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 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.