Multispecies Ethnography

Posthumanism, now in the mainstream of the humanities and humanistic social sciences, poses a challenge to ethnomusicology, a discipline inherently focused on the human and social aspects of music. Drawing from a survey of birds in the ethnomusicological scholarship and the author's research on music and birds in Brazil, this article proposes an approach to ethnomusicology that emphasizes nonhuman factors and their own properties and effects as a method for better understanding music as a meaningful human phenomenon.

How does a big cat in India come to be identified as the one guilty of preying on humans? Indian conservationist law stipulates that the big cat must be identified before it is hunted down. But as I demonstrate ethnographically, there is no possible means of establishing the correct identity of a big cat before it is killed. Through an account of the impossibility of beastly identification, this article demonstrates the limits of both bureaucratic action and conservation in the government of big cats. What operates, instead, is a form of knowing the nonhuman Other, a knowing that is localized, personalized, affective, and momentary. Such forms of knowledge and living-besides are called for by the Anthropocene. Indeed, an analytic potential of the Anthropocene lies in rendering untenable the continual disciplinary sequestering of the nonhuman and environmental from the political, bureaucratic, and legal.

Nonhuman bodies in many sizes and diverse social roles are central to Israel's control mechanism in the Occupied West Bank. Delving into the agricultural record of the Israeli Civil Administration, I ask how the Israeli system of control operates through animal bodies. What does a bureaucratic record so invested in monitoring animals' production, treatment, disease, and death tell about the potential disruption of power? Through a political ecology of human-animal entanglement, I argue that nonhuman bodies both reproduce human colonial relations and allow their constant interruption. Nonhumans challenge the power regime through their unpredictable mobility as well as in their role as both objects of a political economy and subjects of potential agricultural diseases, ecological risks, or public health threats. Breaking from contemporary multispecies scholarly literature's focus on endangered species and relations of care, I place nonhuman bodies as actors of international-interspecies relations in colonial conditions and point to nonhumans, which are here to stay in the climate change era. By doing so, I reflect on the continuous significance of nonhuman bodies to the operation of power in the "borderlands" of Israel/Palestine and beyond.

With the publication of an extended editorial titled 'Animal Studies and Art: Elephants in the Room' by Giovanni Aloi, Editor in Chief of 'Antennae', the journal embarks on a new and challenging year-long project constituting somewhat of a departure from the theoretical approaches of animal studies for the purpose of conceiving new productivities specific to art. This project is provocatively titled 'Beyond Animal Studies'.
At the end of March 2015 the publication of two installments dedicated to multispecies-Intra-action: new ways of thinking multispecies aesthetics through Karen Barad’s agential realism (co-edited with artist/curator Madeleine Boyd) will mark the beginning of this journey. This first offering will be followed by an issue edited by artists and theorists Suzanne Anker and Sabine Flach focusing on the proceedings of an exciting conference dedicated to bioart titled 'Naturally Hypernatural' that took place in New York (November 2014). The last segment of this publishing project will comprise two issues on art and environment that will be made available in December 2015 and March 2016.
'Animal Studies and Art: Elephants in the Room’ is the developed and expanded version of the keynote address Giovanni Aloi gave at the University of Wurzburg in autumn 2014. Its content stems from a genuine sense of concern with regards to current affairs in animal studies, its involvement with contemporary art, and the challenges scholars and artists face in engaging with multidisciplinarity within this context.

La pensée férale is a collaboration with artist Daniel Stegmann Mangrané, a series of seven photos accompanied by seven short texts that seeks to develop a notion of "feral thought"  by using the concept of ferality - a transformation of what was once tamed into something that is no longer so, suggesting that maybe survival in the Anthropocene has something to do with becoming feral.

The project was developed for Maria Lind's Instagram account  https://www.instagram.com/52proposalsforthe20s: "For each week in 2020, curator Maria Lind invites 52 artists to inhabit this account to make weekly proposals for the 2020s."

打着环保意识这个旗号，《美人鱼》讲述了一个多层次的寓言故事。然而，作为一部商业爱情电影，《美人鱼》是否有效而明确地传达环境保护的意识？电影是如何透过人鱼族比喻现实世界中濒危的海洋生物？我们如何在近年生态电影批评（eco-film criticism）这个学科的框架内审视《美人鱼》的环保、生态理念？
本文第一部份将集中在《美人鱼》当中的地方意识和中港合拍片模式带来的「去地域化」呈现如何改变了香港电影当中的地方意识和生态想象。第二部份我们将会探讨《美人鱼》当中的跨物种关怀伦理和多物种公义的想像，藉以指出为何电影未能摆脱人类中心主义的固有思维，以及其生态意识为何未能更有系统地、更贯彻地展现人与非人物种的复杂关系。

Le biomimétisme est souvent présenté comme une solution à la crise écologique que traversent les sociétés humaines. Pour ses défenseurs, cette approche pourrait instaurer, ou restaurer, un rapport moins destructeur à l’environnement, en adoptant des démarches et des processus de fabrication imitant la nature. Mais au moment d’esquisser les idées directrices pour de nouveaux modèles d’actions individuelles et collectives, il convient de réfléchir aux conceptions de la nature, de la vie et de la technique associées à ces pratiques, et pas seulement dans les sociétés occidentales. Plutôt que de considérer l’imitation de la nature et de la vie comme un mécanisme universel, il s’avère crucial de réfléchir aux fondements anthropologiques du biomimétisme ou – pour insister sur la diversité des pratiques – des « biomimétismes ». Les textes rassemblés dans ce numéro explorent l’inventivité des sociétés, présentes et passées, lorsqu’elles cherchent dans leur environnement une source d’inspiration pour fabriquer des objets et organiser leur existence collective selon des finalités variées.

Based on extensive fieldwork in Bogotá and the southwestern Amazonian state of Putumayo, Colombia, this book moves across laboratories, greenhouses, forests, and farms. It weaves together an ethnography of two kinds of practitioners—state soil scientists and campesinos—who attempt to build alternatives to illicit crops and the militarized, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to replace them. In the context of the US-Colombia war on drugs, the book examines the struggles and potential collaborations between farmers, agrarian movements, state officials, and scientists over the meanings of peace, productivity, rural development, sustainability, and what constitutes a good and dignified life. It argues that peace is not only a political condition characterized by the official end to armed conflict, but also crucially a condition for life that is grounded in soils, and all the complex relations of which they are composed and decompose. A growing body of literature at the interfaces of cultural anthropology and science studies has made important contributions to our understandings of the intensified shift in the capitalist appropriation of material and immaterial worlds. This book both builds upon and departs from this literature by foregrounding the emergence of socio-ecological proposals that strive to exist and persist as alternatives to this reductive, market-oriented view of life. It also poses questions about what can be learned from turning our attention to “litter layers” rather than stable “soils”—in other words, toward processes that never became the industrialized or chemical soil that has taken center stage in global concerns over anthropogenic climate change.

Ce chapitre cherche à rendre compte de l’émergence, puis du développement, de la catégorie de « non-humain » dans l’anthropologie et la sociologie contemporaines, entendu comme une alternative à la dichotomie nature/culture. Dans une première partie, nous tentons de recenser l’ensemble des travaux qui ont cherché à accorder un mode d’existence social spécifique aux objets en tentant d’échapper au double écueil du naturalisme réductionniste et du constructiviste culturaliste. Dans une deuxième partie, nous nous focalisons plus précisément sur le cas des acteurs « naturels » ou « environnementaux » pour souligner les théories de l’action et de l’acteur qui y sont liées : l’enjeu est alors de dessiner les contours d’une science sociale non-anthropocentrée. Enfin, dans une troisième partie, nous discutons plus spécifiquement la notion de « collectif », adoptée par Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola ou Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, pour désigner les assemblages sociaux d’humains et de non-humains : nous tentons en conclusion d’interroger les enjeux politiques d’une telle notion.

Hypothesis: the Highly Sensitive Personhood in both humans and other animals could be the missing interspecies communication link because of a similar sophisticated neurological system and a complementary heightened common trait. Abstract: In an emerging post-humanist turn (Braidotti, 2009) where science is being challenged to widen its horizons over a more holistic perspective, embracing interdisciplinary methods of research (Bekoff, 2001) the patriarchal legacy that has mostly valued detached reasoning over emotions is making space for a more embodied mode of knowing (Warkentin, 2010) with a renewed valorisation of emotions (Hamington, 2008). Other-animals' vision of the world filtered through the experience and elaboration of a savant autistic in the person of Dr Grandin, has already allowed humans to gain a rare perspective on other-animals' perception of reality. The possibility analysed in this essay is that both the human and other animal Highly Sensitive Personhood (Aron, 1997) can be an effective tool in moving beyond the sole observation by establishing a mutual communication that is not only an anthropomorphic perception of the unfamiliar other but a more scientifically based insight into the other's cognitive and emotional world.

The first major ethnography of reef scientists, Coral Whisperers, begins with a clear distinction between hope and despair, but Irus Braverman’s ultimate goal is to reveal the ways these positions are “interconnected and even co-dependant” among those working on reef futures in laboratories and lagoons. Moving beyond extremes, she claims, might “show us the way out” of our apocalyptic trajectory. Her ethnography uses a fast-moving set of narratives based on interviews with 100 coral scientists and reef managers to show that these researchers are more than just experts on reefs: they are “spokespeople” and “guides” that might lead other conservationists—and all of us—“through the perils of the Anthropocene.” Part of the reason why that these Charon-like scientists can take leading roles, she claims, is because corals are “good to think with"—a phrase that appears in many multispecies studies, borrowed from the English translation of Levi-Strauss’ Totemism (1962). Braverman uses “good to think with” in a familiar multispecies register, but the coral thinking that she reveals—through a detailed retelling of competing scientific narratives—is neither easy nor good. Corals, it seems, are incredibly difficult to think with. They make trouble for seemingly stable categories of nature, life, death, and law as scientists attempt to speak for and with them.

In the last decade there has been an increase of interest and concern for the lives and well being of honeybees. With the onset of colony collapse disorder (CCD) in 2006 where we saw the disappearance of millions of bees from North America and Europe for seemingly unknown reasons, people began to realize just how important honeybees are, not only to advanced methods of agricultural production, but also our ecological futures. This article brings to light the varied relationships that have materialized between humans and honeybees, from mid 20th century scientific discoveries, to contemporary urban beekeeping projects that seek to bring ‘nature’ into the city in order to help “save the honeybee.” It aims to articulate moments of enchantment that occur in the presence of honeybees, moments that inspire a deeper understanding of the ecological processes and spiritual dispositions that configure our place on Earth amongst the family of things. While drawing primarily from recent articles and books that sit within the emerging field of multispecies ethnography, this article also draws from, and is inspired by, recent work in philosophy, environmental sciences, and human ecology.

Regional geopolitical processes have turned the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in northwest India, into a strategic border area with an increasing military presence that has decentered the traditional agropastoralist economy. This in turn has led to social fragmentation, the growing isolation of elders, and ethical dilemmas for those who strive to maintain traditional subsistence activities.

The zoological garden is permanently trying to reform itself. This includes the classification drive meant to overcome the apparent chaos of princely menageries of the bygone era, efforts to emphasize the difference between the zoo and the circus, and the many attempts to reform its modes of display, whose trajectory may be described in terms of moving away from the concept of “prison” towards the concept of “refuge.” In what follows, I reflect on the zoo and the possible redefinitions of this project. I propose to reconfigure the zoo as a new cosmopolis, a natural-cultural institution grounded in the urban multispecies terrain. This move requires reclaiming the principle of care, along the lines of what the feminist philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa calls alterbiopolics. To develop such a non-utopian vision, one needs to critically evaluate the zoo’s present practices and commitments, as well as look back at its past. Two powerful paradigms have fueled the constant transformation of the zoo as an institution of captivity: prison and refuge. The continuous changes within the structure and operation of the zoo as an institution are taking place in the context of these twin poles and they will serve here as signposts for navigating this speculative search for alternative zoo futures.

Both Niki Caro's 2002 film Whale Rider and Linda Hogan's 2008 novel People of the Whale feature children who possess characteristics that associate them with ancient transformational animals and-at the same time-prove them to be modern leaders capable of challenging clichés surrounding the "Ecological Indian." Both film and novel also feature traditionallycarved canoes linked to the whales considered by the many whaling peoples to be ancestors. This essay explores how events staged around these canoes offer insight into the activities of indigenous, ethnic minority, and civil society groups who are organizing a movement that has recently been described as "indigenous cosmopolitics." While exploring the relevance of this movement for ecocriticism, the essay also examines how transformational characters might be reread for the ways they suggest new modes of research being referred to as "multi-species ethnography" by scholars who study humans within the "cosmos" of their entanglements with other kinds of living beings.

In January 2013, a pack of stray dogs was accused with murder in one of Mexico City’s poorest and most populated boroughs. Images of the dogs, expert testimonies, and protests saturated the media. Eventually, the dogs were ambiguously exonerated. This event raises important questions that show the intricate ways in which human–dog relationships in Mexico have been historically constructed around notions of humanness, and informed by notions of class, race, and citizenship. I rely on the concept of “graduated humanness” to analyze the case of the “doglinquents” of Mexico City. I conclude that the concept of “graduated humanness” can illuminate how humans and animal rights are used contextually to “save” specific nonhuman beings while not addressing the larger structural conditions that frame the lives of humans and nonhumans.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F978-1-137-59572-0_11

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59572-0_11

In Companion Animals in Everyday Life (2016), edited by Michał Piotr Pręgowski. Palgrave MacMillan. See information on the book here: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-59572-0

Conference publication/Tagungsband:
What happens when wolves return to areas that humans inhabit and define as cultural landscapes? Since the 1990s, wolves have been settling again in middle and central Europe. Manifold societal discussions and negotiations accompany their return. As wolf numbers increase, dynamics accelerate. How can different scientific fields contribute to a better understanding of the diverse processes that encounters with wolves entail?

This essay is a companion piece to Gan's art installation "Rice Child (Stirrings)" which was installed at the World of Matter exhibition at Hartware Medienkunstverein (HMKV) in Dortmund Germany. The essay discusses how particular varieties of rice emerge from entangled temporalities of technology, history, memory, and matter.

View images of the installation at http://elainegan.com/riceDarc.html

A cselekvőhálózat-elmélet (Actor-Network-Theory, ANT) értelmében egyetlen társadalmi ágens sem tekinthető a társadalom középpontjának, a materiális ágencia nem vezethető vissza egyetlen alapvető rétegre vagy kauzális mozzanatra. Az ANT-nézet szerint minden entitás valamilyen módon hozzájárul legalább egy hálózat fenntartásához és fennállásához. Szimmetrikus módon kell elemeznünk a hálózatokat, amelyek a társadalmi valóság szövetét alkotják. 49 Egyetlen ágens sem rendelkezik monopóliummal az ontológiai fontosságot illetően. Mint John Law és Annemarie Mol írja a cumbria-i bárányok és a 2001-es száj-és körömfájás járványról szóló tanulmányukban, "a materiális szemiotikában egy entitás akkor számít ágensnek, amennyiben egy észlelhető különbséget hoz létre". 50 Egy ágens annyiban mondható cselekvőképesnek, amennyiben ágenciát fejt ki, tehát egy hálózat csomópontjainak valamelyikében. "Az entitások", folytatja Law és Mol, "egymás számára adnak létet [...], egymást valósítják meg". 51 Nincsen az ANT társadalmi ontológiában semmilyen tiszta "önmegvalósítás": létezni annyi, mint mások megvalósulásához folyamatosan hozzájárulni. Kölcsönös megvalósítás, adományozás híján aligha beszélhetnénk bárminek a létezéséről. Mindig a másik az, aki létet nyújt számunkra; másság nélkül elképzelhetetlen bármilyen önazonosság. Amit hajlamosak vagyunk fizikaiként aposztrofálni, rendkívül sokféle konstrukció végeredménye. Graham Harman rámutat arra, hogy a Bruno Latour neve által fémjelezhető 49 LATOUR 1999: 733-740 50 LAW -MOL 2008: 58 51 U.o.

Moveable Gardens explores how biodiversity and food can counter the alienation caused by displacement. By offering in-depth studies on a variety of regions, this volume carefully considers various forms of sanctuary-making within communities. This book seeks to address how carrying seeds, plants, and other travelling companions is an ongoing response to the grave conditions of displacement in today’s world. The destruction of homelands, fragmentation of habitats, and post-capitalist conditions of modernity are countered by the individuals in this volume through thoughtful remembrance of tradition and the migration of seeds, which are embodied in gardening, cooking, and community-building.
Moveable Gardens includes research located in distant yet connected places, where the authors examine how biodiversity fares in food, memory, and commensality. In highlighting itineraries and sanctuaries in an era of massive dislocation, this volume addresses concerns about finding comforting and familiar refuges in the Anthropocene. The worlds of marginalized individuals who live in impoverished rural communities, many Indigenous peoples, and refugees are constantly under threat of fracturing. Yet, in every case, there is resilience and regeneration as these individuals recreate their worlds through the foods, traditions, and plants they carry with them into their new realities.
This volume offers a new understanding of the performances and routines of sociality in the face of daunting market forces and perilous climate transformations. These traditions sustained our ancestors, and they may suffice to secure a more meaningful, diverse future. By delving into the nature of nostalgia, burrowing into memory and knowledge, and embracing the specific wonders of each deeply-rooted or newly displaced community, endlessly valuable ways of being and understanding can be preserved.

Este trabalho é parte de uma reflexão acerca dos cuidados humanos nos processos de adoecimento, envelhecimento e morte de animais de estimação. Em uma pesquisa empírica realizada a partir do universo de um hospital veterinário, constatou-se que há hoje uma configuração social de afeto que coloca aos indivíduos humanos como amar seus animais, numa espécie de modelo a ser seguido sobre cuidados e consumos. Enquanto isso, aos indivíduos animais, agora inseridos num - sempre controverso - processo de antropomorfização, cabe uma vida cada vez mais controlada e organizada a partir do modelo de civilidade humano. Nessa organização familiar multiespecífica, há espaço para afetos e desafetos, e emoções ambivalentes, tais como em uma família exclusivamente humana.

This work is part of a discussion about human care in cases of illness, aging and death of pets. In an empirical research carried out from the universe of a veterinary hospital, it was noted that today there is a social configuration of affection that imposes on human individuals how to love your pets, with some kind of model to be followed about care and consumption. Meanwhile, those animals, now entered a-always controversial-anthropormofization process, have a life one increasingly controlled and organized from the model of human civilization. In this multispecies family organization, there's place for affections and disaffections, and ambivalent emotions, such as in a family exclusively human.

Ⅲ ABSTRACT: Humans and elephants have lived together and shared space together in diverse ways for millennia. Th e intersections between these thinking and feeling species have been diff erently explored, for diff erent reasons, by disciplines across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Such disciplinary divisions, predicated on oppositions of human-animal and nature-culture, are integral to the confi guration of modernist thought. However, posthumanist and biocultural thinking questions the underlying epistemological conventions, thereby opening up interdisciplinary possibilities for human-animal studies. In relation to issues of confl ict and coexistence, this article charts the emergence of an interdisciplinary research program and discursive space for human-elephant intersections under the rubric of ethnoelephantology. Recognizing continuities between the sentient and aff ective lifeworlds of humans and elephants, the mutual entanglements of their social, historical, and ecological relations, and the relevance of combining social and natural science methodologies, the article surveys recent research from anthropology, history, and geography that exemplifi es this new approach. Ⅲ KEYWORDS: captive elephant management, elephant conservation, elephant welfare, ethnoelephantology, ethnoprimatology, human-elephant relations, more-than-human geography, multispecies ethnography

Resumo É bem conhecido o fato de que a antropologia, em suas vertentes clássicas, se caracteriza por estabelecer uma grande divisão entre natureza e cultura, a qual inclui a demarcação de diversas oposições complementares: corpo e alma, ambiente e civilização, fato e valor, animal e humano, entre outras. O ponto de partida para a discussão aqui proposta é refletir sobre esse grande divisor, investigando alguns dos limites e desdobramentos dos conceitos de " cultura " e de " natureza " no campo da antropologia contemporânea. O objetivo é mostrar como esse par conceitual tem sido sistematicamente colocado à prova tanto a partir do contato com a alteridade radical do pensamento de povos não ocidentais quanto nos chamados estudos da ciência e da tecnologia, que ao longo das últimas décadas se desdobraram em abordagens inovadoras da política, da economia, ou seja, das grandes instituições da modernidade ocidental. Em relação ao conceito de cultura, objeto por definição da própria disciplina antropológica, a referência aqui é principalmente a sua retomada crítica a partir dos anos 1970. No que se refere ao seu par, o conceito de natureza, evoco uma problemática mais recente, em que o que se coloca em questão é a ideia mesma da natureza como uma unidade exterior e transcendente, um domínio independente do humano. A questão se desdobra em duas: (1) uma reflexão sobre as relações entre humanos e animais, problematizando a atribuição prematura do campo da moral a uma dimensão estritamente humana, e (2) um questionamento do papel da natureza nas ciências, em diálogo com saberes indígenas ou tradicionais. Abstract It is well known that anthropology, in its classic strands, is characterized for establishing

This MA thesis explores the very particularly lively rooftops of Cairo (more specifically, in four homes across different neighborhoods of Cairo and Alexandria during a 9-month journey of fieldwork) where multispecies intimacies inevitably unfold. All these homes are largely located in impoverished localities of their cities, leaving access to proper proteins a challenge if not an economic impossibility. On these rooftops, then, nonhuman animals such goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, geese, ducks, and turkeys are raised, to be later eaten and consumed mainly for sustenance. I take these rooftops as initially human-centered projects of access to proper dietary nutrients, then try to follow these projects to explore how they expand and extend to include intimate, sustainable, ecological, and transformative relations between its protagonists. Rooftop recipes for relating, as witnessed and slowly cooked, by all means bring together polyphonic intimacies made of love, care, disciplining, slaughtering, eating, growing, and grieving - all taking place in an overarching social in which rooftops are complexly entangled.

Welcome to Aesop’s Anthropology, an effort to theorize culture and society across species lines. This project pursues a basic question: what can we learn about culture from other species? Studies of nonhumans are generating new perspectives on intelligence, media, and
networking, but they’ve yet to impact how we understand sociality. This is because of the notion that culture uniquely characterizes us as a species—much like racial and classed conceits equated culture and cultivation with the highest achievements of European society in the last millennium.
This is also attributable to the dependence of social theorists on the notion of social construction. In this  view, we only ever engage nonhumans through representations, reflections of our cultural conditioning and social order. But the usefulness of social construction—along with certainty about the uniqueness of humans—has eroded. It’s time to recognize that sociality, in its origins and elaborations, begins with nonhumans. We’re late to the game of culture, and it’s time to catch up in our thinking about the social.

In this book review, I seek to probe present anthropological engagement with the environ- ment, or nature, broadly speaking. I do this through the prism of political ecology, a field I have worked in for the last two decades and still hold as key to analyzing environment- related conflicts. As I will argue, however, political ecology approaches tend to reduce nature to a matter of resources – or more precisely, resources for human appropriation
– and in so doing, fail to account for the more dynamic and complex aspects of the multitude of life that constitutes nature.

1) L'argomento principe della discussione postumanista riguarda senza dubbio il termine "alterità non umana", potremmo persino dire che in esso tale filosofia cerca una sua coordinata di riferimento e lo fa allargando il profilo del concetto più generale di alterità 1 . La parola "alterità", gravitante intorno al significato di prossimo relazionale (individuo o altra cultura), è riconosciuta nel doppio valore denotativo di: 1) entità altra, ossia separata, estranea, straniera, divergente, termine di confronto, sfondo da cui emergere; 2) referente, ovvero capace di azione referenziale, vale a dire polarità dialogica in grado di fornire un contributo-orientamento nell'espressione e nella costruzione identitaria. Qui si nasconde il doppio contributo identitario dell'alterità: a) in quanto entità altra essa consente la riflessione, vale a dire un'autoricognizione in grado di definire il profilo identitario; b) in quanto portatrice di referenze, vale a dire di contributi esterni di orientamento e sostegno allo sviluppo, essa consente all'identità un percorso evolutivo 2 . L'alterità pertanto è al tempo stesso esterna e interna all'identità, quindi è parimenti dialettica e integrata: questo è sicuramente il punto di svolta tra un approccio umanistico all'identità umana, epurativo delle alterità non-umane, e un approccio postumanistico, integrativo delle stesse. Ma facciamo un passo indietro: per capire la visione postumanistica di inclusione del nonumano nella dimensione umana, un passaggio quanto meno critico, è necessario prima di tutto soffermarsi sulla dialettica identità-alterità all'interno della dimensione umana, per esempio nella costruzione dell'identità individuale e culturale. Mentre fino alla prima metà del Novecento costruire la propria identità significava divergere, prendere le distanze, purificarsi dall'altro, in seguito e soprattutto a partire dagli anni '70 è cominciata a emergere una visione 1 Il concetto di alterità è centrale nella discussione antropologica della seconda metà del Novecento, con il senso di "soggettività altra" portatrice di una diversa prospettiva culturale che va conosciuta e compresa ma al tempo stesso che entra nella costruzione dell'identità etnica, si consideri Ugo Fabietti (Identità etnica, La Nuova Italia, Roma 1995) e Francesco Remotti (Contro l'identità, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1996). A partire dagli anni '70 si parla altresì di identità non umana per definire una soggettività portatrice di una diversa prospettiva etologica, si consideri Donald R. Griffin, (Animal Minds, The

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.

Multispecies ethnography is a new approach in anthropology that reconsiders 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 they are terrestrial, air-born, aquatic, or microscopic. This involves a challenge to the humanist epistemology upon which ethnography traditionally depends, which has conceptually and ecologically segregated the figure of the human. In this regard multispecies ethnography draws on posthumanist theory, which also informs similar developments in geography, and science and technology studies. As a more-thanhuman 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.

This essay represents an interdisciplinary collaboration between  Anna Tsing and Elaine Gan of Matsutake Worlds Research Group. The essay experiments with three concepts—coordination, assemblage, diagram—to articulate a forest in Japan as a gathering of vegetal, fungal, and human temporalities. The essay argues that coordination is key to understanding how differences live together without centralized, human-centered planning.

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.