Multispecies Ethnography

Abstract

Multispecies ethnography is an approach that aims to consider the agency of nonhuman life forms and their social, historical, and ecological connectivity with human life. Extending the ethnographic gaze, it explores the ways other life forms are implicated with human lives, landscapes, and technologies, whether terrestrial, airborne, aquatic, or microscopic. This challenges the humanist epistemology upon which ethnography traditionally depends, which has conceptually and ecologically segregated the human. Multispecies ethnography draws on posthumanist theory, which also informs similar developments in geography and in science and technology studies. As a more‐than‐human approach to anthropology, multispecies ethnography is open to perspectives from the natural as well as the social sciences, often engaging with other life sciences in order to integrate multiple understandings of the mutual becomings that entangle human and nonhuman life in shared environments.