Paper short abstract:

This presentation draws distinctions between multi-sited ethnography and assemblage ethnography by highlighting the potential of assemblage thinking for highlighting temporal relationships that often link people, species, and environments across time and space.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores assemblage thinking as a novel strategy for analyzing multispecies relationships. Anthropologists increasingly draw on assemblage ethnography to examine human relationships with non-human species at varying scales and between distinct sites and, in many ways, the utility of assemblage ethnography in making sense of relationships that shift across space blurs the methodological lines with multi-sited ethnography. In my presentation, I explore how assemblage ethnography diverges from multi-sited ethnography in its attention to temporal as well as spatial relationships. This, I argue, is particularly useful when examining multispecies relationships that respond to seasonal changes and cycles of life and death. To make my point about the spatio-temporality of assemblage thinking, I draw on my research with an endangered medicinal tree called quina (Cinchona officinalis) in Loja, Ecuador. I use assemblage thinking to understand how quina is implicated in two historic health crises—the emergence of malaria in the 1700s and the recent COVID-19 pandemic—and the consequences of these events for the ways that people interact with and generate knowledge about the plant today. Engagements between people and quina today do not occur in a vacuum; They are informed by past attempts to define, speak for, and control nature for medicinal, political, and economic purposes. By highlighting relational patterns across space and time, assemblage thinking can be useful for better understanding why people and quina came together so violently during the COVID-19 pandemic and how these relations are part of a longer history of multispecies relating.