Paper short abstract:

How can a more symmetrical anthropology (a terminological trap itself) be put to work methodologically beyond the debates of behaviorism, anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism? I followed that question into the crisis-ridden knowled gepractices of beekeeping and honey bee health care.

Paper long abstract:

Doing ethnographic research in human animal contact-zones has gained a new framework in the last decade. The formation of multi-species-studies is answering to post-humanist demands and a proclaimed animal turn in the humanities and social sciences. But how can a more symmetrical anthropology (a terminological trap itself) be put to work methodologically beyond the debates of behaviorism, anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism?

In my fieldwork I followed that question into the crisis-ridden field of beekeeping and honey bee health research. I was trying to learn (apprentice like) how knowledge was produced within an assemblage of technologies, practices, agencies and emotions of humans and western honeybees - concerned with a virus bearing parasite named Varroa destructor. In the presentation I focus on myself in an auto-ethnographic manner reflecting on the devices (beekeeping tools and infrastructures) that enable resonance (or disaffection) between myself (as a beekeeper and scientist) and the colonies I tried to deal response-able with. Immersing myself into this I experienced the modern foundations of todays knowledge on bees, how it is necessarily based on beekeeping innovations assuming a domesticated status of the bees and its ontological problems in solving the wilderness of the varroa crisis.