The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography

Departing from the foundational distinction between nature and culture at the base of Euro-American epistemology, an emergent cohort of multispecies ethnographers is beginning to explore new horizons in biocultural anthropology.  Rather than simply celebrate the fact of human/non-human mingling, multispecies ethnography orbits around the question, cui bono? (who benefits?), when species meet.  Reaching beyond the realm of primates, and even the phylum Chordata, ethnographers are starting to trace how organisms shape, and are shaped by, intersecting political, economic, and cultural forces.  Creatures previously appearing on the margins of anthropology—as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols—have been pressed into the foreground of recent ethnographies.  Animals, plants, fungi, and microbes are now studied as historical agents, alongside humans.  Anthropos—the ethical and reasoning being that Enlightenment Europeans conjured as their inheritance from classical Greece—has recently become an ambivalent figure.  Atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer have scaled up the agency of anthropos to embrace and endanger the entire planet.  In the Anthropocene, a new epoch in Earth’s history, humans have come to drive climate change, mass extinctions, and the large-scale destruction of ecological communities.  With this in mind, ethnographers are beginning to study how humans are entangled within multispecies relations.  As living, working, and communicating are under radical revision in the biosciences, anthropologists have begun to ask: What is anthropos becoming?