The emergence of multispecies ethnography
Author(s)
Kirksey, S. Eben; Helmreich, Stefan
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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.
Date issued
2010-11Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anthropology Program; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Humanities, Arts, and Social SciencesJournal
Cultural Anthropology
Publisher
American Anthropological Association
Citation
KIRKSEY, S. Eben, and Stefan HELMREICH. “The Emergence Of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010) : 545-576. © 2010 by the American Anthropological Association.
Version: Final published version
ISSN
1548-1360
0886-7356