Paper Short Abstract:

Multispecies anthropology offers the promise of new understandings of human relations with other creatures. But what kinds of knowledge can anthropological research provide about these relations? This paper considers how practices such as birding could create distinctly anthropological knowledge of other creatures that augments less direct or scientific approaches.

Paper Abstract:

The multispecies turn in anthropology emerged from many inspirations but a central element was the promise of generating new understandings of human relations with other species that avoided cutting those relations in two, with humans in society and other creatures in nature. These beings would no longer be explained in terms of what people made of them, either materially or conceptually, but could be researched as active, lively agents that affected and responded to humans. But several years on from the turn, the question lingers as to what exactly anthropologists can really know about other creatures and by what means. Are anthropologists still left relying on the knowledge of other humans, from indigenous peoples to scientists, or can they develop new knowledge of other creatures more directly?

This question has troubled my own work, which has sometimes been rooted in traditional anthropological approaches, such as interpreting the meanings people give to their relations with other species. While this approach has value, in this paper I will examine how more direct multispecies practices can generate new insights that arise from observation and participation in multispecies lifeworlds. I use the example of my own birding practice to examine the sort of knowledge this generates and how it intersects with and augments other ways of knowing birds. I argue that birding produces knowledge that is both post- and pre-scientific in that it both draws on and anticipates scientific research, as well as being embedded in familiarity with environments that are shared with birds.