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Paper short abstract

Planetary biology abstracts land/sea-scapes into mappable data, erasing more-than-human cultures. Drawing on Tsing's “friction” to overcome the local/planetary dichotomy, the paper combines multispecies ethnography, STS and decolonial theory to argue for accountability to more-than-living lifeworlds

Paper long abstract

Planetary biology hinges on a particular kind of abstraction rendering land- and sea-scapes as continuous, mappable, and legible to algorithms. This requires a systematic erasure of non-human and more-than-human cultures and histories, more-than-living relationships and modes of being. The very practice of encoding biodiversity, deciding what counts as life, what is sampled, what is measured, embeds choices that have profound consequences for more-than-human lifeworlds.

Aiming to overcome the local vs planetary dichotomy, and instead drawing on Anna Tsing's concept of friction (Tsing 2005), I argue that genuine accountability to earthly multiplicity demands taking seriously the cultural and relational dimensions of more-than-human lifeworlds. To that end, the paper proposes a transdisciplinary approach, building on multispecies ethnographic work with the lifeworlds of macaques in Bali and urban pigeons in Warsaw, critical STS-minded ethnographic work with biologists and comparative psychologists, and a theoretical reframing of non-human cultures informed by the decolonial and more-than-human turns in anthropology.

Quantitative, planetary-level studies can be necessary in pursuit of multispecies justice (Chao et al. 2022), but they defeat their purpose unless accountable to particular, situated lifeworlds. A non-extractive (Neimanis 2023), naturecultural approach to biodiversity requires acceptance some things are not mine to be known. Where planetary biology sees populations and genomes, multispecies ethnography reveals beings enmeshed in complex networks, territorial knowledges, and forms of collective agency, living in rhythms and histories that resist sampling. Their identity is constituted through relations and cannot be limited to taxonomy, to the kinds of bodies they have.