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Postdoctoral researcher

Paul G. Keil

Paul is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. His research examines pig hunting practices in New South Wales, Australia, and the place and identity of feral pigs. 

Paul’s current research project examines Australia’s relationship with wild pigs through recreational hunting. More-than-human ethnographic research aims to deliver novel insights on an under-studied and controversial interspecies interaction. Further, hunting offers an unexpected opening to explore new perspectives on the place, identity, and becoming of free-roaming pigs in Australia. Australia has inherited pigs, hunting traditions and ontological orders from Europe. The country’s historical, cultural, and ecological peculiarities can deliver unique insights into Europe’s concerns about the endemic boar dramatic population resurgence, biosecurity risks, and future. 

Broadly, Keil is interested in human-nonhuman teamwork, hunting, and life lived with charismatic wildlife, informed by theoretical and methodological frameworks from more-than-human and ecological anthropology, cognitive science, and the environmental humanities. His regional and ethnographic expertise is in Northeast India and Australia. Paul received his PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Macquarie University in 2017 for an ethnography of human-elephant relationships in Assam, India. The research examined how people’s practices and worlds emerged in coordination with those of elephants and sought to conceptualize human-elephant sociality beyond the dynamics of conflict, competition, and domination. 

 
 

Selected pig publications

  • 2023 | ‘Unmaking the Feral: The shifting relationship between domestic-wild pigs and settler Australians.’ Environmental Humanities 15 (2): 19-38

  • 2023 | Fair H., Schreer V., Keil, P., Kiik L., Rust N. “Dodo dilemmas: Conflicting ethical loyalties in conservation social science research” Area 55: 245-253

  • 2021 | ‘Rank Atmospheres: the more-than-human scentspace and aesthetics of a pigdogging hunt.’ The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 32, 96-113.