Book Review: The Cactus Hunters

The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade, by Jared D. Margulies (2023). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Across continents and cultures, Jared D. Margulies pursues an understanding of how social life unfolds through the complex entanglements of humans and plants. He calls his new book The Cactus Hunters a “political ecology of desire,” drawing inspiration from political ecologies of the global wildlife trade, feminist theories of care, and psychoanalytic geographies. By integrating Lacanian psychoanalysis into what might otherwise be a commodity-chain analysis of cacti, the author demonstrates how an attention to the unconscious can illuminate the political economy of the illicit wildlife trade. Margulies’s explanation of Lacanian psychoanalysis runs parallel with his ethnography. What emerges in this book is not only a study of how desire is formulated but also a personal and ecopolitical reflection on desire’s effects on plants, from extinction to flourishing.

Jacques Lacan was a twentieth-century French psychoanalyst whose topological theories of the unconscious, including “the Thing” (that object of desire which is fundamentally absent from the subject) and jouissance (the pleasure derived from failing to satisfy the desire for the Thing), contributed to shaping the post-structuralist turn of the 1970s. In The Cactus Hunters, Margulies introduces Lacan’s core tenets and uses this psychoanalytical framework to qualify his argument that desires move people to act in profound ways: “they reshape and transform environments; they upend lives just as they forge incredible bonds” (322).

Tracing the historical and phenomenological aspects of collecting cacti, Margulies examines illicit botanical collecting and extreme instances of poaching, connecting these to the mental topologies that underpin capitalist desire and extinction anxiety. He draws on multiple methods, including participant-observation at cactus-enthusiast meetings and conventions, weeks-long “cactoexploration” expeditions (see Chapter 2), historical and literary analysis (Chapter 3); interviews with regulatory officials, “investigative ethnography” (Chapter 7), and auto-ethnographic reflection. Detailing the mythical status of Czech cactus hunters, whose fascination with cacti stemmed from an influential Czech botanist and salvage anthropologist of the early twentieth century, Margulies profiles a figure he calls “Švejk,” named after the trickster featured in Czech literature who subverts Soviet power. This modern-day Švejk illegally collected cactus seeds in Mexico, justifying his actions as necessary to prevent a fully fledged black market in the cactus trade. As one trade official states, Czech cactus collectors “want the species so much, they are going to do anything to get them” (143). He describes the paradoxical desire of these cactus hunters as “Robin Hood Conservation,” which aims to expand collectors’ personal holdings to conserve the species, even as their collective demand for threatened plants hastens those species’ decline toward extinction. This paradox recalls cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” (2011), by which the thing that one desires becomes an obstacle to one’s flourishing. In this case, however, cactus hunters’ activities contribute to the endangerment of beings that they desire—the very species that they purport to conserve.

Margulies compares this form of desire with the commodification of cacti for resale across national borders, arguing that they both arise from overlapping unconscious processes. In Chapters 5 through 7, he develops a method of “following desire as a mode of pursuing political economy” (244). He investigates the Dudleya cactus genus and efforts to illegally extract it from California and transport and sell it in South Korea. In this instance, the aftermath of the apprehension and sentencing of one cactus poacher, in which Margulies himself participates, substantiates the claim that “the desires of others shape (illicit) economies and species alike” (305). He is attuned to the historical and current power dynamics that construct those who are deemed “gentleman collectors” (141), whose illicit practices often elude state oversight, while others are branded as “poachers” and are subject to both state and social punishment. The middle chapters on cactus harvesting and trade reveal the legacies of colonialism and racism that continue to determine which motives for collecting cacti are considered licit or illicit.

Reflecting on the relationships among desires, plants, capitalism, and the Anthropocene, Margulies draws on decolonial and Indigenous scholarship to investigate extinction. For him, plants, and the ontological threat to them posed by extinction, trouble the distinction between time and space through the “flow of vegetal time that cannot be dislocated from space” (184). He analyzes the temporal dimensions of plant political economies, drawing attention to the plants’ value to South Korean collectors, which correlates to the labor time expended by the cultivators of greenhouse-grown cacti. “Wild-collected plants, [on the other hand,] if of a sufficient quality, enable vendors to avoid sunk costs of labor time and to sell plants with a greater profit margin than if they grew them from seed” (273). Moving beyond the political economy of cactus trade, Margulies also entertains the plants’ value as the embodiment of time. A bridge between space and time, “between earth and sky” (322), plants present the opportunity to move away from inactive anxiety induced by the dystopic notion of the Anthropocene toward what he calls “flourishing geographies” (chapter 8). He does not conclude with a pessimistic view of desire as driving an inevitable march toward species extinction and capitalist hegemony. Instead, he encourages a re-orientation of desire toward this flourishing: the “celebration of the possible as cause of desire” (322).

The Cactus Hunters recalls Renato Rosaldo’s classic essay “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” (1993), which posits the impact of emotion in motivating social behavior. Rosaldo’s reshaping of anthropological theory to include the emotions of the theorizer echoes throughout Margulies’s book. Extending this attention to the internal world, Margulies applies psychoanalysis to argue that emotions not only drive social behavior but also that the construction of desire is crucial to understanding its social consequences.

To conclude, The Cactus Hunters will capture the attention of diverse audiences, ranging from specialists in critical plant studies, conservationists, and international trade policy-makers to academics working in fields of geography, feminist studies, and psychoanalysis. It will also appeal to anyone who enjoys an adventure, as Margulies explores both the surprising intricacies of the global trade in succulent plants and the unconscious depths of the desiring mind.

References

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Introduction: Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage.” Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. 1-24.