Paper short abstract:

How useful is the assemblage concept for multispecies ethnography? Based on three empirical case studies on multispecies relations in a transnational conservation landscape in southern Africa, this contribution discusses the assemblage as a framework for anthropological analysis and methods.

Paper long abstract:

How useful is the assemblage concept for anthropological studies of multispecies relations? What are its analytical and methodological implications? This contribution first situates “the multispecies assemblage” within the theoretical legacy of Deleuze and Guattari. Then, based on three case studies of multispecies assemblages in one of the world’s largest transboundary conservation area, the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area in southern Africa, we highlight how we use the assemblage in our empirical research and what implications does it have for our analysis and methodological choices. Overall, we show that the assemblage concept provides an open-ended analytical and methodological framework in terms of spaces, actors and times. These three trajectories take multispecies research to be multi-sited rather than site-bound, not only following heterogeneous nonhuman things and beings, but also highlighting their active roles and their transforming relations across space as well as history.

Our three case studies highlight how values, policies and landscapes emerge in complex assemblages, including through power asymmetries involving humans and nonhumans. We conclude that the assemblage represents a chance for multispecies ethnographers to conduct analyses at wider scales, without losing a local anchorage, and without glossing over political and socio-economic inequalities. It provides an inductive and context-sensitive approach designed to account for the dynamisms of phenomena that are essentially impossible to comprehend and delineate in a clear-cut manner, in a world of complex local-global and more-than-human entanglements.