AHG Seminar - 13 May: Swiftlet Climbs

Swiftlet Climbs - Masculinity and the Nest Trade

Natalie Lis, University of Queensland

Swiftlets have long been entangled in gendered and political projects, their nests serving as both commodities and markers of masculine prestige. This paper traces the shifting masculinities of swiftlet nest harvesting, from ancient cave expeditions to the late twentieth-century rise of purpose-built towers. For centuries, people climbed precarious cliffs and cave walls to collect edible nests, a dangerous practice requiring strength and endurance. Nests gathered through such feats became elite delicacies and the basis of a lucrative trade. By the late twentieth century, intensifying demand for bird’s nest soup transformed harvesting from interactions with landscape to human-built architecture. Retrofitted warehouses, abandoned shophouses, and hybrid domestic structures replaced caves as primary sites of extraction. Some operated illegally, outside zoning and health regulations, provoking public complaints and state scrutiny. Yet these towers also functioned as symbols of entrepreneurial virility, recasting masculine authority as mastery over urban space and speculative economies. Government regulation further politicised the industry, as authorities sought to capture revenues, manage ecological damage, and assert control over an unruly trade. The swiftlet tower thus marks a shift from physical risk to abstract performances of masculine control through financial speculation, architectural improvisation, and regulatory negotiation. Drawing briefly on my research into industrial poultry farming, the paper situates swiftlets within a wider pattern in which avian commodities are organised through gendered infrastructures of power. Understanding these dynamics reveals how human-built avian architectures enact and reproduce systems of domination that bind human masculinity to the commodification of nonhuman life.