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This paper is concerned with the affective economies of lively capital. Its central argument is that nonhuman life itself has become a locus of accumulation, marked by an atmospheric politics of capital: the intensification of relations between life and productivity by incorporating entire lifeworlds into regimes of generating value. Focusing on the Giant panda – a spectacular icon raising millions of dollars globally – the paper first examines junctures at which their charismatic affects emerge and are manipulated to produce value. Turning to panda lifeworlds in zoos, it then shows how such value production is contingent on affective labours nonhumans perform in captivity. Nonhuman labour, as a component of atmospheric politics, enables understanding how lively capital is produced and reproduced, a theme interrogated through a critical analysis of the commercial global circulation of pandas. The paper develops the concept of atmospheric politics – an intervention in an animal's milieu and its affective intensities – as a means for analysing the dynamics of lively capital. Atmospheric politics retrieves a critical political economy obscured by the concept of nonhuman charisma, and restages biopower as an apparatus and political technology of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relations between nature and capital have been a longstanding concern in the social sciences. Going beyond antinomies of posthumanist and political economic enquiry, this paper advances a set of relational analytics for incorporating liveliness into critical analyses of capital. Firstly, developing the concept of animal work, it shows how metabolic, ecological and affective labour become a productive economic force. Secondly, animating the commodity, it demonstrates how lively forces influence commodification and exchange, enabling or hindering accumulation. Thirdly, tracking animal circulation, it examines the logics of rendition that transform nonhuman life into capital. In conclusion, the paper develops a relational grammar for anatomizing the nature-capital dynamic, one that reorients the economic to be co-constituted by the ecological from the outset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maps into geographies of 'lively commodities', commodities whose value derives from their status as living beings. In an era where life itself has become a locus of capitalist accumulation, picking apart the category of 'liveliness' underpinning commodification has important analytical and geographical stakes. To this end, by tracking historical geographies of commodifying lions in political economies of ecotourism in India, this paper shows how more-than-human labour and lively potentials affect commodification and influence accumulation, not simply through recalcitrance, but as active participants within political economic organisation. The paper advances and develops a triad of relational concepts - nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation - through which the political economic potency of lively commodities might be articulated and grasped. It concludes by discussing the analytical potential of this approach and its future purchase for rethinking commodity geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rendering nonhuman life for sale is a fundamental facet of contemporary capitalism. Political economy extensively examines how nature is commodified but fails to analyse the difference liveliness of animals makes to processes of commodification. Drawing upon empirical work on lions and elephants in the political economies of tourism and biodiversity conservation in India, this paper proposes analytics for understanding commodification and accumulation in relational and less humanist terms. First, it develops Haraway’s concepts of ‘lively commodities’ and ‘encounter value’, foregrounding animal ecologies to rework political economic categories of the commodity, labour and production in more-than-human terms. Second, it examines how lively commodities and encounter value configure political economies, mapping their specificities and economic potential. The paper advances potential diagnostics and vocabularies through which ecology and non-dualist accounts of agency might be integrated into the nature-as-resources approach of political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]