The Dearest Butterfly: A Nonlinear, yet Stratified, Human-butterfly Ethnography

This dissertation is a multi-sited and multi-species ethnography which follows the migration of the monarch butterfly across the East Coast of Canada and the United States to the Oyamel Forest of central Mexico. The project builds upon ethnographic research at four nodal locations for monarch conservation: Point Pelee National Park in Ontario, Canada; Monarch Lab in Minnesota, U.S.; The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico; and an online community named DPlex-L. The thesis develops the concept of the “Dearest Butterfly” to index the emergence of a new way of valorizing this migratory insect after it entered international networks of species conservation and to navigate what I call a non-linear and stratified assemblage that exists around the aspirations of conserving this charismatic insect. Along with this proposition, I chronicle and utilize the monarch’s sharp population decline as a means to unearthing North America’s devastated socioecology. The thesis argues that the insect’s falling numbers are related to the outcomes of nature-extensive exploitation and displacement of indigenous forms of knowing nature at the sites of study. In a non-linear fashion, I connect these outcomes with NAFTA’s circulation of goods and new forms of human displacement from Mexico to its northern neighbors to argue that protecting this tri-national butterfly was part of a plan to consolidate the North American region as an economic block that prizes mobilities of goods even while it seeks to prevent the movement of people, and, ironically, of monarchs. The thesis engages with the field of Science and Technology Studies by describing the everyday tensions of rendering the iconic monarch as a working and captive insect in the laboratory in order to conserve it. From the introduction Pendant Egg to the conclusion chapter Egg Under Review, I maintain that thinking with monarchs and their exceptional life cycle achieves a twofold outcome for anthropological research: it approaches the devastated monarch migratory corridor as an ecological, social, and technological assemblage; and it investigates existent cooperative and often uncooperative relations to critique this crisis, and hopefully re-vitalize it through a proposition of an ecosophy for migrating humans and nonhumans of North America.

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