Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we share fragments of letters, emails and tweets seeking to feel-think (sentipensar) our commitments to the work of tending to what our multispecies fields have taught us, particularly as they take us outside of binaries of kindness or killing, death or life.

Paper long abstract:

There is a curious history of anthropologists dreaming to one another through letters (Goodwin-Hawkins and Meher 2019:114). In this piece, we offer fragments of our own conversations—both past and yet-to-come—through which we attempt to feel-think (sentipensar cf. Fals Borda 2009, Escobar 2014, 2018) human-animal relations outside of binaries of life or death, killing or kindness. As anthropologists committed to an ethics in which love for the world involves recognising our gifts and responsibilities, we reflect on the practices, cares and challenges of tending to the “critical promise of the field” (Pandian 2019:3). In our cases, often literal fields of grass raise ideas and ways of knowing that are challenging to express in words, and can disturb those who would be our allies. With a commitment to living our responsibility and gratitude for lives shaped with sheep, hedgehogs, and their broader multispecies worlds, we explore how we might do the work of responsively tending to love, life and death (McLauchlan 2019). We offer these fragments as a mode of “writing with care”—of writing in a way that acknowledges and reflects vulnerability and uncertainty (Garcia 2010:35). This writing also becomes a way of seeking small community in what has been described as the loneliness of anthropologists (Goodwin-Hawkins and Meher 2019: 114). Together we explore what emerges when we commit to holding what seems unreconcilable, and asking how we might make space for more, not fewer, ecological and ethical possibilities (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).