Paper short abstract:

Thinking with creative engagements with species, failed multimodal methods, and ethnographic wanderings, I explore how pigs and the practices that govern their lives on industrial farms in Denmark produce the industrialized pig species and how this transforms the ethnographic encounter.

Paper long abstract:

Multispecies modalities encompass a way of conducting ethnography in industrial agriculture that account for and respond to the complicated care of confinement. Initially setting out to counter dominant epistemic regimes of industrial farming, methodological challenges necessitated methodological openness, sensory attunement, ethnographic attention, and reflexive vulnerability as a way to both engage with and critique industrial logics of control. Drawing on ethnographic wanderings amongst pigs in Danish industrial farms from birth to death, I present how these encounters remake perceptions of species as homogenous and trouble the emphasis on the individual as the essential point of encounter in multispecies anthropology, which has implications for anthropology as a whole. Multimodal techniques reveal how industrial pigs move in and out of ethnographic understanding, existing between individuals and species as a porcine plurality.

Through finding and losing individuals in the stalls and on screen, I conceptualize what porcine plurality means for multispecies ethnography’s individualizing gaze, by troubling the valorization of individual encounters through the ways that individualization aligns with taxonomic categorization, despite the intimacies that individualism affords. Then, I consider how encountering industrialized species produces an intimacy with individuals who are always already of their species and explore what this intimacy means for multispecies anthropology. I conclude with a call to root around in the multiple ways we can work within these landscapes. I propose plurality as a way to hold space open between the grasping at individuals and the categorizing impetus of species, a way to hold space open for difference.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the endeavor of tracking wolves alongside a biologist. It describes the various types of tracks wolves and we left behind, and reflects on the power of tracking within the realm of inter-species ethnographic encounters and anthropological research.

Paper long abstract:

Wolves are elusive animals. Encountering a wolf is a rare occurrence. Those who live near them, or pursue them out of curiosity, scientific interest or animosity, know that wolves are aware of their presence long before they can locate them. Wolves spend a lot of time observing the habits and behavior of those who live near them, be they humans or other animals. They know the routes and habits of prey, allies and possible enemies. But they also leave tracks, and it is possible to reconstruct their routines and get to know their situation.

This paper presents the work of following wolf tracks together with a biologist who has located several packs, whose members sometimes go into the Basque Country. It describes the type of tracks that he collects and the information that each one of them offers, and imagines the ones we left behind and the knowledge they bestow upon the wolves. Finally, reflects on the power of tracking within the realm of inter-species ethnographic encounters and anthropological research.

Paper short abstract:

The river's fish pass system is an important infrastructure for fish migration. This Research focuses on the fish system in Bremen and explores the method of more than human storytelling by listening to the animals around the fishpass system.

Paper long abstract:

The Bremen fish pass system is a famous technical construction in Bremen over the river Weser. It is famous for helping fish swim up and down the river, despite the Weser dam. However, the real lives of the fish and relevant animals, who are deeply influenced by the Bremen Dam and the fishpass system, are not always visible to the public. By including the views of different people and experts who are entangled with those animals, I try to turn the view of storytelling and „give” the animals their talking right back. The views of biologists, building engineers, activists for fish protection, fishermen, politicians, and lawyers are all included in this research. More importantly, I pay attention to the reactions of animals to the changes in the Weser River surroundings. By learning about specialized knowledge in the field of animals and human experts, I have been going through a process in which strange topics in daily life have turned into important storylines for a multi-species narrative. Thus, I suggest using metaphor as a very good method for the development of empathy and responsibility, which leads us to a new way of history co-writing with animals.

Paper short abstract:

Through ethnography and cognitive ethology I share preliminary thoughts about an unexpected encounter with a cat that made me aware of other possibilities for looking at multispecies ethnography and interactions

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I bring together cats and humans to explore how we learn about each other and revisit multispecies ethnography. Through different knowledge interfaces and forms of expertise (like cognitive ethology and ethnography), I will share preliminary thoughts about an unexpected encounter with a cat that became an ethnographic subject and informant to learn with during my current fieldwork. Pitti, one of the two resident cats in the pet cemetery where I am doing my research, showed me unknown ways of knowing, making me aware of other possibilities for looking at multispecies ethnography and interactions.

Although, according to classical ethology, every animal is the result of an innate, inherited tendency from a precise phylogenesis, cognitive and philosophical ethology argue for the relevance of ontogenesis and, therefore, the historical, learned and creative journey of a specific animal. Here, I will focus on a mutual learning investigation into a species-specific dimension always inflected into particular subjectivities (both human and animal). My experience and the cat's one are mediated by multiple social and cultural processes. Having to face the challenges posed by the novelties the world puts in front of us, we used our skills and attitudes to build a relationship with each other and the world around us. And while I wonder what a relationship with a cat can teach us about fieldwork, sociality, and culture, I try to explore the edges of mutual learning between different ways of learning.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at a group of activists collaborating with, and learning from, beavers to help prevent wetland desiccation. Reversing conventional hierarchies, in this work beavers are treated as skilled environmental engineers, and human activists assume the roles of their humble helpers.

Paper long abstract:

'Do as the beavers do!' was the advice I was given by a more experienced activist the first time I joined a beaver-dam reconstruction action, and was unsure how exactly to lay the next log on the dam we were building. This paper draws on my activist ethnographic work with a group of direct-action activists engaged in 'guerrilla' efforts to protect wetlands threatened by expanding real-estate and other projects in central and eastern Poland. I focus on the ways the activists observe the work done by beavers and explicitly learn from these rodents the skills of dam-building and hydrological earthwork. Reversing the conventional knowledge hierarchies between humans and non-human animals, in this work, the beavers are treated as experts in environmental 'engineering', while human activists assume the roles of their humble apprentices. Humans are no longer the masters, and other animals no longer the passive objects of 'conservation' or 'management'. An interspecies community of practice is thus created, that suggests a rethinking of available theoretical models of multi-species relations. While these have recently been crafted around ideas such as 'animal rights', 'animal sovereignty', or 'democratic representation', the human-beaver relation I'm observing resembles more anarchist models of community based on skill-sharing and direct action. Moreover, bearing in mind Lewis H. Morgan's 1868 thesis that early human societies had picked their basic technology up from beavers, this case invites a reflection on anthropology's own lost tradition of multi-species learning.

Paper short abstract:

I suggest caution in utilising interdisciplinary knowledge to attend to animals within anthropological research. Critiquing some forms of anti-cartesianism on ethical, political and theoretical grounds, I propose comparative enquiry of the conspicuous enigmas that animals variably present.

Paper long abstract:

In my 20-year career as a horse trainer, I’ve learned to tread carefully when describing other people’s horses. British equestrianism presents a rigorously critical environment where diverse moral philosophies leave equestrians divided, save for their mutual concern with the question: “How is it that other people can misunderstand their horses so woefully?”

This epistemological minefield led me to anthropology ten years ago, to study how humans from the same historical context can come to such different sorts of understanding. But ironically, the horse world seemed to need anthropologists to explain human epistemology just at the same moment that anthropologists were dismantling the epistemological presumptions that had hitherto excluded animals as knowable subjects at all.

Against this backdrop, this paper presents caution in engaging with interdisciplinary epistemologies when doing/redoing ethnography that attends to multispecies relationships. It lays out a critique of the way anti-cartesianism can problematically reduce the problem of knowing animal others, and it proposes a route for studying animals in terms of the variant epistemological problems they present different humans. In this form of enquiry, other disciplinary voices (including ethologists, comparative psychologists, equitation scientists) would feature as ethnographic comparata rather than analytic resources, and animals themselves would feature as conspicuous enigmas in the data – somewhere and something other than the range of descriptive challenges they pose for different groups of humans. This approach to the theoretical and methodological challenges of knowing animals is decisively anthropocentric, but deeply rooted in respect for the predicament of our epistemological wards.

Paper short abstract:

Bird ringing is a kind of embodied attentiveness that sits between the expectation of conformity and repetition and the confusion of an unmediated multisensory encounter. The paper reflects on what this practice can mean in the context of an ethnographic encounter with non-human subjects.

Paper long abstract:

Bird ringing is an intimate bodily experience for all involved. For bird ringers, it is a kind of embodied attentiveness that sits between the expectation of conformity and repetition and the confusion of an unmediated multisensory encounter. Bird ringers touch, caress, stretch, hold, breathe and blow on birds and feathers, divinate all kinds of information, and wrestle with the very existence of categories that are supposed to put order in these experiences. What is a species? How do you read age, sex, the life history, population or geographical belonging? And if that is not enough, how such an intersubjective human-non human experience can be learned, communicated, calibrated so that it becomes more than a punctual encounter and is turned into what we call science? What to make of the traces—material but not only—left on the bodies of these captive creatures that pass through their hands? After four years of handling birds and almost two of being a bird ringer in training in several different contexts, and using interviews and discussions with bird ringers in Romania, I reflect on what these experiences can mean in the context of an ethnographic encounter with non-human subjects.

Paper short abstract:

How do death and the decisions that make it possible impact knowledge and politics within and across species? This paper describes a series of paradoxes: Deer that instrumentalize peers’ death by hunters, biologists who exhort hunters to kill, and hunters who refuse to kill at all

Paper long abstract:

How do death and the decisions that make it possible impact knowledge and politics within and across species? This paper examines quandaries of verification and evidence in the knowledge claims of multispecies ethnography and the anthropology of violence by considering how killing, its avoidance, and its encouragement produce as well as partition knowledge and discernment. Central to the argument is a concern with conservation bureaucrats, hunters, and even white-tail deer who draw on and manage nonhuman deaths. Based on three years of ethnography with hunters, bureaucrats, and deer, it describes how killing makes visible a series of apparent paradoxes: Deer that recognize and instrumentalize peers’ deaths by hunters, biologists who exhort hunters to kill to “safeguard” environments, and hunters who kill selectively or refuse to kill at all. This paper thus explores how death may permit actors normally kept separate to reproduce and make visible often-obscured fundaments of nature/culture orders, including on the part of deer. It interrogates how an ethnographer might know what a deer knows about its death, suggesting a rapprochement between human and nonhumans’ ability to cognize killing for particular ends. Such recognition of how violence circulates is not a form of absolution or relativism, but a suggestion that claims to absolution configure how humans recognize and assign sentience and responsibility in multispecies worlds. Hence a material engagement with killing made “useful” by both deer and humans alters the grounds and methods for evidence for recognizing human and nonhuman subjectivity as approached by ethnographers and ecologists

Paper short abstract:

What can the waste workers’ knowledge and experiences with rats tell us about more-than-human inequalities? In this paper, the experiences and practices of urban waste workers are elevated to understand the dynamic relationships between humans and rats in the urban space.

Paper long abstract:

What can vernacular practices teach us about human-animal relationships? What can the knowledge and experience of waste workers with rats tell us about more-than-human inequalities?

This paper engages in contesting traditional approaches to knowledge production. Building on insights from postcolonial multispecies ethnographies (Haris, 2022), the paper explores the potential of a community-based approach in more-than-human ethnographies. By challenging traditional epistemologies, it recognises the equal value of local, everyday practices alongside scientific knowledge. Urban waste workers, often overlooked in studies of human-animal relationships, take centre stage, providing crucial perspectives emerging from their encounters with urban rats. Despite the limited attention given to their experiences studying human-animal relationships, their insights can reveal these interactions' complex dynamics. Notably, in Brazil, this group bears a significant burden of rat-borne diseases such as leptospirosis (Clazer et al., 2015), which is transmitted through contact with rats' urine. In addition, waste workers also emerge as key informants on rat behaviour in urban spaces, providing new and situated perspectives on these encounters.

This proposal suggests alternative methods for situating human-animal relationships within their contextual and historical contexts and emphasises the significance of vernacular knowledge and practices. By considering the experience of marginalised occupations, such as waste workers, this proposal engages in a more-than-human and more-than-academic approach, restoring epistemic justice and new ontologies to frame human-animal relationships.

Paper short abstract:

The research aims to show how multispecies interactions end the exceptional nature of the human animal in nature. From post-humanist approaches, a new profile emerges that places the human being as one more species among all those that make up the cartography of living beings on the planet.

Paper long abstract:

Based on posthumanism, which alludes to the decentering of the human animal from its historically maintained position as the center of the universe, the so-called anthropocentrism, the research aims to show how multispecies interactions end the exceptional nature of the human animal in nature. From post-humanist approaches, a new profile emerges that places the human being as one more species among all those that make up the cartography of living beings. It is in this context where links arise provoking other ways of being or co-being with other animals and lead to previously unthinkable positions. When the female riders who educate in sensitive training and the people who protect horses talk about their relationship with them, a sense of interaction appears between these people and the horses for which they are responsible. The analysis of the narratives collected ethnographically in the different interviews carried out with people linked to the horse world in the area of Catalonia, identifies central themes of what we call the co-being of animal relations: how they express, feel and verbalize embodied moments of mutuality, of responsibility between two individuals with agency where one of them is the horse and how a practice that we could name anthropo-zoo-genetics operates, understood as a place where species domesticate each other at the same time. In this interstice created by the intertwining of species, the co-being emerges in the form of intra-action that reveals how the horse and the human meet and change as a result of their action.

Paper short abstract:

I explore the knowledge that emerges from the relationships developed between rescued farm animals and the activists that take care of them as well as the complexity of the encounter between ethology and veterinary knowledge on the one hand, and knowledge gained by the activists, on the other.

Paper long abstract:

This lecture explores the knowledge that emerges from the relationships and shared learning between animals rescued from idustrial farming, and the activists that take care of them. Based on my research on farm animal sanctuaries in Israel, I consider of the encouter between ethology and veterinary knowledge on the one hand, and knowledge gained by the activists through their daily care work, on the other. This complexity of knowledge, sometimes complementary, sometimes competing, offers a unique perspective on knowledge production in multi-species ethnography, encompassing theoretical, analytical, and practical dimensions while also considering the moral implications of its application. In Israel, there are more than ten sanctuaries which provide loving home for rescued animals, previously subjected to labor or exploitation in the food, wool, and leather industries. The animal care teams, attach great importance to the professional opinion of veterinarians they work with. In addition, the activists make an effort to learn the available ethological knowledge about the animals to provide more sensitive care. But many find in the daily care work that the veterinary and ethological knowledge is often insufficient. There are often value gaps between this type of knowledge and the knowledge accumulated from the daily care work, sometimes causing a clash of values forcing the activists to face moral dilemmas and struggle with deciding how best to take care of the animals. Following these findings, I will consider the implications of this work for the future of multi-species ethnography.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Dutch animal shelter, I consider how veterinarians, animal caretakers, and volunteers affect, and are affected, in their interactions with cats. These are diverse modes of anthropomorphisation at play throughout the rehoming of shelter cats.

Paper long abstract:

Animal shelters define modes of human cohabitation with animals, particularly in urban landscapes. These institutions receive stray, unwanted or government-seized animals and aim to relocate them into human households. In this paper, drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork, I consider anthropomorphisation as a relational and ordering tool involved in the rehoming of shelter cats.

The rehoming process involves human-animal interactions and practices of neutering, socialisation and disease control aimed at reshaping cats’ bodies and behaviour closer to a domesticated pet ideal. Focusing on so-called ‘misfits’ – cats posing behavioural and medical challenges –, I will show how the rehoming involves diverse ways of understanding and evaluating cats, organising spaces, and forms of caring for individuals and collectives.

The analysis reveals how different modes of anthropomorphisation influence shelter staff’s reasoning and acting. For instance, animal caretakers classify newly arrived cats through a temperament assessment. The interpretation of cats’ acts has a basis in behavioural sciences, which restricts explanations of their acts and moods to a repertoire of behaviours. Meanwhile, volunteers take a more subjective interpretation and depend on their capability to affect and be affected by the cat’s actions during their socialisation sessions. These represent different ways that science, law, technologies and individual humans may come together in different modes of anthropomorphisation that enact cat sentience. Through these stories, I reflect on how anthropomorphism is inescapable and the importance for multispecies ethnographers to reflect on the ways it is used.

Paper short abstract:

Challenging the human-centric science, we explore a multi-species political epistemology, defining beings as "epistemic companions". Our exploration, guided by a non-anthropocentric view, tries to redefine our relationship with the ecosystem for a more inclusive understanding of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Today, criticizing the anthropocentric nature of the production of scientific knowledge does not seem far-fetched, nor does the fact of thinking about our vital issues involving other beings more-than-humans. In recent decades, several works have built a critical path on which to travel that has politicized not only the existence of those living and non-living others that make up our planet but, above all, the relationships that we weave with them in this task of composition.

Embarking on this trajectory, we propose a multi-species political epistemology exercise, delving into the role played by other living beings in generating diverse knowledge that does not revolve around the human perspective. Rather than treating them as mere objects or subjects of knowledge, we advocate considering other beings as agencies or assemblages of knowledge, steering clear of the anthropocentric and overly human-centric jargon. We extend an invitation to regard other living beings as epistemic companions—partners in the endeavor to produce a knowledge framework distinct from the conventional human-centric approach.

In this paper, we explore various cases to present a comprehensive set of arguments and dimensions crucial for substantiating our concept of epistemic companions. Our exploration is guided by a non-anthropocentric viewpoint and a relational approach, aiming to synergize efforts in constructing conceptual repertoires that transcend the boundaries of human knowledge. Through this lens, we seek to redefine our engagement with the broader ecosystem, acknowledging the agency and contribution of all entities in shaping a more inclusive and expansive understanding of knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that an ethical approach to animal-involved ethnography requires treating animals, like humans, as co-participants in the research. To help guide this approach, it proposes a framework of questions and key values for research in an array of different settings and contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Focused specifically on ethnography that involves nonhuman animals, this paper argues that an ethical approach to such research requires treating animals, like humans, as co-participants in the production of knowledge, while contrasting this approach to ones in which animals have instead been the objects of research. To help guide this approach, it proposes a framework of key research values - including trust, empathy, humility, and an awareness of anthropocentric bias. Further, it explores how these values can be mobilized in an array of different settings and contexts for human-animal encounters, such as wilderness sites, sites of captivity, and sites where animals are subjected to violence. It concludes with a consideration of ethnography's potential as a vehicle for advocacy on behalf of its participants, especially as it could apply to nonhuman animals.