This presentation explores the diverse worlds of chickens in southwest China. Drawing on ethnographic research in Qingjiang and several neighbouring Miao villages in southeast Guizhou, it traces chickens across courtship and marriage, divination and funerals, protective rituals and house construction. Through close descriptions of these practices, I show how chickens are repeatedly brought into situations of uncertainty and transformation - when relations are unsettled, boundaries must be crossed, or one social or cosmological state becomes another. Rather than approaching animals primarily through their representational meanings - asking what they symbolise or stand for - I ask instead what chickens do within these processes of transformation.
Building on multispecies and more-than-human approaches, I develop the concept of threshold beings to describe nonhuman animals recruited when boundaries must be crossed, relations established, or transformations secured. I combine this with the concept of ritual infrastructure to show how animal capacities become materially embedded through their bodies and substances - feathers, blood, and eggs - in houses, ritual objects, and apotropaic forms, allowing ritual efficacy to endure beyond the ceremonial event. In the process, I argue that chickens are not simply representations or symbols of transformation, but active participants in the material and relational processes through which transformation occurs.