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.