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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes the para-pastoralist method of following situated yak rhythms in Tibet while embracing epistemic opacity to productively generate multispecies knowledge, addressing debates over animal subjectivity between scientific validity and local knowledge in field-based research.

Paper long abstract

Apprenticeship to human interlocutors and sensorial attunement have become two primary epistemic gateways for engaging animal subjectivity in multispecies ethnography. Yet much of the everyday life of yaks in Tibet, as with many animals, unfolds within autonomous forms of animal sociality that remain largely beyond human participation. Moreover, many local interlocutors do not frame animal lives through sustained inquisitive engagement across time and space, as researchers do. As a result, prevailing approaches risk producing knowledge mediated through shared interspecies temporalities, narrative authority and sensory knowledge derived from brief field encounters, while struggling to account for animal-led asynchronous rhythms, opacity and refusal.

Drawing on twenty-one months of fieldwork among Tibetans and yaks, this paper proposes the para-pastoralist as a methodological positioning that situates the researcher alongside multispecies practices without collapsing into either human-centred apprenticeship models or speculative becoming-animal approaches. It develops three complementary methodological shifts: first, treating asynchronicity as constitutive of human–animal organisation rather than as a failure of interspecies encounter; second, constructing an animal-led ethogram through rhythm-following, strategic behavioural interventions and mobile video practices; and third, tracing interspecies histories by combining human narratives with corresponding animal behaviours that carry imprints of past human–animal social memory across time and space.

The para-pastoralist inhabits fractured epistemic spaces between anthropology and ethology, human and animal, and researcher and interlocutors. It foregrounds field-based anthropologists as ethical cross-disciplinary contributors to collaborative multispecies knowledge, where animal subjectivity is not extracted at once but emerges as a relational presence and absence, perceptible only when it can be.