Next Forum

In the sixty-second number of Antropologicheskij forum / Forum for Anthropology and Culture, published by the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Kunstkamera), the European University at St Petersburg, our ‘Forum’ (written round-table) will address the subject of human / animal relations and multispecies ethnography. We would like to invite you to respond to the questionnaire below.

You may, as you wish, directly address the questions presented here, or send in a text responding to one or some of them (or taking up some other issue that seems to you relevant). Whichever way, we would be grateful if you could keep your answers to a maximum of 10 pp. (1.5 spaced, 12-point type). Please use the author-date in-text citation system for any references in the format [Smith 2002: 12], i.e. author/date (no comma) in square brackets, appending a list of ‘References’ at the end with full publication details: Author: e.g. Smith M. A.; Article title: e.g. ‘Visual Anthropology’; Journal title: e.g. Ethnology, 2002, no. 3, pp. 14–19; or alternatively, Author: e.g. Smith M. A.; Book title: e.g. Visual Anthropology. Place: Publisher, date, pages: e.g. London: Anvil Press, 2002, 356 pp. Please send replies by 1 July 2024 to forum.for.anthropology@gmail.com, with a copy to ck616@cam.ac.uk; your email address should be included in any attached file. We hope that the discussion will appear in September 2024.

Forum 62: Humans and Other Species

By its very etymology, the term ‘anthropology’ suggests that the focus of research is on human beings. Yet for all that, the various fields of anthropology have not excluded attention to other members of the natural world, from primates within biological anthropology to animals, fungi, and plants that participate in some capacity in human culture. Lewis Henry Morgan, one of the discipline's co-founders, described the engineering activities of beavers, and Edward Evans-Pritchard devoted many pages to the relationship between the Nuer people of Sudan and their cattle, as well as to the principles of categorization that group humans with other creatures [Morgan 1868; Evans-Pritchard 1940]. “Natural species are chosen not because they are “good to eat” but because they are “good to think,” this aphorism by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his work on totemism stated the importance of animals to anthropologists who studied their role in myths, taxonomies, rituals, and social institutions [Lévi-Strauss 1991 (1962): 89]. A key question that emerged, in particular through the study of shamanism and vernacular ontologies, was the question of the boundary between humans and other beings, and the problems of interspecies communication as well as the construction of the self and community associated with this boundary-making [Hamayon 1990; Viveiros de Castro 1998; Conklin 2001; Willerslev 2007].

In the 2000s, a growing critique of the unbalanced relationship between humans and other animals [Ritvo 1987] as well as skepticism about human exceptionalism led to the species turn in global anthropology. Expanding the horizons of social research, scholars have chosen to focus not only on humans but also on other representatives of wildlife and their tensions and entanglements, addressing ecological niches, networks, rhizomes, symbiosis, and interspecific alliances, and introducing a new method of multispecies ethnography [Kirksey, Helmreich 2010]. Besides Eduardo Cohn's “anthropology of life” and his critique of anthropocentrism [Cohn 2013], the species turn has borne fruit such as studies of the connections between humans and insects [Raffles 2010] or the interdependence of humans and matsutake mushrooms [Tsing 2015]. It has influenced discussions of classical problems of anthropology, such as subject and subjectivity, social hierarchy, morality, ecological imagination, political economy, etc. [Govindrajan 2018; Blanchette 2020].

In the new issue of the Antropologicheskii forum, we would like to discuss what the inclusion of other species in our focus, along with the methods of multispecies ethnography, offers anthropology, how this issue affects the future of the social sciences, and what complexities and challenges it poses for researchers. We invite participants in the “Forum” to respond to the following questions:

1. Have you ever studied the relationships between humans and other species? Do you observe any changes in the study of these relationships in current scholarship, or are the approaches in your field unchanged? What interspecies interactions (neighboring, cooperating, exploiting, ignoring) do academics in the field of anthropology that you are familiar with discuss, and which ones are needlessly overlooked? Which living things can be productively introduced into the study?

2. In your opinion, what is the main task of multispecies ethnography and research on relationships between humans and other species? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such research? Can anthropologists benefit from the experience of scholars from other fields of knowledge (natural sciences, philosophy, literature, art) or from interdisciplinary approaches?

3. How can we most effectively explore a social world not limited to human relations? How can anthropological work “ lend a voice” to animals, plants, fungi, viruses (those who in English-language literature are referred to by the term nonhumans)? Are new methods needed for such research?

4. Why are interspecies studies less popular in the Russian context in comparison with global trends in anthropology? In what direction are they currently developing and what can they bring to anthropology as a whole?

5. How can we separate scholarship and political activism in the study of human-animal relations? Is it possible?

Many thanks!

References

Blanchette A., Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Conklin B.A., Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society. Dallas: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Evans-Pritchard E.E., The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940.

Govindrajan R., Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Hamayon R.N., La chasse à l'âme. Esquisse d'une théorie du chamanisme sibérien. Nanterre: Société d'Ethnologie, 1990.

Kirksey S.E., Helmreich S., ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology, 2010, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 545–576.

Kohn E., How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2013.

Lévi-Strauss C., Totemism. Trans. by R. Needham. London: Merklin Press, 1991.

Morgan L.H., The American Beaver and His Works. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Company, 1868.

Raffles H., Insectopedia. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

Ritvo H., The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. London; Cambridge, Mass: HarvardUniversity Press, 1987.

Tsing A.L., The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2015.

Viveiros de Castro E., ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 469-488.

Willerslev R., Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Editorial Office of the journal 'Forum for Anthropology and Culture':

Forum for Anthropology and Culture:

ISSN 1815-8927

Antropologicheskij forum:

ISSN 1815-8870

EUROPEAN HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE