Date: 12 June 2026

Muhammad Kavesh (Australian National University)

Petronella Vaarzon-Morel (New York University Sydney)

Abstract

This talk examines how the expanding trade in donkey hides for ejiao production reconfigures human-animal relations across Pakistan and Australia. Drawing on ethnographic research in Punjab and in Central and Northern Australia, we develop the concept of situated blurriness to describe the patterned ambiguities through which states and commercial actors sustain extractive possibility while obscuring ecological limits and ethical tensions. As China’s declining donkey population drives transnational sourcing, donkeys are variously framed as agricultural products, invasive pests, speculative assets, and indispensable labouring companions. In Pakistan, inflated livestock statistics and illicit trade sustain narratives of demographic abundance despite locally experienced scarcity and rising prices. In Australia, proposals for commercial farming intersect with conservation culling and Aboriginal engagements with free-roaming donkeys, generating competing valuations of animal life. Across both sites, bureaucratic enumeration, speculative investment, and regulatory manoeuvring detach donkeys from lived assemblages of care, labour, and memory, rendering them legible primarily as extractable hide. Attending ethnographically to these processes, we argue how blurriness is constitutive of contemporary commodity chains, and enables the transformation of sentient beings into tradable biomatter.