Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines 3 hierarchies related to studying (and making) with microbes: ocularcentrism/verbocentrism, human exceptionalism, and sole-researcher politics of knowledge production. These frictions map onto multimodal, multispecies, and multisensory concerns, respectively, which intertwine.

Paper Abstract:

For millennia, humans have made foods with the help of microbes, both knowingly and unknowingly. Against this backdrop, a natural sake brewery in rural Japan relies on the endogenous microbes within their brewhouse to transform rice into the alcoholic beverage sake. They do not add bacteria and yeast into their fermentation tanks like the remaining 900 conventional breweries in the country; instead; the brewers must create the conditions for microbes to gather, and only certain microbes, at certain stages, in certain sequences. The brewing process thus epitomises the perpetual and ongoing work of sympoiesis with microbial life.

While most ‘food anthropology’ examines how values, identities, and meaning emerge in affirming or negating manners, this paper scrutinises the methodological limits of conducting ethnographies involving microbes. Based on ethnographic data, I examine the frictions that emerge out of three sets of hierarchies in this research setting: (1) as a multimodal concern, are texts and visuals the only modes for documenting and presenting ethnographic data; (2) in staying with multispecies commitments, how does one account for microbes as an interlocutor without performing a form of ventriloquism; and (3) as a multisensory methodology, how does one attune to and represent microbial encounters without imposing ableist or extractivist parameters to data collection? As anthropologists increasingly conduct complex ethnographies, and, as adjacent fields look to anthropology as guidance for how to do ethnographies well, I argue for multimodal research that always and already attenuates ocularcentrism, verbocentrism, human exceptionalism, and sole-researcher politics of producing new knowledge.