Sweet Knoll

Rurality in the Anthropocene is a tactical mode of existence in imperiled ecologies. Neither a strategic enterprise nor an identity politics, it is rooted in geopolitical histories and a congeries of feral ontologies: ways of being, communicating, and understanding in multispecies worlds that are rife with conflict, struggles for survival, and unexpected moments of grace. As a relational construct, rurality indexes the intersubjective copresence of more‐than‐human beings who materially and affectively sustain futurity in landscapes ravaged by extractive industries and climate change. This essay, based on interviews with public land ranchers in Oregon, conjures rurality as an ethnographic encounter in three registers involving wild horses, small‐scale ranchers, and a bewitched anthropologist.