What happens when inheritance matters and multispecies relations intersect—and the goal of ›continuing life‹ becomes a matter of deciding whose lives need to be saved, and how? Policy makers in the Balkans approached such dilemmas differently in socialist and postsocialist times. In the post-WWII population boom, Yugoslavia ameliorated its livestock with Western breeds to boost the productivity of the countryside. Such a ›revolutionary ecology‹ backfired, however, and by the 2010s, the mountain abodes had been largely abandoned. At the moment, it is precisely the ›old autochthonous races‹ that are given priority in conservation efforts, in what can be understood as a ›patrimonial ecology‹. Combining archival data from the 1950s–1960s with contemporary ethnographic fieldwork, the lecture explores what happens when heritage matters involve making a decision about which environmental assemblages should be passed down, and which ones should be left ›in the past‹. As a form of living capital, it argues, livestock is a form of succession that runs through both cross-generational and interspecies encounters, posing critical questions of kinship, survival and care in the Anthropocene.

Ivan Rajković is a social anthropologist and a poet with interests in political ecology, moral economy, and multispecies relations in the Balkans. His first work, The Gift of Labour, dealt with the politics of deindustrialization and unemployment after Yugoslav socialism.