Towards an Anthropology of More-Than-Human Resistance: New Challenges for Noticing Conflicts in the Plantationocene

In light of the Plantationocene, a term recently elaborated to capture the magnitude of power of plantation systems from European Colonialism and plantation slavery to industrial animal farming and plant monocultures in the present climate crisis, political anthropology faces new challenges in noticing resistance. While plantation struggles have been crucial for conceptual innovations since the late 1960s as well as new arts of noticing, the related crises of climate change, extractivism and exterminism garner a new urgency to rethink resistance in the light of the multispecies turn. Examining recent anthropological examples of resistance in, around, and against plantations, this article opens the concept of resistance to include the agency of nonhumans and their capacity to make social and political changes, fight back, form alliances and co-produce rebelliously charged effects, meanings and interpretations. The article discusses the emerging field of anthropology of more-than-human resistance and helps in re-calibrating the anthropologist’s art of noticing it. In doing so, the text elaborates three challenges – the risk of romanticizing resistance, of reifying it, and of conceptual stretching. To cope with the challenges in forging anthropology of more-than-human resistance, two particular strategies are further outlined – of focusing on the articulations of resistance, and fostering a closer affiliation to activism and organized protest.

In the first years of the new millennium, there has been an enormous and worldwide boom of monocultures, a large-scale and industrial variation of agriculture which focuses on the most effective production possible of a single species in large quantities -be it monocrops systems of soy, African palm, rubber, maize, rapeseed or animal-industrial complexes for hogs, poultry or livestock. The turning point was the so-called 2007-2008 world food crisis during which the prices of plants like rice, wheat and soy beans increased rapidly as a result of several processes collapsing into each other such as rising petroleum prices and increasing use of subsidies for bio-fuels in the US and the EU, rising global food demand, a growth of middle class strata going hand-in-hand with dietary and appetite changes (in countries like China and India), and financial speculation. The crisis heightened fears of food insecurity in the rich countries of the Global North (e.g. the UK, US, France, Italy, Finland, Netherlands) as well as among new economic powers (e.g. China, Brazil, UAE, Whereas some scholars compare the recent boom of plantations to the similar boom at the time of early Colonialism (Sapp Moore et al. 2019), and others write about a "new form of colonialism" (Rulli, Saviori, and D'Odorico 2013: 893), the concept of the Plantationocene was proposed in 2014 by social and natural scientists associated with the multi-annual AURA project (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene). The term captures, in Donna Haraway's words, "the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor" (2015: 162; 2016: 206). The Plantationocene comprises environmental and politicaleconomic issues together, as it captures historically accumulative and actually existing forms of power, domination, hierarchy and violence forged around agricultural worlds and beyond from the era of European Colonialism onward.
With all these characteristics of domination, violence and the historical durability of plantations, Tsing is right when stating that the concept of the Plantationocene is pessimistic as it allows "telling some really terrible stories about what's going on in the world" (Tsing, Haraway, and Mitman 2019: 17). However, on many occasions such terrible stories are countered or confronted by stories of resistance. If, as Michel Foucault famously stated, "where there is power, there is resistance " (1978: 95), the Plantationocene is no exception. Plantations have always been and are sites and sources of myriad forms of protest, resistance and searches for alternatives -from slave gardens (Franklin and Haraway 2017: 9), counterplantations (Casimir 1981), and subaltern food systems (Carney 2021) to movements for slow food or food justice (White 2019), guerrilla gardening, and global peasant coalitions such as Via Campesina (Desmarais 2007).
What is more, not only many modes of resistance emerged historically as well as recently in, around and against plantations, but a whole anthropology of resistance as a sub-field of political anthropology was sharpened and innovated from the 1960s onward. Scrutinizing plantation struggles helped the anthropology of resistance not only to analyze various cases from all around the world, but to discuss, extend and innovate what is meant by the concept of resistance itself. And this text suggests that yet another innovation and challenge is emerging around plantation struggles for the contemporary anthropology of resistance, which has experienced lately a kind of resurrection, a "resistance redux" (Ortner 2016: 61). The task is to rethink resistance in the light of the so-called turn to multispecies ethnography, in which attention is given to the agency of non-humans beyond their reduction to sources, symbols or foods for humans (e.g. Kirksey and Helmreich 2010). There seems to be a tension here when bringing together a multispecies perspective and the Plantationocene. On one side, there is yet another world-wide boom of plantations supposedly cementing human domination over the Earth, but on the other side, at the same time at the dawn of the 21st century, there is a boom of multispecies ethnographies which document the distribution of more-than-human agency around plantations, as well as the incompleteness of human domination (e.g. Swanson et al. 2018), thus enabling us to see "cracks" (Novák 2020) in such domination from new angles. And the task of this article is to explore these cracks by focusing on resistance in, around, and against plantation systems in the light of multispecies ethnography.
To date, the anthropology of resistance and multispecies ethnography have not communicated much, if at all -their relationship ranges mostly from mutual ignorance to antagonism (e.g. Bessire and Bond 2014;Kopnina 2017). The challenge of this paper is to dispute this prevailing relation, or, better, to diversify and nuance it. But there is no symmetrical approach under operation here. The article's goal is to bring some perspectives from multispecies ethnography into the field of the anthropology of resistance and not vice versa. To be more specific, the main task of the article is to open the concept of resistance in political anthropology to include the agency of non-humans and their capacity to make social and political changes, fight back, co-produce rebelliously charged effects, meanings and interpretations, deny being controlled or dominated, affect more-than-human others in a political way, or form alliances and become "biological allies" (Crosby 2003: 52). In other words, the aim is to rethink, with the help of several anthropological examples from plantation worlds, resistance in the light of the multispecies turn and to underscore morethan-human resistance as much as to help re-calibrating anthropologists' sensitivity to it in the field, a sensitivity similar to the so-called "arts of noticing" (Tsing 2015: 17-26) or "new patterns of seeing" (Beilin and Suryanarayanan 2017: 207-208). The text is exploratory, critically re-examines existing literature in a new light, and extends the anthropological studies of resistance.
The argument is organized into five parts. First, the article discusses the crucial characteristics of the Plantationocene. Second, relations and roles of plantation struggles in the sub-field of the anthropology of resistance are outlined with a special focus on work from the late 1960s to early 1990s and its connections to contemporary challenges. Third, reflections of more-than-human resistance are presented with particular attention to vernacular landscapes of resistance as well as to three risks and the resulting need to narrow down an analytical approach to resistance: (1) the risk of romanticization, in which resistance is seen as always positive and in a binary structure of Nature resisting Human mastery; (2) the risk of reifying resistance by pressing it into a set of dichotomies and binary oppositions; and (3) the risk of Sartorian conceptual stretching, in which the meaning of resistance is extended in search of its universal applicability to such an extent, that it loses its analytical value. Such concepts are "broadened by obfuscating their connotation" (Sartori 1970(Sartori : 1053. Fourth, to cope with the three challenges in forging an anthropology of more-thanhuman resistance, two particular strategies are outlined -of focusing on the articulations of resistance, and of fostering a closer affiliation to activism and organized protest. Fifth, brief remarks conclude the article, discussing the emerging field of the anthropology of morethan-human resistance and the need to cultivate the art of noticing it.

Welcome to the Plantationocene
Although the first plantations emerged already in the late Middle Ages in the Mediterranean area (Mintz 1985), it was only during the European Colonialism when plantation systems took off, interweaving inseparably intensive agriculture with racialized violence ranging from enforcement, via displacement of indigenous populations, to confinement, murder and slavery. Plantations experienced the boom and turned into the decisive agro-economic and political power mechanism worldwide (Wolford 2021). Thus, the history of plantation systems is inseparable from the history of colonialism and, as such, it needs to be understood in a broad context related as well to debates on the origins of the contemporary climate crisis. As Kathryn Yusoff (2018: 31) states: "The invasion of Europeans in the Americas resulted in a massive genocide of the indigenous population, leading to a decline from 54 million people in the Americas in 1492 to approximately 6 million in 1650, a result of murder, enslavement, famine, and disease. This led to a massive reduction in farming and the regeneration of forests and carbon uptake or sequestration by forests, leading to an observed decline in Antarctic ice cores of CO2 in the atmosphere". In her influential book, Yusoff documents the geology of the origins of climate crisis and its connections to colonial dispossession, slavery and the murder of black populations in order to pluralize the concept of the Anthropocene into a billion black anthropocenes. Targeting racialized violence and political and environmental domination, related mainly to the biological and agricultural spheres of Colonialism, the concept of the Plantationocene can as well be seen as an extension of and complementarity to Yusoff's geological focus. 2 Besides, plantations are as well closely enmeshed in the history of modernity and industrialism. Studying the historical globalization of cane sugar production and consumption, Mintz (1985) revealed that it was on the plantations in the Caribbean during early 16th century colonialism, that the initial methods of factory organization and industrial modernity were forged -be it the intimate connection between mono-culture/product and enforced work performed by slaves, workers or immigrants; emphasis on increasing efficiency and productivity linked, inter alia, to the implementation of technological and mechanical innovations; the temporal and spatial organization of work, within which concrete steps were tied together in causal relations; discipline and precision; or mass production of one product in as large a quantity as possible (see as well Tsing, Haraway, and Mitman 2019: 8;Scott 2012: 40). It is this combination of field, factory and racialized forced labour (first enslaved then wage) and multiple levels of violence that is at the heart of the agro-industrial plantation system. This system was adopted by modern factories, including later on in the industrialization of animal production towards the so-called animal-industrial complex, which helped to boost industrial modernity via other important organizational forms such as commodities trading, infrastructures of global transportation, and the disassembly line (Blanchette 2020: 2;Shukin 2009). Plantation systems embrace plant and animal production, as well as energy production, as documented by Lorenz-Meyer (2022) on solar energy plantations in this special issue.
Last, but not least, plantation systems are sources and places of great simplification and homogenization of life and the world (e.g. Scott 1998). "Using the term plantation in its largest sense, I point to simplified ecologies designed to create assets for future investments", writes Anna Tsing (2017: 51-52). Plantation systems simplify as they intend to cut particular life forms out from complex, interdependent braids, in order to use and totally control them through the plantation apparatus. The plantation needs to "linearize" them and in doing so redirects them towards particular goals of production and profit. Through simplification, monocultured plants, industrially farmed animals as well as human labourers are transformed into labouring commodities, which Tsing calls future assets. They are reduced to one purpose of existence -to be productive while themselves being a product; to be a working machine and at the same time a production tool. All other circumstances of life that are incomprehensible to or incompatible with this one-dimensional teleology, become expendable, and thus tend to be cut off. Simplification takes place here as "the creeping simplification of ecosystems" (Weis 2013: 23), producing homogenization and sameness out of diversity. Whereas Tsing sees plantations as "machines of replication, ecologies devoted to the production of the same" (2016: 4), Scott writes in the context of industrial agriculture about "taming nature" (1998: 262-306) and sees it as a part of the broader process of simplifying modernization, in which large-scale hierarchical organizations like nation states, transnational institutions or multinational companies, including large-scale plantation corporations, took over. According to Scott, this takeover over the last two to three hundred years is directly linked to the disappearance and destruction not only of biodiversity and species (Pe'er et al. 2020), but of broader bio-cultural diversity -thousands of local practices, vernacular orders, life worlds, ways of indigenous agriculture, and whole cosmologies have been "extinguished at such a rate that one can, with little exaggeration, think of the process as one of mass extinction akin to the accelerated disappearance of species" (Scott 2012: 53).
The interweaving of post/colonial racism, brute violence, slavery, murder, total control of life, capitalism, modern simplification, extractivism, toxic industrialism, forced labour of plants, animals and people within plantation systems of mono-crops and factory farms of animals forms the backbone of the Plantationocene. Evolving over the last 500+ years, the Plantationocene's historical entanglements continue to shape plantation dynamics in the present, as well as the historical and contemporary forms of plantation struggles. What is more, analyzing such struggles crucially influenced the political anthropology of resistance.

Shifting Optics in the Anthropology of Resistance
In political anthropology, the importance of plantation struggles was recognized several decades before the neologism, the Plantationocene, was coined. Analyzing plantation struggles after the 1960s was crucial for establishing and cementing the anthropology of resistance not only as a respected sub-field within broader social, respectively political anthropology, but as well as different from the political sociology of social movements.
In the post-colonial turmoil following WWII and with a hopeful optimism related to the 1960s national liberation struggles around the world, political anthropology extended its attention to analysis of protests by peasants and plantation workers in relation to the analysis of structures of political, economic and socio-environmental power (Steward et al. 1957;Wolf 1969;Mintz 1974;Scott 1976;Stoler 1995Stoler [1985). Shedding light on resistance from varied angles, the shared task of many anthropologists of resistance working from the late 1960s to the early 1990s was, according to Ann Laura Stoler, to document "how particular populations were drawn into a world capitalist system to which they were subject but by which they were not wholly subsumed" (Stoler 1995(Stoler [1985: ix). In other words, the challenge was to show that although dominated people were exploited and controlled, this domination was never complete and that there were cracks in such a totality and space in which to organize protest and revolt. The historicity of the subaltern population was scrutinized by these scholars as well -to document that the exploited classes were not dull "potatoes in sacks of potatoes" (Marx 1996(Marx [1852) and "people without history" (Wolf 1982), but historical, that is, possibly recalcitrant agents despite being subjected by structures of domination.
Although acknowledged by many in those times, the task to recognize the historical agency of dominated human groups and to resist was approached differently. James C. Scott's approach stands out as particularly intriguing and original. According to Scott (1985), investigating organized protest in rural areas often leads to a too narrow and reductive perspective on peasant politics, since these rebellions appear too exceptional, eventoriented, dangerous and risk-loaded due to power asymmetry between poor peasants and landlords, capitalists or states. Is this kind of politics really the most common for peasants? Are there only two paths for peasants -either active consent with their subordination, as Gramsci's theory of hegemony would suggest, or a life-or-death situation of open and organized rebellion? Scott addressed these questions by ethnographic research at the end of the 1970s in the Malaysian village of Sedaka, which was propelled into a plantation economy through the so called Green Revolution.
During his research at Sedaka, Scott discovered a different form of doing resistant politics -a form which takes place in between the either-consent-or-open-protest binary and which he termed infrapolitics (Scott 1990). Infrapolitics refers to everyday, hidden, quiet and subtle forms of resistance, and enables poor peasants to object and dissent in situations of profound power asymmetry beyond an all-or-nothing constellation. Ranging from slander, non-cooperation, sabotage, to foot dragging, delaying, and postponing to poaching and subversive meaning making, infrapolitical resistance eschews open protest of banners, pamphlets, manifests, riots, slogans, articulated demands, strikes or guns as these may be too risky and episodic. Scott (1985) defines such quotidian resistance as weapons of the weak, an approach which is attentive to the particularities, complexities and power asymmetries connected to the subaltern worlds of peasants and villagers, as "this kind of politics was the politics that most people historically lived" (Holtzman, Hughes, and Scott 2010: 76).
But, why in this article elaborate, albeit very modestly, on precisely these older works of anthropologists of resistance when this sub-field has developed tremendously in the meantime? After all, the anthropology of resistance has not only integrated very new fields and units of analysis (for recent discussions of the anthropology of resistance, see Kuřík 2016;Wright 2016;Ortner 2016;Laszczkowski 2019), but has also moved forward with analyzing resistance in agricultural worlds -from peasants struggling against globalization (Edelman 1999), to animal rights and welfare (Kopnina 2017), urban gardening (Harper and Afonso 2016), Internet farming and so-called "weapons of the geek" in the politics of hackers (Coleman 2017), to alternatives to plantation systems such as bioregionalism, permaculture and ecotopia (Lockyer and Veteto 2013), Food not Bombs networks (Giles 2021), activism for food sovereignty (Koensler 2020) and degrowth (Hickel 2020).
There are two main reasons for this contribution and both are connected to sharpening the anthropologist's ability to spot and analyze resistance. First, the body of anthropological work from the late 1960s to early 1990s helped to recognize the historical agency of subaltern people of all kinds to resist. Second, James Scott's attending to the infrapolitical dimension around plantation life was crucial for re-calibrating the anthropological sensitivity and attentiveness to a radically new art of noticing non-obvious forms of resistance in ethnographic and historiographic work.
This article contends that the anthropology of resistance faces two similar challenges related to the multispecies turn. In order to move beyond an analytical framework of activism as a human-only endeavour whereby other species and non-human elements are seen mostly as food, symbols, resources, or backdrops, the anthropology of resistance is confronted, I argue, with the task of re-calibrating its optics all over again -this time towards recognition of the agentic capacity of non-humans, as well as towards the art of noticing more-thanhuman resistance. This re-calibration is already taking place in social anthropology and in the following sections I will articulate this explicitly using several anthropological examples from within the sub-field of the anthropology of resistance, juxtaposing its proceedings as well as outlining some risks connected to it.

Fordlandia as Failure?
The first example in searching for forms and shapes of more-than-human resistance in the Plantationocene is the case of Fordlandia in the Amazon basin, mentioned by Scott (2012: 38-40). In the 1920s and 1930s Fordlandia was supposed to become a crucial component of Henry Ford's vertical integration strategy in producing cars, as it was an attempt to build a plantation of rubber trees in Brazil in order to produce latex for tires. Rubber trees grow in the Amazonian rain forest dispersedly, one tree among diverse other species, because only in this way can they manage to resist different kinds of pests. In other words, dispersion is a strategy of rubber trees to live well there. However, when replanted into plantation formations, the rubber trees could not survive since such a landscape of close proximity was too advantageous for their pests to take over. After millions of dollars spent and dozens of failed attempts to solve the problem, Ford's company was forced to abandon the project in the mid-1940s. Fordlandia ended up as a disaster for the company.
Scott reminds us that Fordlandia is not a case of a universal rubber tree successfully resisting being "plantationed" anytime and anywhere. Rather it is a historical story of vernacular Amazonia, since exporting Brazilian rubber trees to Southeast Asia and building plantations there proved much more successful because the crucial local agent in the Amazonian story, the pests of the rubber tree, were left in South America.
Among many other things, Scott's example demonstrates an ambivalence between a local environs with its spatial histories and a plantation, this wannabe context-free and locality-free package cut from all vernacular ties, and "unpackable" anywhere, a "generic module of farming that travels well" (Scott 2012: 48). Tsing re-frames this built-in tension, even contradiction, in a definition of plantation in which the agency of more-than-human histories takes central stage: Yet, everywhere, they [plantations] are formed in vernacular histories, which tie them to the contingencies of encounters and the peculiarities of places. They can never be everywhere because they depend on the entangled landscapes they disentangle. And yet each eruption of the plantation spreads the generality of everywhere-ness. There is a muddle here: the plantation creates the generality of disengagement; yet only a non-general, local apparatus can make this generality emerge (2016: 5).
Tsing's definition hints at the vulnerability of the plantation and opens up the possibility of analyzing more-than-human refusals of landscapes or local life worlds to avoid being violently and totally "plantationed". Whereas Scott writes in this sense about "recalcitrant nature", "landscapes relatively resistant to control and appropriation" or "the resilience of the vernacular" (2012: 36, 37), Tsing uses the term "anti-plantation" (2015: 38). What is more, Bubandt and Tsing (2018a) write about "weedy refusals of planners' imagined discipline" and go even further as they make out of it not only the crucial characteristics of plantation systems, but of the whole Anthropocene in which a particular type of interaction, so-called "feral dynamics", becomes crucial (p. 6) -between large modern infrastructures embodying planner's visions of control and unplanned more-than-human improvisations around them with "multispecies, weedy historicities" (p. 3). Now, how to transform cases such as Fordlandia into an informed story within the anthropology of resistance? What are the benefits, risks, even cul-de-sacs and other circumstances of such a transformation?
In a history composed solely of humans and anchored in the cosmology of the modern West, in which "nature" is reduced to a passive object to be mastered, the story of Fordlandia, as well as the stories of many other unsuccessful plantation attempts, is narrated as a human failure. Such narration presumes a history where agency is exclusively human. However, there is another way to unfold such a story, opened by the multispecies turn. Leaving behind the framing of human failure to master nature, this approach becomes open to natures, landscapes, species, geo-formations, more-than-human ecosystems, localities, and complex life webs capable of being historical agents with capacities to produce effects with serious consequences, such as huge economic damages to plantations. If shutting down or not opening up a plantation is a political goal, then non-humans can become victorious by their own ways of dwelling in the place and resisting the plantation logic. In producing resisting effects, non-humans can cause problems which may even become more troubling to plantation operation than many human-only efforts to organize protests against plantations (for recent examples of human protest failures in, around and against plantations, see Taussig 2010: xiii; Hetherington 2020; Blanchette 2020).
In other words, recognition of historical agency plays a crucial role. In this sense, there are intriguing and thought-provoking similarities and connections with the above-mentioned work of anthropologists of resistance from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Whereas scholars like Mintz aspired to document the historical agency of subaltern populations of humans, some contemporary multispecies anthropologists such as Tsing, Mintz's student, extend the frame beyond anthropocentric views and document the historical agency of nonhumans and vernacular more-than-human places capable of resisting attempts to be fully controlled and transformed into a docile resource. The term vernacular is important here.
It signals that more-than-human resistance is situational, contextual and thus empirically traceable -it is always of a particular time, place, life world, and of particular spatial and temporal constellations of humans and non-humans.

Of Romanticization, Reification and Conceptual Stretching
However, with this new recognition of the historical and unruly agency of vernacular nonhumans and whole landscapes, there seem to be several risks emerging, especially around the vocabulary of "weedy refusals" (Bubandt and Tsing) or "recalcitrant natures" (Scott) and with the central and general framework of weedy refusals of human control, planning and domination. In particular, three interconnected problems stand out which the anthropology of resistance is already familiar with from older debates -the problem of romanticization, the problem of reification and the problem of conceptual stretching.
First, regarding romanticization, there is a risk of seeing weedy refusals as something always positive, even heroic, when weeds and natures stand out of their virtues outside structures of domination (Abu Lughod 1991). As romanticism is grounded in the modern Western cosmology, there is as well a risk of reconnecting such heroism to a natureculture divide, and merely reversing the abstraction and universality of the modern narrative of Human-mastering-Nature into Nature-resisting-Humans. I'm not stating that the perspectives of Scott and Tsing, mentioned above, embrace such risks -to the contrary: Scott (2012: 39) writes about riots by the human workforce (e.g. Galey 1979) which helped as well in shutting down Fordlandia. I suggest rather that the problem of romanticization emerges more as a possible feral effect beyond the intentions of these authors, who operate with a vocabulary of recalcitrant nature and weedy refusals.
Second, romanticization can in a way be understood as a manifestation of the broader problem of the reification of resistance in binary oppositions. This problem presupposes the plot of an always clearly delimited, even mutually exclusive, binary of a dominating and a dominated evading domination through resistance. In such a framework, reification of resistance can take place alongside various binaries (e.g. nature : culture, inside : outside, expert : vernacular, owner : worker, planner : unplanned, control : improvisation, local : global) sharing a common binary structure. As Chris Kelty pointed out in an email correspondence over one particular dichotomy between the uncontrollable landscape and the desire to control of planners such as experts, executives, engineers, scientists, or financiers: "It's un-anthropological, even offensive to imply that the people involved in making a plantation work are people with a simplistic, imaginary perfection, a stupid technical rationality with no flexibility, which is bound to be disrupted because it is a dream. That they are not aware of the 'weedy refusals' or 'recalcitrance' of nature… They definitely are, but they have very different values about what good comes of what they do (i.e. their imaginaries have to do with providing food for everyone, making food more efficient and less wasteful, generating income, etc.). All things we can critique on their own terms without having to resort to some fantasy of a technocratic elite unconnected to the earth, or whatever" (personal correspondence 2021/2022). At the same moment, however, this relevant critique should not lead to, so to say, "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" by dissolving analysis of resistance, and especially resistance in correlation to actually existing forms of power, domination, inequality, violence in fetishizing ambivalences, multiplicities or, as Kelty (ibid.) himself put it, in empty phrases such as "everything is entangled". What is needed instead is to keep analyzing the power-resistance correlation, but track resistance in plantation systems beyond binary lines in such forms as shifting coalitions, nodes, relations, percolations, and dynamics as well as situational practices of very clearing or blurring itself of boundaries around resistance.
Third, besides the romanticization and reification of resistance, with such a broad definition of resistance as "weedy refusal" to infrastructural control, there is a risk of being too conceptually stretched (Sartori 1970) to be analytically useful. Simply stated, resistance could mean everything and thus nothing, and lead to a sort of "theoretical slackness" (Rabinowitz 2014: 476). Thus, there is a need to narrow down, nuance and better dissect what is meant by weedy refusals. To do so, in the next section we discuss two more ethnographic examples to better anchor and ground recalcitrant natures more firmly within the sub-field of the anthropology of resistance. In particular, two strategies for analyzing more-thanhuman resistance will be outlined -a focus on shifting articulations of resistance as it is used in the multi-stakeholder worlds and lives around plantations, and a closer affiliation of resistance with activism and organized protest.

Worlds of More-Than-Human Resistance
Lucie Žeková (2013) offers a moving case from her ethnographic research of a factory farm with cows in the Czech Republic. Žeková examines constellations from inside the industrial plant focusing on human and cow workers' interaction. Žeková is capable not only of capturing such interactions as multispecies situations full of negotiation and sociality, but manages as well to document how resistance pops up in a situation such as the disinfection of workplace walls. Human workers are supposed to clean these walls with disinfectants and water after every cows' work shift. Such cleaning is not always completed properly and disinfectant is left on the walls. The cows appear to like the smell and taste of the disinfectants and enjoy sniffing or licking it off the walls. This cow activity, however, is recognized by human workers not only as unwelcome, but disobedient and rebellious as well. Žeková captures the human workers' perspective: "In a workplace, there is no room for hanging around and smelling savory aromas. It slows down the work and production" (Žeková 2013: 43). Here, the cows' repeated acts of resistance in an industrial farm take the infrapolitical form of non-cooperation and slowing down the whole production process running on a synchronized and consequential set of rules.
But the crucial point I want to stress here is that the cows' activity is recognized and articulated by human workers as rebellious, that is, as loaded with agentic capacity to produce rebellious effects and cause troubling situations -in this case, unwelcome situations from the human workers' perspective, since they then have to work more and disinfect the walls all over again. In other words, human workers recognize cows as restive agents beyond the reductive view of them as a food, resource, object, or symbol. Not only do the human workers recognize such agency, but they interact with the cows accordingly; in this particular case, the plantation workers intend to correct and regain control over such derailing agency, which is recognized as opposing their interest in doing their jobs smoothly and maintaining the appropriate interspecies rhythm at work.
Žeková's case demonstrates one way of narrowing down weedy refusals into something more-than-human-resistance-specific -that is, to ethnographically document constellations in which resistance is recognized and articulated alongside more-than-human lines by concerned human stakeholders, be it workers, neighbours, managers, owners, experts… And in doing so, it documents how practices charged with infrapolitical or political meanings such as protest, non-cooperation, struggle, resistance, sabotage, disobedience, and even war emerge and are articulated or related to. 3 Whereas in Žeková's case of the resisting agency of non-humans was recognized by humans as small acts of micro-resistances to be corrected by plantation workers, in other more-than-human constellations the similar resisting agency of pests systematically and unstoppably causing huge damage to plantations could be seen by other human stakeholders, such as plantation managers and owners, as "declarations of war" in response to which many resources have to be spent and sophisticated war strategies developed in order to defeat, and even eradicate, the enemy. What is more, whereas Žeková's case shows how resisting agency is recognized in order to be suppressed, in the last example I'm about to outline now, such agency is recognized in order to be allied with, plugged in to, redistributed and extended by activists in joint more-than-human protests against plantations.
Based on archival and ethnographic research, Beilin and Suryanarayanan (2017) explore multispecies forms of resistance against genetically engineered soy monocultures in Argentina. The authors document how various pests and human groups intersect in what they call "interspecies resistance". Whereas so-called Roundup Ready soy, supposedly the only plant resistant to a herbicide called Roundup, is seeded widely in northern Argentina, mutated pests such as super weeds led by amaranth, have emerged on soy fields and are capable of resisting Roundup as well. Such literal weedy refusals of amaranth multiplied the amount of herbicide needed to be used, which caused health problems for the human communities living nearby the soy fields. They started to organize themselves in protest against such plantations with allies such as doctors, lawyers, scientists and activists. But these are not their only allies. Beilin and Suryanarayanan show how this anti-Roundupready-soy activism is interconnected with the super weedy refusal -amaranth is recognized not only as a symbol of the struggle or as an alternative to soy to be seeded as food, but as a resisting agent of its own, a model of resistance to be imitated, and a biological ally (Crosby 2003: 52). Among other things, activists fighting against transgenic soy strategically use the agentic capacities of amaranth to resist herbicide use and cause economic losses by throwing at plantations so-called "amaranth bombs", balls composed of mud and plenty of amaranth seeds (Beilin and Suryanarayanan 2017: 218). Beilin and Suryanarayanan (2017), together with Chao (2021), are one of the first "swallows" narrowing down the very broad weedy refusals by tracing not only articulations and recognitions of resistance, as in Žeková's infrapolitical case, but as well its connections to organized forms of protest and activism while retaining a perspective of more-than-human resistance.
At the beginning of the 1990s, such a move towards analysis of organized protest, activism and social movements was crucial for the anthropology of resistance to survive and move forward from its critique, including over-stretching the concept of resistance (Escobar 1992). At the beginning of the 2020s, such a move to narrow down could offer the anthropology of resistance a closer and more systematic look at more-than-human forms of protest in which people are not only fighting for food, nature, or fighting against resource extractions, but fighting together with various biological allies in struggles where resisting agency is recognized and redistributed along multispecies lines.

Conclusion
Plantation struggles are important because resisting plantation regimes and their ongoing violence is connected to the climate crisis. As such, they form part of climate activism. What is more, they are as well good to think about in the anthropology of resistance in facing emerging challenges. Whereas the work of anthropologists of resistance from the late 1960s to the early 1990s managed to bring into the discussion the historical agency of subaltern people, the contemporary anthropology of resistance can use plantation studies to encourage attentiveness and sensitivity to the rebellious agency of non-humans, be it other species, landscapes, ecosystems, geo-formations, or topographical constellations, which is a challenge raised by multispecies ethnography. 4 Protests in, around and against plantations can and do already help in outlining the emerging field of the anthropology of more-than-human resistance. These examples differ among others in forms of resistance (from infrapolitics of non-cooperation, withstanding, sabotage, persistence to politics of protest and activism), in what relations are cultivated (ranging from alliances via ignorance to enemies) and among which conflict stakeholders (pests, cultivated plants/farmed animals, landslides against mines, plantation workers, neighboring communities, activists, experts, owners etc.).
The goal of this text was not to provide some final conclusions and categorizations about contemporary plantation struggles, but rather to use some examples of them to outline and discuss the emerging field of the anthropology of more-than-human resistance, a field opened up with the help of multispecies ethnography. In the history of political anthropology, the concept of resistance has shifted in meaning, correlations and emphasis from analyzing the maintenance of the political order, via challenges to power, oppression and domination, and everyday forms of resistance, to more organized and open forms of protest, social movements, and activism (Wright 2016). The article shows that a new challenge has emerged in this regard -to move towards recognizing the non-human agentic capacity to form alliances as well as to non-cooperate, resist, produce effects charged with political meanings, and to cause political and economic troubles as well as positive results etc.
In outlining the emerging field of the anthropology of more-than-human resistance, the paper presents some challenges to be faced -be it problems of romanticization, reification or conceptual stretching, and the related need to narrow down anthropological approaches to more-than-human resistance, either alongside resistance articulations or closer affiliation with activism and organized protest. As the anthropology of resistance has already faced many of these challenges, the open question remains if and how other older critiques in the anthropology of resistance can be of any help in analyzing morethan-human resistance. Here I mean critiques such as of the dominant focus on social movements favoured by anthropologists (Edelman 2001), the lack of ethnographic material, and the focus on ambivalence (Ortner 1995), of the automatic attachment of resistance to the meaning of opposing norms and emancipation grounded in progressive liberal cosmology (Mahmood 2005), of pathologizing and exoticizating resistance (Theodossopoulos 2014), or of ignoring the nature-culture divide as a powerful and still operating political technology of extractivism, capitalism and industrialism after it was removed from the non-problematic analytical equipment of anthropology (Bessire and Bond 2014).
No matter how more-than-human resistance is dissected and categorized and in which directions the emerging sub-field will be explored in the future, there seems to be an emerging task for anthropologists -to cultivate the art of noticing and attending to, or "new patterns of seeing" (Beilin and Suryanarayanan 2017: 207-208), more-than-human resistance. This art is, I believe, of similar importance as Scott's art of noticing infrapolitics. Whereas Scott impelled anthropology from the 1980s onward to spot resistance ranging from the giving of active consent to open rebellion in human politics, some emerging streams of anthropological research around plantation struggles suggest a need to learn to spot resistance distributed as well among agents of an ontologically different kind. This is a task of crucial importance, because bridging the anthropology of resistance and multispecies ethnography opens up the possibility to narrate histories as well as futures differently.
Thus, proposing such tasks also entails realizing that verbalizing and textualizing morethan-human resistance is a performative act of great responsibility. Here the ethnographer plugs and intervenes into particular life worlds of more-than-human politics and transforms them by assembling a story to be understood, told and written. Haraway (2016) reminds us of the performativity of multispecies storytelling when figuring it as a practice of worlding, of making and (re)composing life worlds. Scott's conception of infrapolitics enabled us to see that "most resistance in history did not speak its name" (Wade and Scott 2018). What stories would full appreciation of more-than-human resistance enable us to compose, for example in relation to climate activism? Furthermore, what would be the rebellious consequences in relation to politically engaged anthropology and the forging of political coalitions with anthropology? After all, as the late David Graeber and Andrej Grubacic recently stated, "To create a new world, we can only start by rediscovering what is and has always been right before our eyes" (Grubacic and Graeber 2021: 6).