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S. Eben Kirksey

Bio: S. Eben Kirksey is an academic researcher from The Graduate Center, CUNY. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 937 citations.

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TL;DR: Anthropologists have been committed, at least since Franz Boas, to investigating relationships between nature and culture, and this enduring interest was inflected with some new twists as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Anthropologists have been committed, at least since Franz Boas, to investigating relationships between nature and culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, this enduring interest was inflected with some new twists. An emergent cohort of “multispecies ethnographers” began to place a fresh emphasis on the subjectivity and agency of organisms whose lives are entangled with humans. Multispecies ethnography emerged at the intersection of three interdisciplinary strands of inquiry: environmental studies, science and technology studies (STS), and animal studies. Departing from classically ethnobiological subjects, useful plants and charismatic animals, multispecies ethnographers also brought understudied organisms—such as insects, fungi, and microbes—into anthropological conversations. Anthropologists gathered together at the Multispecies Salon, an art exhibit, where the boundaries of an emerging interdiscipline were probed amidst a collection of living organisms, artifacts from the biological sciences, and surprising biopolitical interventions.

1,226 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Dec 2020
TL;DR: A etnografia multiespecies emergiu na intersecao de tres linhas de investigacao interdisciplinares: os estados ambientais, os estudos sociais da ciencia e da tecnologia (STS), and os estudes animais as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Antropolog(a)s tem se dedicado, ao menos desde Franz Boas, a investigar as relacoes entre natureza e cultura. No alvorecer do seculo XXI, este interesse recorrente vem sendo alterado diante de novas torcoes. Um conjunto de “etnografo(a)s multiespecies” comecaram a depositar enfase inedita na subjetividade e na agencia de organismos cujas vidas estao emaranhadas as vidas humanas. A etnografia multiespecies emergiu na intersecao de tres linhas de investigacao interdisciplinares: os estudos ambientais, os estudos sociais da ciencia e da tecnologia (STS) e os estudos animais. Comecando pelos classicos assuntos etnobiologicos, plantas uteis e animais carismaticos, etnografo(a)s multiespecies igualmente convidaram organismos pouco estudados – tais como insetos, fungos e microbios – para a conversacao antropologica. Este(a)s antropolog(a)s reuniramse no Salao Multiespecies (Multispecies Salon), uma mostra de arte, onde as fronteiras de uma interdisciplina emergente foram exploradas em meio a uma colecao de organismos vivos, artefatos das ciencias biologicas e surpreendentes intervencoes biopoliticas.

1 citations


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TL;DR: In this article, the authors situate contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media.
Abstract: This essay situates contemporary ethnography within late industrialism, a historical period characterized by degraded infrastructure, exhausted paradigms, and the incessant chatter of new media. In the spirit of Writing Culture, it calls for ethnography attuned to its times. It also calls for ethnography that “loops,” using ethnographic techniques to discern the discursive risks and gaps of a particular problem domain so that further ethnographic engagement in that domain is responsive and creative, provoking new articulations, attending to emergent realities. Ethnographic findings are thus fed back into ethnographic engagement. This mode of ethnography stages collaboration with interlocutors to activate new idioms and ways of engaging the world. It is activist, in a manner open to futures that cannot yet be imagined.

330 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The field of multispecies studies as mentioned in this paper explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds.
Abstract: Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are experimenting with novel ways of engaging with worlds around us. Passionate immersion in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, and plants is opening up new understandings, relationships, and accountabilities. This introduction to the special issue offers an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, it explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds. From detailed attention to particular entities, a multiplicity of possible connection and understanding opens up: species are always multiple, multiplying their forms and associations. It is this coming together of questions of kinds and their multiplicities that characterizes multispecies studies. A range of approaches to knowing and understanding others-modes of immersion-ground and guide this research: engagements and collaborations with scientists, farmers, hunters, indigenous peoples, activists, and artists are catalyzing new forms of ethnographic and ethological inquiry. This article also explores the broader theoretical context of multispecies studies, asking what is at stake-epistemologically, politically, ethically-in learning to be attentive to diverse ways of life. Are all lively entities biological, or might a tornado, a stone, or a volcano be amenable to similar forms of immersion? What does it mean to live with others in entangled worlds of contingency and uncertainty? More fundamentally, how can we do the work of inhabiting and coconstituting worlds well? In taking up these questions, this article explores the cultivation of "arts of attentiveness": modes of both paying attention to others and crafting meaningful response.

311 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an interdisciplinary biogeography for conservation in the Anthropocene through an engagement with the critiques of neoliberal natures offered by political ecology, focusing on biodiversity conservation.
Abstract: The recent diagnosis of the Anthropocene represents the public death of the modern understanding of Nature removed from society. It also challenges the modern science-politics settlement, where natural science speaks for a stable, objective Nature. This paper reviews recent efforts to develop ‘multinatural’ alternatives that provide an environmentalism that need not make recourse to Nature. Focusing on biodiversity conservation, the paper draws together work in the social and natural sciences to present an interdisciplinary biogeography for conservation in the Anthropocene. This approach is developed through an engagement with the critiques of neoliberal natures offered by political ecology.

290 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, an ethnographic and theoretical critique of ontological anthropology is presented, which provides an empirical counterweight to what the ontological turn celebrates of Native worlds and what it rejects of modernity.
Abstract: What does ontological anthropology promise, what does it presume, and how does it contribute to the formatting of life in our present? Drawing from our respective fieldwork on how Indigenous alterity is coenvisioned and how the lively materiality of hydrocarbons is recognized, we develop an ethnographic and theoretical critique of ontological anthropology. This essay, then, provides an empirical counterweight to what the ontological turn celebrates of Native worlds and what it rejects of modernity. In it, we examine the methodological and conceptual investments of ontological anthropology. The figure of the ontological as commonly invoked, we argue, often narrows the areas of legitimate concern and widens the scope of acceptable disregard within social research. We chart how this paradigm's analytical focus on the future redefines the coordinates of the political as well as anthropology's relation to critique. Finally, we formulate three conceptual theses that encapsulate our criticism and open this discussion to further debate.

249 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Eduardo Kohn1
TL;DR: The turn to ontology, often associated with the recent works of Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Bruno Latour, is, in Elizabeth Povinelli's formulation, "symptomatic" and "diagnostic" of something as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The turn to ontology, often associated with the recent works of Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Bruno Latour, but evident in many other places as well, is, in Elizabeth Povinelli's formulation, “symptomatic” and “diagnostic” of something. It is, I here argue, a response to the sense that sociocultural anthropology, founded in the footsteps of a broad humanist “linguistic” turn, a field that takes social construction as the special kind of human reality that frames its inquiries, is not fully capable of grappling with the kinds of problems that are confronting us in the so-called Anthropocene—an epoch in which human and nonhuman kinds and futures have become so increasingly entangled that ethical and political problems can no longer be treated as exclusively human problems. Attending to these issues requires new conceptual tools, something that a nonreductionistic, ethnographically inspired, ontological anthropology may be in a privileged position to provide.

235 citations