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Paper short abstract:

This article explores the potentials of acquiring an hyphenated identity as a herder-ethnographer as an anthropological method to go beyond anthropocentric restitutions of life-worlds and towards multispecies ethnographies that pave the way to more inclusive knowledge production.

Paper long abstract:

In a pastoral ecosystem, the herders', the animals' and the environment's respective roles and identities are intertwined, interdependent and mutually constitutive. Yet, for too long, the latter two were only deemed good to "think with", as "hapless bearers of symbolic projection" (Latour 2005:10), in order to better understand human beings: the story was always one-sided. Anthropology, as a discipline etymologically concerned with human beings, is trying to find its place. The epistemological question at stake touches upon the possibility of studying the relationships between human beings and other-than-humans and how these are mutually shaped (Meuret and Despret 2016, Haraway 2008, Deleuze and Guattari 1980) - while, on the one hand, avoiding anthropocentrism and on the other, not taking up the role of amateur ethologists by focusing exclusively on other animals. It is in this sense that a growing number of authors call for an expansion and a redefinition of anthropology as the study of more than one species, as an "anthropology of life" (Pitrou 2015:1810). I would like to argue that acquiring a hyphenated identity (Plumwood 2002:16), that of a herder-ethnographer, is a promising methodology in this endeavour. We have all been witnesses to the disastrous consequences on our world and fellow earth beings (Caneda 2015) that our anthropocentrism have had in recent times. Anthropology has as much to gain from, as a discipline concerned with knowledge production, as to contribute to the understanding of other life-worlds and, thereby, in paving the way to co-inhabit the Earth on fairer grounds.