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- Convenors:
-
Marieke van Winden (conference organiser)
(African Studies Centre Leiden)
Harry Wels (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
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- Stream:
- E: Transdisciplinary debates
- Start time:
- 5 February, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
- Session slots:
- 1
Long Abstract:
Scientific evidence nowadays leaves no doubt that humans differ from animals only in degree and not in kind. Human exclusivity and anthropocentrism therefore no longer hold, hence non-human animals, and their absences / invisibilities, need to be included in African Studies. However, taking non-human animals as serious participants or ‘respondents’ in African Studies, in the same ways that humans are part of such research, comes with huge theoretical and methodological challenges. The anthropocentrism of conventional African Studies has not really equipped scholars with tools to answer these intellectual challenges in adequate ways so far. Nonetheless attempts are increasingly made all over the African continent and universities (as elsewhere around the globe) to rectify this reductionist approach and include non-human animals in the African Studies research practices.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper long abstract:
Walking ethnographies have recently been added to the the list of participatory methods used to study pastoralists. The walking ethnography or go-along method provides data that the usual sit down interview is unable to bring to the fore. The pastoralist's or herder's practice takes place outside and it is further a mobile activity that is thus best understood or learnt in action. For this reason this project with Nama pastoralists in the dry arid regions of the Northern Cape South Africa has been walking with herders and learning from them literally on the hoof. The case study has set up a pedagogy in the research that purposely reframes the learning and research experience. Instead of the sit down interview where the researcher often leads discussions and drives the interaction walking ethnographies with herders attempts to shift this power dynamic between researcher and researched. In our interactions the herders lead us and they in turn follow the animals and the animals in turn seek out and engage with the plants. The form has produced novel research data and has begun a recasting of the expertise and experience of the herders. Watching them in practices reveals a series of unique perspectival shifts that allow us to see herders as the developers of unique knowledge of the ecology, the animals and the management of these resources in challenging environments. This paper will thus give vent to the novelty of this methods and explore the walking ethnography as a multispecies and multisensorial classroom where anthropologists learn from ecologists who in turn learn from herders who again learn from animals who are then taught by plants. When following herders we are lead into a world of entangled learning and a co-mingling of ecologies, animals, matter and mythologies both "scientific" (ecological models) and "indigenous" (giant water snakes and God's dog).
Paper short abstract:
Using South African animal communicators as interpreters, I experiment with interviewing non-human animal research participants, employing African knowledges to contribute to the ontological and species turns and taking the decolonisation of knowledge and cognitive justice debates beyond the human.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists have established that the essential difference between nature and culture is a relatively recent, specific Northern notion (Descola 2013; Mullin 2002), and the concept of the Anthropocene confronts us with the idea that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep separating the two (Latour 2017; Dibley 2012). However, even if other Cartesian binary oppositions have been deconstructed quite successfully, the core dichotomy of nature/culture that underlies them has proven difficult to tackle, because it forms 'the key foundation of modernist epistemology' (Descola and Pálsson 1996: 12). Beyond this dualism lies 'an entirely different intellectual landscape, one in which states and substances are replaced by processes and relations' (Ibid.), which makes fertile novel ground to explore and develop dynamic, relational and multivocal approaches.
A wide variety of peoples in Africa and beyond perceive human and non-human animal worlds as interactive and indivisible (High 2010; Rival 1993; Ingold 1994). These understandings of personhood, agency and the non-human world fundamentally challenge Northern notions, and have implications for understandings of knowledge as well as the nature of doing research. The academically almost ignored case of animal communicators, who traverse the nature/culture dichotomy in practice, forms an ideal counterpart to the often largely theoretical discussions of the ontological and species turns. These are people who engage in detailed, two-way, non-verbal and non-physical forms of communication with non-human animals, a practice which has come to be known as intuitive interspecies communication (IIC) (Barrett et al. 2018). Their presence has boomed recently especially due to famous South African individuals as Anna Breytenbach, Wynter Worsthorne and Linda Tucker.
Employing a multi-sited ethnography at the intersection of multispecies approaches and ethnographies of encounter, I engage with the practices and ontologies of four successful Southern African animal communicators who reside and/or work in Southern Africa, but whose lives dynamically entangle geographical and cultural affinities, effectively mashing-up Indigenous, settler, modern, traditional, African and European identities. Co-constructing understandings and approaches with them, I am experimenting with practices to include non-human animals as full research participants, for example by engaging in interviews with these animals, using animal communicators as interpreters. My objective is to inspire productive reflections on and restructuring of the premises of scientific thinking, thus aiming for African knowledges to disrupt and contribute to cutting-edge theoretical debates surrounding the ontological turn and species turn and influence more-than-human approaches in decolonisation of knowledge and cognitive justice debates.
Paper long abstract:
Famous primatologist Frans de Waal wrote a book in 2016 with the intriguing title 'Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?' Given how superior people in general feel about their smartness compared to animals, the answer that De Waal suggest must have been disappointing: No, we are actually not smart enough to know that.
Now that science has provided abundant evidence that animals differ from humans only in degree and not in kind, to the level that we can actually do away with the binary distinction between the two, we can paraphrase this title of De Waal's book and ask ourselves as Africanists the question if we are smart enough to take this evidence seriously enough to start including non-human animals in African Studies as interdisciplinary field of studies (both in African Studies curricula and research)? If, given the current evidence, sentience is what humans and animals share and all other traits and skills only differ in degree and not in kind, are Africanists smart enough to find ways to include non human sentience in their research?
This paper argues that African Studies as a field and community of scholars shows mixed answers to this question. Some embrace the evidence as it opens up new vistas for understanding African realities; some find it difficult to imagine a 'level playing field' between humans and animals in terms of acknowledging similar and intertwined agency in both. Never mind the 'disappointing' answer of Frans de Waal to hís own question, in this paper I want to argue why Africanists are smarter than you might think in answering mý question in the title.