By Emma Pask, University of Chicago / Aarhus University
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2024 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the argument they made in their submission and to situate their work in relation to the field of environmental anthropology.
ABSTRACT: A dilapidated cotton warehouse owned by Huntsville Prison in East Texas became the home to over a million bats in the 1990s. This state-protected urban bat colony, its accumulation of guano, and its reservoir of zoonotic diseases now exposes the town residents and the men imprisoned across the street to a looming public health crisis. Meanwhile, as unlivable heat worsens every summer, the inmates are denied air-conditioning and animal migratory patterns are drastically altered, but only the bats are advocated for by the state of Texas. Why does it seem more possible to imagine techniques for moving these erratic animals than it is to consider what the incarcerated men might need to survive their imprisonment?
This paper compares the relative comforts afforded to state protected non-human animals on a historical cotton-plantation-turned-open-air-prison, where disproportionately black and brown men, wards of the state, are guaranteed no safety. It does so through an examination of property: from historical settler-colonial plantation regimes, where both land and people were treated as property, to its transmutations into building codes in the present. Property is upheld here through “damage control,” an animal management paradigm used by pest control experts, bat scientists, and the prison officials at Huntsville. In addition to an analysis of damage control techniques, the paper looks for answers ethnographically when and where Huntsville residents lean on the wall of the execution wing of the prison to watch the bats emerge at sundown.
On any given night between May and October in Huntsville, East Texas, you can find a group of town residents and tourists alike leaning on the large brick wall of the execution wing of the Huntsville Prison, staring up at the sky. The air is often heavy, the sound of insects is deafening, and at sundown, upwards of a million bats fly out of the dilapidated cotton warehouse across the street. The Mexican free-tailed bats are a beloved fixture of the town. These animals are notoriously susceptible to climatic conditions and extreme weather and to a quickly spreading disease called White Nose Syndrome. Huntsville residents aspire to protect them. Meanwhile, the men incarcerated next door are denied air conditioning, medical attention, and basic human rights.
How this unevenness is managed, observed, and ignored is the main preoccupation of this paper. It is also a case study in my book project, a historical and ethnographic study of bat scientists across the state of Texas. Taking bats as disruptive actors to conventional biological categorization and property and national boundaries, the wider project asks how decisions are made about what species get to live where and how.
The bats were not always here, in Huntsville, or even Texas. Their migratory pattern has shifted drastically over thousands of years. But these Mexican free-tailed bats started to take up summer residency in this warehouse, property owned by the prison, in the 1990s after a fire broke out in the building. After the fire, the warehouse, which sits on top of a historical cotton plantation and was built with the labor of incarcerated men at the turn of the 20th century, was never repaired. Now the floor of the building is covered in 30 years’ worth of bat guano, which harbors flesh-eating bacteria and a fungus that causes a lung disease called histoplasmosis.
The building’s ceiling is caving in, and its windows are long gone. The whole thing will soon collapse and these bats will try to relocate, likely into local homes, and the toxicity held in their shit will disperse further. In the meantime, these bats are an ongoing public health concern for those incarcerated in the open-air prison next door. Proposals for what to do are much more interested in the state-protected bats – whose homes and habitats cannot legally be demolished – than the health and lives of the prisoners.
Ethnographically, the paper’s focus is on how people talk about the bats at the Huntsville prison and that which goes unsaid in the plans that are floated on the animal’s behalf. For example, I examine a meeting held in the town on the topic of “Living Near Bats” where residents, pest control experts, bat scientists, and prison officials came together to give a series of presentations on what is being done to mitigate the potential harms of the bats to the infrastructure of Huntsville.
The paper uses this ethnographic material – in which property is the main concern – to argue that the prison’s infrastructure, as both a carceral institution and as eco-tourism, is a product of a historical property regime. It tracks this property regime from the settler colonial plantation projects of East Texas, where both land and people were considered property, to the formation of the prison as an infrastructural project managed through building codes in the present. The paper excavates the historical trajectory of this cotton warehouse and bat home to propose that its status as property determines how it is managed, how this management is made into spectacle, and how this spectacle structures its observers’ attachments.
The paper thus draws on a longstanding preoccupation in historical anthropology established and elaborated by scholars like Sidney Mintz and Michel Rolph Trouillot, namely that with long histories of land use and plantation economies. Inspired by Vanessa Agard-Jones and Alyssa Paredes, the paper works in this tradition to confront exposures, toxicity, and other forms of uneven distributions of environmental danger that characterize living in the ongoing and runaway conditions of climate change. In doing so, it pushes environmental anthropology to adopt a wider temporal horizon, looking backwards to the colonial histories of environmental insecurity and extraction and forwards to future relations that might outlive these colonial institutions.
Throughout, the bats work as disruptive objects of observation in my ethnographic work, much in the way pesticides work in Agard-Jones’ and Paredes’. They force pest control experts and tourists alike to recalibrate their expectations of how nature works and find new ways to articulate their attachments. I therefore adopt an ambivalent relationship to the bats, natural cotton pest controls themselves, in line with Naisargi Davé’s proposal for indifference, which helps me historicize these environmental relations within Texas’ property regime. In doing so, I let the bats guide my ethnographic attention and take me across Texas’ landscape, landing me in conflicts that are, on the surface, over environmental conservation and public health regulations, and yet are always also about the history of labor, race, and property.
Sidney W. Mintz. (1985). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Random House.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot. (1982). “Motion in the System: Coffee, Color, and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) Winter 1982, Vol 5. No 3. Pg. 331-388.
Vanessa Agard-Jones. (2013). “Bodies in the Systems.” Small Axe 17 (3, 42). Pg. 182-192.
Alyssa Paredes. (2021). “Experimental Science for the ‘Bananapocalypse’: Counter Politics in the Plantationocene.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology Vol. 88. Pg. 837-863.
Naisargi Davé. (2023). Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being. Durham: Duke University Press.
