Multispecies Ethnography

Attention to plant life is currently flourishing across the social sciences and humanities. This paper introduces recent work in the informal sub-discipline of 'vegetal geography', placing it into conversation with the transdisciplinary field of 'critical plant studies' [CPS], a broad framework for re-evaluating plants and humanplant interactions informed by principles of agency, ethics, cognition and language. I explore three key themes of interest to multispecies scholars looking to attend more closely to vegetal life, namely: (1) plant otherness; (2) plant ethics; (3) plant-human attunements, in the hope of encouraging greater cross-pollination between more-than-human geography and critical plant studies.

Archaeology is a field of research that relies largely on the remains of past
humans and nonhuman animals and the traces of their interactions within
a range of material conditions. In archaeology, as in sociocultural anthropology,
the dominant analytical perspective on human–animal relations is
ontologically anthropocentric: the study of the human use of nonhuman animals
for the benefit of human beings, and scholarly inquiry that is largely for
the sake of elucidating what nonhuman animals can tell us about the human
condition. This review outlines the historical trajectory of Anglo-American
archaeology’s encounters with animal remains, and human–animal interactions,
within this framework and considers recent attempts to move beyond
anthropocentrism.

The majority of studies in ethnoprimatology focus on areas of sympatry where humans and nonhuman primates (hereafter, primates) naturally coexist. We argue that much can be gained by extending the field's scope to incorporate settings where humans manage most aspects of primates' lives, such as zoos, laboratories, sanctuaries, and rehabilitation centers (hereafter, managed settings). We suggest that the mixed-methods approach of ethnoprimatology, which facilitates examination of both humans' and primates' responses to one another, can reveal not only how humans' ideas about primates shape management strategies, but also how those management strategies affect primates' lives. Furthermore, we note that a greater focus on managed settings will strengthen links between ethnoprimatology and primate rights/welfare approaches, and will introduce new questions into discussions of ethics in primatology. For example, managed settings raise questions about when it might be justifiable to restrict primates' freedom for a "greater good," and the desirability of making primates' lives more "natural" even if this would decrease their well-being. Finally, we propose that because ethnoprimatology is premised on challenging false dichotomies between categories of field site—specifically, between "natural" and "unnatural" free-ranging populations—it makes sense for ethnoprimatologists to examine settings in which humans exert considerable control over primates' lives, given that the distinction between "wild" and "captive" is similarly unclear.

Reason and rationality, upon which modern, westernized, societies have been founded, have powerfully characterized the nature of human relations with other species and with the natural world. However, countless indigenous and traditional worldviews tell of a very different reality in which humans, conceived of as instinctual and intuitive, are a part of a complex web of ecological relationships. Other species, elements of the natural world, and people are active participants in relations overflowing with communications, interactions sometimes recorded in ethnographies, or as ‘myths’ and ‘stories’. The present article draws upon a range of traditions to explore the biases which shape how indigenous and traditional life-ways are represented in westernized contexts; the phenomenon of receiving direct insight or intuitive knowing from more-than-human worlds; and the numerous valuable understandings regarding the nature of the human being, other species, and how to live well, that are offered by a deeper comprehension of different worldviews. I also argue that the various capacities for instinctual and intuitive knowledge which accompanies these life-ways are endemic to the human species yet overlooked, the correction of which might work to usefully recalibrate our ethical relations with each other, and with other life on earth.

In this paper we use an apparently marginal topic—‘native plants’—to address two issues of concern to contemporary politics and political theory: the legacy of settler colonialism, and dilemmas of scholarship and activism in the ‘Anthropocene’. Drawing on the writings of Francis Bacon and based on a case study of California, we argue that planting and displanting humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor. In contrast to those who equate native plant advocates with antiimmigrant nativism, we see native plant advocacy as part of a broad process of botanical decolonization and a strategic location for ethical action in the Anthropocene.

The climate catastrophes that are beginning to ravage the planet make starkly evident the inadequacy of existing concepts and institutions of justice to protect the interests of the full range of beings whose lives and flourishing are in peril. This Critical Exchange seeks to thematize some of the thornier questions that arise when we try to imagine and institutionalize justice in ways that accommodate this far broader and more diverse cast of subjects, agents and actors, as well as their relationships. We do not simply seek to increase the range of subjects of justice, but also to challenge the idea that it is only subjects, understood as individuals, who fall within the ambit of justice.

Free article link:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/VHEPVCFVBI2ZVFNCFPKS?target=10.1111/taja.12379


This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled
lives of species, selves and other beings through a
multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing
on a sensory analysis, one that emerges through what Anna
Tsing refers to as the ‘arts of noticing’ (2015), this introductory
paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives
are intertwined, and how their close examination can guide
anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of
more-than-human engagement, connection and relatedness.
Through articles within this issue from Australian anthropology
and beyond, we ask how becoming-with more-thanhumans
helps us to construct a post-humanist analysis in
the combination of sensory anthropology and multispecies
anthropology. Through a combination of these two fields,
the paper suggests, anthropology can take up the opportunity
to think about animals as subjects, through our ability
to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more
meaningful way through interspecies knowledge-making.

This article concerns the practice of cassava gardening among the indigenous Makushi people of Amazonian Guyana. By focusing on the cassava garden (mîî) as a primary site of multispecies engagement, I explore some of the heterogeneous modes that people-plant relationships take in everyday life and ritual practice. Plants, for the Makushi, are typically thought of as 'persons' (pemon), and gardening is predicated upon maintaining relationships of interspecies care via regular human-plant communication. In the idiom of human kinship, cassava plants are spoken of as being 'children' (more yamî'), both of human gardeners and Cassava Mama, the tutelary spirit of cultivated plants. Human-plant communication is both verbal, in the form of poetic language (taren) and songs (eremu), and embodied, in the form of tactile engagement and substance-based transfers. It is in the cultivation of communicative relationships with plants and their spirits, I argue, that Makushi gardeners create and nourish human persons and, ultimately, reproduce society. I go on to address the anthropological problem of plant animism in Amazonia, arguing that a more embodied, sensorial and, following Strathern, 'immanentist' notion of spirit is required to better account for the complex entanglement of bodies and souls that undergirds human-plant interpenetration in indigenous Amazonia. In dialogue with literature from the multispecies turn, I suggest that an anthropology beyond the human, much like Makushi gardening, might usefully be thought of as a process of more-than-human ontogenesis.

When the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden was established in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1913, it was envisioned as a site that served white citizens. Kirstenbosch was presented as a landscape in which plants functioned as representatives of their wild habitats. The botanical garden's curatorial practices silenced histories of colonial occupation, frontier violence, colonial agriculture, and slavery that had shaped the land on which it was built. Narratives that celebrated colonial histories were cultivated in monumental gardening. Throughout its existence, Kirstenbosch has centered Western epistemologies. Where Indigenous knowledge systems were featured, they were mediated through ethnobotany. While human stakeholders lacked commitment to transformation, emergent ecologies evolved that interrupted colonial narratives and Western epistemologies. Discussing histories of wild almond trees, hybrid plants, and cycads, the author suggests that the emergent ecologies around them introduced radical stories to Kirstenbosch. The emergent ecologies' storytelling is radical because it works at the roots of plants and historical genealogies, and it roots different narratives-of ruination and new flourishing, diversity and local becomings, multispecies kinship and love-into Kirstenbosch. In doing so, the emergent ecologies introduce possibilities for reimagining the botanical garden as an institution of environmental governance from within its confines and its disciplines.

Multispecies ethnographic projects are venturing "beyond the human," but how far can they go and remain anthropological? The answer depends on whether such projects align with the surge of ethological research on animal cultures. Based on my fieldwork on wild horses in Galicia, Spain, I make a case for an ethologically informed ethnography that extends cultural analysis to other social species. In this project, I used ethological techniques of direct observation but analyzed the results using Erving Goffman's concepts of face, footing, and civil inattention. My analysis inverts Clifford Geertz's classic study of the Balinese cockfight by making horse sociality the center of analysis, rather than regarding these animals as representations of human status concerns.

O artigo tem por objetivo expor o giro multiespécie e suas repercussões sociojurídicas notadamente para problematizar a concepção tradicional de sociedade assim como reconhecer nossas existências como inscritas em mundos nos quais as vidas humanas e não humanas se interpelam e influenciam mutuamente para construírem suas historicidades.

Anthropologists have mediated between discriminated communities and outsiders, helping to influence public opinion through advocacy work. But can anthropological advocacy be applied to the case of violence against nonhumans? Ethical inquiries in anthropology also engage with the manifold ways through which human and nonhuman lives are entangled and emplaced within wider ecological relationships, converging in the so-called multispecies ethnography, but failing to account for exploitation. Reflecting on this omission, this article discusses the applicability of engaged anthropology to the range of issues from the use of nonhumans in medical experimentation and food production industry, to habitat destruction, and in broader contexts involving violence against nonhumans. Concluding that the existing forms of anthropological engagement are inadequate in dealing with the massive scale of nonhuman abuse, this article will suggest directions for a radical anthropology that engages with deep ecology, animal rights, animal welfare, and ecological justice.

In the post-war period, the health risks posed by indoor environments have both transformed and challenged notions of environmental health centred on pathogenic germs. The composition of home spaces, particularly in developed nations, has been fundamentally altered by the introduction of formerly industrial chemicals to everyday products and building materials. Further, the changing nature of building design, cleaning practices and urban life have altered the ‘microbiomes’ of homes, contributing to a rise in certain immune system conditions. This paper contends that to begin to address these concerns, the microscopic elements of ‘indoor ecosystems’, and how they are created and maintained, must become a focal point for research. It proposes an approach that integrates social practice theories and multispecies ethnography to investigate the cumulative composition constitution of indoor spaces. Findings detail the application of this approach to research into the domestic hygiene practices of parents with young children in Sydney, Australia. This approach highlights crucial assumptions about the ways micro-scale agency is embedded in everyday domestic practices that are contributing to sub-optimal indoor environments.

This article argues that one novel way to understand the slow death of a homogeneous Japanese identity, viewing it in perhaps a more positive light than simply loss, is to consider how Japan is increasingly ‘post-familial’ (Hansen 2013). In sum, there is an emergent shared (or ‘common’) sense of being Japanese moving beyond the myth of a monolithic or unified political-national/ socio-cultural/familial Japanese self towards a desire to get ‘in touch’ with an individual, surely individuated, identity, alongside a concomitant openness to be ‘touched by’ Others who exist beyond the rigidly defined social-political subjectivity of ware ware nihonjin (we Japanese). Engaging in these increasingly ubiquitous cosmopolitical connections may or may not be chosen (Beck 2009), but two influential arenas where encounters of touch are clearly on the rise in Japan are the increase in the number of non-ethnic Japanese residing in the country, with some becoming Japanese citizens, and, less discussed, the sharp rise in the number of urban household pets, specifically dogs, over the past two decades. This article draws together two levels of analysis, the virtual world of multimedia advertising and the ethnographic everyday, in order to discuss how seemingly distinct registers of touch in contemporary Japanese culture have emerged and coalesce in questioning simplistic readings of belonging and identity.

Despite recent calls to view nonhuman animals as more than objects within archaeological studies, traditional interpretations of horses in Iron Age Inner Asian communities continue to consider them as relevant only through their functional or symbolic significance to humans. This article argues for a “relational” rather than “domination” model of human-horse interactions, and that a necessary step toward this is a more clear understanding of horses, themselves, as social beings. This is brought to light through ethological studies and the understandings of “working riders,” including the author. Using a case study of the Iron Age Pazyryk human-horse burials, it is then proposed that through this lens the outfits of the horses in the Pazyryk kurgans might be seen to reflect roles and statuses of the horses, rather than of the humans.

Indigenous archaeologies call on researchers to recenter theory and practice on descendant peoples' lives and ways of knowing. Extending this project, this article takes story and dance as a site of theory, foregrounding Indigenous modes of embodiment in which bodily and sensory perspectives are cultivated through participation in more-than-human beings. Drawing on research with members of a small, Muskogee-identified community in the US South, it frames the large-scale earthworks at Poverty Point site in Louisiana as representing a horned owl. This evokes stories about a people who lived in an owl-shaped village and who could move in some particularly owlish ways. Critiquing ontological frameworks in which the sensory is universal and mind is removed from body and land, I argue that ancient peoples may have cultivated perspectival sensory perspectives through the everyday activity of living together in the collective form of an owl. Moreover, as contemporary descendants return to Poverty Point, the land animates shared, multispecies sensory fields that enroll descendants into a longue durée of owlish encounters and entanglements, or what my hosts simply call "Owls teachings." Here, I call for an archaeology reimagined in the context of Native American and Indigenous studies, asking how mounds might animate resurgent possibilities beyond settler nation-states rooted in (and routed through) deep Indigenous histories of return.

An extreme, far-right movement that promises to remake rural policies to benefit a minority of wealthy landholders produtores (producers) won Brazil’s presidency in 2018 with support from a majority of the electorate in southern Amazonia. There political elites have long argued that the claims of produtores are the claims of all Brazilians. This framing of produtores as “the people” is a multispecies affair insofar as it capturesthe generative capacities of monoculture ecologies, which landed elites can claim to represent the national interest. But if extreme-right agendas flourish in monoculture landscapes, diverse ecologies may open alternatives to authoritarian populism. We examine an agroecology program in which peasants strengthen links of solidarity among them while they establish mutualistic relations with seeds, soils, and plants. Alternatives to authoritarian populism, we contend, may be cultivated in multispecies land struggles whereby human and nonhuman forces converge in efforts to compose hospitable, inclusive ecologies.

Invasive species are the subject of much debate and attention. Social scientific analyses of alien species have focused on rhetoric about invaders, arguing that the discourse about invasive species reflects how people think about nature, culture and agency. In this article, I argue for a focus not only on discourse, but also on what happens in practice in the encounter between field scientists and invasive animals. Through ethnographic fieldwork on Guadalupe Island in Mexico, I analyze both the place of islands in the Mexican nation and invasive species eradication programs as examples of ‘care of the pest’, that is, projects in which scientists carefully tend to invasive organisms in order to produce knowledge about them. This knowledge is then used against the animals to exterminate them in a ‘biology of betrayal’, and occasionally, animals are enlisted into these projects to aid scientists in eradicating fellow members of their species. This article shows how changing perceptions of the value of island ecologies affected the use of the land and the fates of the animals on Guadalupe Island as the island was variously configured as laboratory, field site and slaughterhouse.

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, is a collection of 45 essays that reflect on and assess the environmental humanities. The volume brings together work by an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars and writers who address the Anthropocene, domestication, posthumanism, multispecies communities, narratives of decline and resilience, environmental history and memory, literature and ecocriticism, and environmental media, technologies, and art. See the table of contents for a look inside.

Magical charm plants – used to ensure good luck in hunting, fishing, agriculture, love and warfare – are known among many Amerindians groups in the Guianas. Documented by anthropologists as social and political markers and exchangeable commodities, these charms have received little attention by ethnobotanists, as they are surrounded by secrecy and are difficult to identify. We compared the use of charm species among indigenous groups in the Guianas to see whether similarity in charm species was related to geographical or cultural proximity. We hypothesized that cultivated plants were more widely shared than wild ones and that charms with underground bulbs were more widely used than those without such organs, as vegetatively propagated plants would facilitate transfer of charm knowledge.

"The lionfish is an enigmatic, beautiful, and invasive marine species in The Bahamas,where the reef ecology is construed as vulnerable while fishermen and invasive fish are seen as primary threats. This article considers fisheries anthropology through recent attempts to incorporate the lionfish into the Bahamian fishery as a commercial fish species, and it explains how the mysterious fish has become symbolic of the creativity and design of contemporary fisheries and fisheries management. Starting with the premise
that marine management creatively calls fish, fishermen, and fisheries into being as socially charged objects through conservation-oriented studies of fishing and invasion,the article engages with maritime anthropology, social studies of invasive biology, and multispecies ethnography to ask what is natural about fisheries and what is naturalized within discourses of fisheries crisis. The point is to determine what key aspects of fisheries, fish, and fishermen have been and are being designed in The Bahamas such that the
fishery has become a specific site of oppositional figuration. Through an analysis of the metaphorics of impact, the human-centered focus on negative change stabilizing and grounding reef conservation endeavors, we see how fishermen and lionfish have become malleable cultural figures in The Bahamas, figures that are simultaneously transgressive and hopeful."

The cultivation of tea has had major impact on societies and environments across the world. It has been the cause of imperial wars, colonial appropriations of territories and capitalist exploitation of people and ecologies. In this article, I am particularly concerned with the British empire of tea, what preceded it and its afterlife in the former colonies. Research on tea within the social sciences and humanities have mainly concentrated on the precarious situation of plantation laborers. Informed by recent scholarship in multispecies- and critical plant studies, I seek to trace the intimate relations between people and plants. Taking a cue from James C. Scott’s “grain hypothesis,” I suggest an “imperial crop hypothesis” asking if there are any particular attributes of the tea plant that lend itself to imperial ambitions. In this I straddle between a political ecology concerned with power, resources and infrastructures that enabled the British to establish its empire of tea, and a multispecies approach that foregrounds the entangled ecologies of plant life. I concentrate on four particular moments of this history: the British “discovery” of tea grown by indigenous peoples in the hills of the newly annexed Ahom kingdom in the early 19th century; the establishment of the Assam plantations during second half of the 19th century; the travel of tea across the Indian Ocean and the making of Kenyan tea industry during the 20th century; and, finally, the development of purple tea, a new variety of tea projected as the tea plant for the 21st century.

The ayahuasca research community is familiar with the concept of plant intelligences; however, they have yet to be adequately accounted for by commonly used research practices. This chapter is a call to examine the ontological and epistemological assumptions that underlie research practices and how these practices and assumptions may reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and animacy. The first part of this chapter describes some absences created by following a " methods as usual " approach when researching ayahuasca, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the World Ayahuasca Conference in 2016 (AYA2016). This highlights the need for researchers to acknowledge the methodological, disciplinary, and identity-based limitations on our abilities to produce and represent certain knowledges. Secondly, this chapter is a call to seriously and humbly engage with Indigenous sciences and epistemologies. This requires an honest reckoning with how research has contributed to colonial appropriation and marginalization of Indigenous knowledges. Indigenous ways of knowing have precedent for collaborating with teacher plants in producing knowledge and have much to contribute to discourse on multispecies perspectives. Lastly, I discuss possibilities for including multispecies sensibilities and Indigenous standpoints in research practices to create more collaborative and decolonial knowledges.

*This is just the abstract of the paper - send me a private message if you'd like a copy of the full paper - I'm not allowed to post it freely for download, but can share for non-commercial purposes*

In this essay, we reevaluate the 2019 outbreak of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) from the perspective of multispecies entanglements. It is argued that anthropogenic alterations in the biosphere will most likely accelerate the rate of multispecies pandemics in the Anthropocene. Using a textual analysis approach of anthropological and historical sources on the example of coronaviruses and live animal markets in China, we trace how the virosphere of wild animals from tropical regions comes into contact with the virosphere of humans and farmed animals in highly industrialized landscapes. We suggest that adopting a multispecies perspective on viruses can allow them to be understood as living processes that interact with other species in a realm called the virosphere. The rate at which novel infectious diseases are transmitted by bacteria and viruses has increased in recent decades. We argue that this is caused by side effects of the Anthropocene, such as deforestation, the surge in population growth and density, and anthropogenic climate change, which give rise to an increased number of unusual encounters between humans, nonhuman companion species, and wild animals. In this way, the virospheres of host organisms, which were formerly partly isolated, are allowed to converge and freely exchange infectious diseases, leading to a more homogenized virosphere. As anthropogenic alterations are set to continue in the future, we suggest that multispecies pandemics will likely increase in the following decades.

Cet article défend un concept de « conservation conviviale », conçu ici comme « un effort visant à établir des interdépendances vitales entre les humains et les écosystèmes, en vue de leur régénération mutuelle ». En nous appuyant sur des recherches ethnographiques que nous avons menées auprès de communautés subalternes d’Amérique latine, autochtones ou non, nous nous concentrons sur les communautés rurales brésiliennes de squatters apparues dans les années 1990 en opposition aux économies de plantation qui ont provoqué la dégradation de la vie humaine et non humaine. Dans les discours et les écrits des travailleurs de la conservation et de l’environnement, les membres de ces communautés de squatters non autochtones sont parfois dépeints comme des adversaires ignorants — voire hostiles — de la nature, et leur recours à la culture sur brûlis est condamné comme étant destructeur. Alors que ces familles tentent de remédier à des injustices distributives de longue date qui leur ont porté préjudice, nous découvrons de nouveaux engagements en faveur de la conservation de la nature, tels que les efforts des squatters pour cultiver des espèces d’arbres autochtones dans leurs agroforêts. Ces engagements non utilitaires pour la conservation des arbres autochtones défient les présupposés d’un courant idéologique qui alimente diverses approches de la conservation de la nature — qu’il s’agisse de la « sanctuarisation de la nature », que ces approches soient « participatives » ou axées sur le « développement » — qui font de différentes populations humaines des « gardiennes » quasi naturelles ou des « ennemies » de la nature. Cherchant à aller au-delà de ce courant idéologique, nous examinons les possibilités de conservation de la nature en dehors des zones de conservation officielles. Nous soutenons que la réparation des injustices distributives de longue date peut favoriser des pratiques humaines qui reproduisent conjointement des processus socioculturels et biophysiques.

From a Deweyan perspective, the capacity to learn is enabled or restricted by the clutch of one's habits, which are established and maintained by the mutual eliciting of action and reaction between an organism and its environment. Relationships which constrict the capacity for organisms to interact and learn from each other are undemocratic so far as they curb the direction and suppleness by which mutual growth can occur. Dewey saw that education and democracy were therefore inseparable pursuits. However, he developed a conceptual orientation which prevented entry for other species. This paper seeks to open a Deweyan approach to considering ecological communities politically and pedagogically. Ecosystems, like human societies, form and develop through complex learning interactions. This has been recognized for centuries by local and indigenous group and more recently by modern science in differently operating biological processes, from the Baldwin effect, to niche constructionism, and epigenetic inheritance. As Dewey continuously noted, the immediate encounter is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to ensure growthful, democratic environments, because patterns of behavior, thinking, and affect are channelled by the structural contexts within which encounters occur. It is therefore necessary that educators focus on the experimental reconstruction of infrastructure, buildings, institutions, technologies, and other material structures that habituate us to normalize miseducative and undemocratic relationships with our own and with other species.

This paper pursues storytelling in the Anthropocene as a method of earthly survival and multispecies flourishing from capitalist ruins. Storytelling emerged from (an accidental method of) walking-with during a global pandemic; the figure of the modern-day flâneuse is mobilised as a feminist praxis to investigate infected, entangled and affective relationalities between the human, non-human and more-than-human as they unfold in the daily tangles to emerge from lock-down life in the city. It is through the art of noticing (Tsing, 2015) and the arts of living on a damage planet (Tsing et al., 2017) that a commitment to engaging with the ordinary, mundane and habitual muddle, that the world is viewed, sensed and encountered through a different set of optics. The stories that are told about lichen, a dead pigeon, and a deadly virus are curated from a specific geopolitical moment where the early childhood workforce, as a highly gendered and classed group of 'essential' frontline workers, suffer disproportionately. Storytelling provides a means to attune to life in Anthropocene that emphasises precarity, indeterminacy and hope. It is only by recognising that trans-corporeality demands an ethical response-ability to all life forms (Alaimo, 2016) that we might find a means of earthly survival.

This paper examines colonial legacies in human-nonhuman relations to off-centre empire in the Anthropocene. Imperial methods of collecting, preserving and displaying nature profoundly shaped species perception, which in turn affected the scientific attention and ecological relevance a species was granted. In particular, I reflect on the category of invasibility to show how empire sanctioned the mobility of specific population groups and animal species as border- crossing. This further shows how speciesist logics served to extend, maintain and legitimize imperial power. This analysis is relevant in the Anthropocene where invasibility is mobilised to police movement in the context of increased human and nonhuman migration. Further, I discuss how invasibility is considered as one of main threats for biodiversity, which may misdirect conservation efforts. Overall, the article examines the potential in human- nonhuman encounters to challenge colonial legacies. Based on an ethnographic example of multispecies homemaking with species considered invasive in (hetero)normative modes of intimacy and domesticity, I argue that colonial legacies of racialized, gendered and speciesist hierarchies can be disturbed by human-nonhuman relations of companionship, care and interdependence. Finally, I scale-up the analysis to the landscape, by tracing the transformation of a former imperial wasteland in Vienna’s peripheral South from being perceived as economically and aesthetically worthless to a natural monument. Attending to multispecies entanglements is key here to understand the transformative process that led to the recovery of this wasteland. Here I off-centre empire by challenging anthropocentric narrations of how landscape transforms in favour of a narration that re-centres nonhuman agency. I argue that stories of wasteland recovery guided by nonhuman animals are crucial due to the increase in industrial wasteland and environmental degradation in the Anthropocene.

The Wadden Sea is a busy environment in which multiple species share a limited space. Humans use the area for recreation and economic purposes, while it also represents an ecologically valuable space as one of the largest intertidal areas in the world. Sharing the Wadden Sea with multiple species is recognized as a challenge by a seal rehabilitation center in the Netherlands, who cares for seals and their habitat, the Wadden Sea. To diminish harmful effects of human-seal interactions, the seal rehabilitation center educates their visitors to care for the Wadden Sea through at least three different educational practices (seal releases, beach cleanups, and through an exhibition at the visitor center). By taking a relational perspective to analyze these educational moments, it becomes apparent that different "natures" are brought into being. That is, by creating different experiences in multiple circumstances, relations between what is experienced or enacted as being part of the Wadden Sea environment changes. An important focus in this article is the diverse positions humans take up in relation to the Wadden Sea as they are encouraged to care for it and the seals. Instead of taking a human and nature distinction as a starting point, I will show that these educational practices produce fluid and dynamic relations between "humans" and "nature," enabling multiple engagements with the sea and those who inhabit it.

I consider the case of the ''simplest'' living beings—bacteria—and examine how their embodied activity constitutes an organism/environment interaction, out of which emerges the possibility of learning from an environment. I suggest that this mutual co-emergence of organism and environment implies a panbiotic educational interaction that is at once the condition for, and achievement of, all living beings. Learning and being learned from are entangled in varied ways throughout the biosphere. Education is not an exclusively human project, it is part of the ancient evolutionary process of elaborating and diversifying the relational possibilities inherent in metabolism that has brought forth our diverse and flourishing world. Abstracted from context, ''education'' appears as a set of ways in which humans actively engage and take responsibility for the learning outcomes of relationships with each other. Insofar as we consider this distinction absolute rather than a performed construct to be assessed by its consequences, we blind ourselves to the educative dimension of other species as well as our many miseducative engagements with them. If learning processes are inherent and constitutive of ecological communities, education theorists should devote their pedagogical sensitivities and insights to the crucial challenge of developing educative sustainable human–nature relations.

Recent scientific findings on plant intelligence are forcing anthropologists to reconsider indigenous theories of plant vitality. In this article, we compare original ethnographic and ethnobotanical research among two different peoples from opposite extremes of lowland South America – the Makushi of Guyana and the Matsigenka of southern Peru – and explore how somatic experiences and the chemosensory properties of plants permeate indigenous understandings of the aetiology of illness and medical efficacy in both the cosmological and microbiological domains. We synthesize emerging theory in ecosemiotics, embodiment, plant personhood and plant intelligence with the concept of ‘sensory ecology’ to recast multispecies ethnography as a phytochemical as well as a philosophical endeavour. If forests think (cf. Kohn 2013), they most certainly do so with phytochemicals, not with the kinds of signs and symbols that anthropologists are accustomed to studying. The biggest challenge facing multispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010), as we see it, is a methodological one. The conventional methods of social anthropology are not sufficient for investigating the complex and elusive relationships that transpire across species boundaries. As Eduardo Kohn (2013) has argued, interspecies relations are inherently semiotic, involving sign flows across species boundaries. And yet sensory experience and phytochemistry have been over looked in much multispecies discourse. Human-plant relations are intrinsically sensory, and are often mediated through chemosensation. Our ethnographic findings suggest new avenues of analysis into the semiotics, pragmatics and metaphysics of human-plant engagements.

This paper explores how members of the indigenous Canela community of northeast Brazil value and make meaningful their intimate engagements with cultivated plants in their local environment through the recent creation of written ethnobotanical lists.

This article provides an ethnographic response to the statement that soy kills (“la soja mata”), a refrain often repeated by campesino activists living on the edge of Paraguay’s rapidly expanding soybean frontier. In the context of Paraguay’s modernization projects since the 1960s, statements like these were easily disqualified as irrational or nonmodern. In the process, the political importance and analytic potential of the beans were dismissed, and so, too, were the lives and analyses of rural activists. And yet the activists with whom I worked managed, over the course of five years of court battles, to bring killer beans before the courts and to have them recognized as a force in Paraguayan politics. In so doing, they also opened up an analytic position for ethnography, allied with Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitics, which emerges from a situation of mutually enacting responses, rather than as a mediator of relationships between beings included or excluded from the political territory by the criteria of modernity.

North America shelters a growing population of so-called 'exotic animals'. If the phenomenon is not recent, it now fuels a considerable black market. Jungle backyards compose a non-negligible (yet often neglected) part of some modern ecological landscapes. This article explores problematical situations emerging from these shared humanimal lives. It presents the first results of a multi-species ethnography and examines the prevalence of what I call beastness – an antique commerce amid humans and animals that reveals not only utilitarian purposes, but also relational entanglements. Such a commerce feeds a sizeable economy and exerts major selective pressures (both biological and cultural) on organisms and their environment. For instance, there are more captive tigers living in the state of Texas alone than wild specimens running free anywhere else on the planet. From a strictly statistical point of view, the average tiger is no longer the tiger we imagine. Not wild anymore but neither quite domesticated, some animals – pioneers, in a sense – shuffle traditional taxonomical and ontological conceptions. Through biographical material, I reflect on adaptive responses as well as on zoological potentialities developed by this always-evolving bestiary. Providing serious case studies to further debates dealing with bio–eco–conservation, I discuss the influence of informational and communicational processes crystallized by some of our contemporary crossed becomings.

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an ethics of care, repair, or reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies , laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena.

Etymologically derived from the Greek words ά νθϱωπoς (anthropos, or human being) and κ ́εντϱoν (kentron, or center), the term “anthropocentrism” is a worldview that privileges
the aim of improving human welfare over other aspirations. The commonly held meaning of anthropocentrism is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “regarding humankind as the central or most important element of existence.” While anthropocentrism
literally means human-centeredness, the term is used in different ways. According to the environmental philosopher Baird Callicott (2006, 119), anthropocentrism presupposes that “only humans are worthy of ethical considerations” and “other things are mere means to human ends.” The terms “human chauvinism” and “speciesism” are closely related to anthropocentrism.

How might one responsibly review a field just coming into being—such as that provoked by the term Anthropocene? In this article, we argue for two strategies. First, working from the premise that the Anthropocene field is best understood within its emergence, we review conferences rather than publications. In conference performances, we glimpse the themes and tensions of a field coming into being. Second, we interpret Anthropocene as a science-fiction concept, that is, one that pulls us out of familiar space and time to view our predicaments differently. This allows us to explore emergent figurations, genres, and practices for the transdisciplinary study of real and imagined worlds framed by human disturbance. In the interplay and variation across modes for constructing this field, Anthropocene scholarship finds its shape.

In this position paper, we discuss the potential for cross-fertilization between the disciplines of animal-computer interaction (ACI) and cultural anthropology. Through an analysis of the animal-technology-human triad in the Western familial and domestic context, we argue for a more systematic grounding of ACI in anthropology and in particular, inclusion of anthropological perspectives in ACI’s multidisciplinary discourse. This can lead to new insights into how culture affects animal-human-technology
interactions and relationships, as well as how it can be shaped by them.

Zoological consultants in Western Australia survey northern quolls (a small, cat-like marsupial) for environmental impact assessment. Confronted by habitat destruction and on the verge of extinction, northern quolls are protected as a conservation significant species, yet their precarious ecological position is made visible only through zoological work. This article explores how consultative zoologists negotiate relationships between themselves and northern quolls in order to both craft detailed population studies and mobilise the species’ power to reframe human development. Traversing environmental legislation, zoologists nurture (rather than take for granted) quoll relations, manifesting an attentiveness that entangles the animal in fact-making and modes of environmental protection. Drawing from a growing compendium of multispecies scholarship, this article questions how attentiveness can bring new entanglements into being, and how these entanglements can be managed in order to both make sense of the world and level the playing field for those nonhumans who inhabit it.

In April 2020, artists Isabel Burr Raty, Louise Mackenzie, Robertina Šebjanič and Karolina Żyniewicz were invited by Dalila Honorato to develop research on the theme of “Staying in Touch: post-coronavirus art curating” as part of the collaborative digital art residency Braiding Friction. Working remotely across Slovenia, the UK, Poland, Belgium, Greece, USA and Portugal the group developed a speculative fiction in which art is the virus and art practitioners act as frontline workers. Braiding historical and contemporary art, architectural and bio-art practices, the group developed potential futures for post-pandemic art spaces, resulting in a fictional account of a series of art exhibitions that coincide with a pandemic event. The research was synthesised in the form of a pseudo-documentary premiered by the Creative Europe project BioFriction on 23rd July 2020.
This article presents the transcript of the pseudo-documentary “Staying in Touch” (Honorato, Mackenzie, Żyniewicz, Burr Raty, Šebjanič and Tavares 2020, 00:00:00 to 00:47:55), set in 2039: an ergodic narrative constructed as a self-ethnographic role-playing exercise by its contributors, where alter-egos Vess L, Arri Val, K-130, Soladite Carnelian and Anise Neuchâtel reflect on their curatorial practices before, during and after the pandemic. Whilst the narrative draws from many academic and contemporary influences, any references to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places or incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. “Staying in Touch” was edited by Pavel Tavares with the support of Cultivamos Cultura and included cameo appearances by artists Marta de Menezes, Yann Marussich and Adam Zaretsky. At its core, this work is a case study of artistic research and the possibilities of interactive engagement during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Part of the raw material accumulation for the medicinal plant industry in Romania is reliant on gathering plants from the so-called spontaneous flora. The imagery of medicinal plants played upon by medicinal plant product manufacturers is often abundant in visions of either wilderness or traditional peasant landscapes such as pastures. This article aims to present instead two different spaces where medicinal plants come from: wild pansy from within an oil seed rape cultivation, and elderflowers and nettles from the ruins of a former socialist orchard. These spaces of spontaneous flora highlight the process of capital's appropriation or salvage of the 'free' reproductive labour (spontaneous growth) of weeds often at odds and against other capitalist processes. Moreover, salvaging or scrounging is done through the cheap labour of a family whose livelihood depends on work both inside and outside of this capitalist process. These places, therefore, highlight the tension between the spontaneous flora and scroungers on the ground and Nature with its ancestral peasants on the supermarket and nature shop shelves. Nature and the spontaneous flora What do people see when walking down the medicinal plant isle of a supermarket or browse their way through the many nature shops that have in the past decade multiplied in cities across Romania? What is there on show on the websites and the many promotional materials and magazines of the Romanian medicinal plant product making companies? Some products and companies are advertised through clean lines and minimalist design, closely resembling pharmaceuticals and conjuring visions of white hygienic laboratories and

Since the early 1980s, the concept of sustainability has been employed by designers to confront the problems deriving from the emergence of the environmental crisis. On the one hand, if this contributed to generating systemic design approaches and methods to mitigate the human impact on the planet, little has been done to explore sustainability as a concept that extends beyond anthropocentrism. Examining environmental issues by considering other-than-human viewpoints could introduce alternative scenarios compared to those envisioned through technocentric means. This work considers a speculative design project that provides a multispecies reading of the notion of environmental contamination through the engagement of human and vegetal perspectives. The considered methodology focusses on the transdisciplinary tactic of "following" plant collectives across the multiple sites and actors that populate their life. Building on post-humanism theories and Guattari's concept of "ecosophy", this paper entails that sustainability should be seen not just as the outcome of a design process, but also as a behavioural attitude, and design as an implementation of that attitude. It is argued that following other-than-humans can teach designers to think sustainably by cultivating relations of reciprocity that help to shed light on the multispecies landscapes of the Anthropocene.