Critical perspectives on multispecies ethnography

Abstract

In a wide variety of disciplines, from English to Biology, attention to human– animal relations is challenging traditional definitions of the intellectual division of labour between the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences (Maturana and Varela, 1992). In anthropology, in some ways, the trend towards research that focuses on ‘‘multi-species ethnography’’ or the ‘‘anthropology of life’’ or ‘‘post-humanism’’ is creating new opportunities for thinking about the biological/social divisions within our own discipline. ‘‘Bringing the animals (and plants and microbes and tools)’’ back in is enlivening debates in diverse fields in anthropology and among cognate disciplines. This theme issue not only introduces some of these fields of research, but also attempts to take a critical perspective on the explosion of research on human–animal relations. What assumptions are being made that require deeper critical analysis? What are the political implications of attempting to develop ideas such as ‘‘more than human publics’’ or applying ideas of the cosmopolitan to multi-species analysis? (Blue and Rock, 2010; Latour, 2008). How should this kind of research modify our framing of the discipline of anthropology, our research practices, and our cooperation with scholars in other fields? Post-humanist approaches bring back a materialist perspective, but often through radically distinct kinds of materialisms that offer challenges to the assumptions underlying Marxist anthropological traditions. This set of papers addresses these questions in a variety of different ways which will hopefully stimulate debate about how to study post/humanity in the 21st century. Even the question of what to call this new, or revived, field of inquiry has yet to be settled. We have chosen to adopt the recently emerging emphasis on ‘‘multispecies ethnography’’ as part of the effort to destabilize the anthropocentrism that persists in the label of ‘‘human–animal relations’’ (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010). Multispecies ethnography acknowledges that interactions between different non-human species is not necessarily mediated (only) through their interaction