Platformizing the hunt for dolphins : Beyond industrial-capitalist encounters with Nature 2.0

Summary

The Lau-speakers of Malaita, Solomon Islands, hunt dolphins for their teeth. Used as traditional currency and part of a broader, long-standing approach to marine resource management, the future of the hunt is uncertain and this uncertainty is intrinsically entwined with processes of anthropogenic climate change and social media spectacles. The habitat of the dolphins is threatened by a confluence of factors beyond the control of the Lau such as rising sea levels and temperatures, coral bleaching and industrial fishing. The responsibilities for climate change, and the processes of global capitalism that drive it, are located well beyond this least developed state on the margins of global capital and geopolitics. Yet, Solomon Islanders feel the more dramatic effects of climate change such as the loss of their land, resources and the sociocultural practices linked to both. Based on a systematic ‘scraping’ of Malaitan and Solomon Islands Facebook Forums, grounded in fifteen months of classically conceived longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, this article investigates the platformization of the dolphin hunt as part of Malaita's ritual economy. The debates surrounding the dolphin hunt provide an entrée to teasing out the frictions that emerge as competing visions for sustainability are negotiated within global inequalities and how these negotiations are taking place online. Simultaneously, Malaitan debates about the morality of the dolphin hunt provide missing indigenous insights into how Nature 2.0 conservation discourses often recreate the ‘capitalocentrism’ of the very economic system that precipitated the current global environmental crisis.