The emergence of multispecies ethnography
S. Eben Kirksey,Stefan Helmreich +1 more
TLDR
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.read more
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Ethnography in Late Industrialism
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.
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Multispecies Studies Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness
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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene
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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique
Lucas Bessire,David Bond +1 more
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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Anthropology of Ontologies
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.
References
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