Multispecies Ethnography

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Multispecies Ethnography Anthropology Oxford Bibliographies

Multispecies Ethnography Piers Locke, Ursula Muenster LAST MODIFIED: 30 NOVEMBER 2015 DOI: 10.1093/OBO/97801997665670130

Introduction Multispecies ethnography is a rubric for a morethanhuman approach to ethnographic research and writing rapidly gaining discursive traction in anthropology and cognate fields. The term is deployed for work that acknowledges the interconnectedness and inseparability of humans and other life forms, and thus seeks to extend ethnography beyond the solely human realm. Multispecies investigations of social and cultural phenomena are attentive to the agency of otherthanhuman species, whether they are plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, or even viruses, which confound the species concept. This entails a challenge to the humanist epistemology upon which conventional ethnography is predicated, specifically its ontological distinctions between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object. Multispecies ethnography must thus be seen as a part of a larger quest in the social sciences and humanities to replace dualist ontologies by relational perspectives, to overcome anthropocentrism by pointing to the meaningful agency of nonhuman others, and to highlight the intersections between ecological relations, political economy, and cultural representations. Multispecies ethnography however, not only acknowledges that humans dwell in a world necessarily comprising other life forms but also contends that their entanglements with human lives, landscapes, and technologies must be theoretically integrated into any account of existence. The authors of this article wish to thank Eben Kirksey, Thom van Dooren, and two anonymous reviewers.

General Overviews A concern with the constitutive significance of otherthanhuman species and with new approaches to understanding crossspecies intersections characterizes a recent “multispecies turn” in anthropology and related disciplines. A number of journal special issues have emerged that are establishing this emerging subfield. Kirksey and Helmreich 2010 defines the term “multispecies ethnography,” outlines its theoretical and methodological characteristics, and assembles a selection of foundational articles. Livingston and Puar 2011 introduces a selection of scholarly reflections framed around the rubric of “interspecies,” which explores the involvement of nonhuman species in multiple aspects of human life. Latimer and Miele 2013 focuses on the affective dimension of interspecies relations in science and society, assembling articles that problematize conceptual distinctions between human and animal, nature, and culture. Lestel and Taylor 2013 reminds us that human life is constituted not in opposition to but through interdependence with other life forms, featuring articles that encourage us to think differently about life, death, and animality. Feinberg, et al. 2013 challenges human exceptionalism through new ways of thinking about humananimal relations, while in the same issue Ogden, et al. 2013 charts the formative influences upon and recent developments in multispecies ethnography. Finally, Pouliot and Ryan 2013 http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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directs our attention to the complex intersections between humans and fungi, in an issue that demonstrates the application of the multispecies approach with regard to a particular category of life forms.

Feinberg, Rebecca, Patrick Nason, and Hamsini Sridharan. 2013. Introduction: Humananimal relations. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4.1: 1–4. The authors note that social theory has expanded to include nonhuman beings as the anthropogenic power of humanity becomes increasingly evident. They consider the implications of challenging human exceptionalism and the consequences of exercising power over life and death.

Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25.4: 545–576. This is the first text to name an approach to ethnography seeking to epistemologically recontextualize the human in relation to other life forms. Introducing work combining posthumanist and actornetwork perspectives, it reveals an emerging sensibility rather than outlining a programmatic agenda.

Latimer, Joanna, and Mara Miele. 2013. Naturecultures? Science, affect and the nonhuman. Theory, Culture & Society 30.7: 5–31. This special issue is concerned with overcoming the constructed discontinuities between humans and other animals, focusing on the affective dimensions of interspecies relations. Articles in the collection variously track intersections through history and animal welfare science, knowledges of “nature,” and the choreographies of everyday life involving horses, meerkats, mice, and wolves.

Lestel, Dominique, and Hollis Taylor. 2013. Shared life: An introduction. Social Science Information 52.2: 183–186. An issue that theoretically and empirically deals with the “shared life” of humans and other animals. Reminding us of our own animality as humans, the authors point to human convergence with animals at an existential and metabolic level, through “modes of consumption” and “interspecies hospitality.”

Livingston, Julie, and Jasbir K. Puar 2011. Interspecies. Social Text 29.1: 3–14. This introduction presents “interspecies” scholarship drawing primarily on animal studies and posthumanism to analyze relationships between various forms of biosocial life and their political outcomes. The authors highlight the insights that critical race studies and postcolonial studies add to the study of humannonhuman relations.

Ogden, Laura, Billy Hall, and Kimiko Tanita. 2013. Animals, plants, people, and things: A review of multispecies ethnography. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4.1: 5–24. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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Explores influences from philosophy, social theory, biosciences, political ecology, and animal rights activism upon multispecies thinking. Concerned with decentering the human, and attentive to the “asymmetrical becomings” of humannonhuman assemblages, the authors suggest multispecies ethnography brings about “speculative wonder.”

Pouliot, Alison, and John Charles Ryan. 2013. Fungi: An entangled exploration. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 10:1–5. This introduction to humanfungi intersections surveys articles spanning a remarkable diversity of disciplines from the arts, humanities, as well as the social and natural sciences. Articles consider the full range of fungal forms in relation to human attitudes, practices, and literary works, ecological entanglement, cohabitation and connectivity, citizen science, and more.

Foundational Texts Multispecies ethnography has recently emerged as a new kind of anthropological writing and inquiry. Different scholarly traditions feed this young, interdisciplinary, and dynamic field. It thus remains an open question which publications will acquire enduring significance for multispecies research. However, a number of recent works can be considered exemplary for persuading us of the need to extend social theory and ethnographic research beyond the human. Even before the “multispecies turn,” Murdoch 1997 employs actor network theory to incorporate the agency of nonhumans and to achieve naturalcultural symmetry in ethnography. The author of Despret 2013 acts as an observer of ethologists in order to explore the possibilities of a more reciprocal and embodied way of producing knowledge about animals’ lives and behaviors. Kohn 2007 offers the author’s idea of “an anthropology of life” to argue that a focus on semiosis, processes inherent to all forms of life, will lead us to a more encompassing understanding of life itself. Fuentes and Kohn 2012 makes two proposals: a proposal for an “anthropology beyond the human” that investigates the embeddedness of all human life in multispecies relations, and a proposal for using the concept of ecological niche construction to understand the entangled life of humans and nonhumans. Sagan 2011 opens up multispecies and symbiogenetic perspectives on our evolution and ecological becoming. Nading 2013 brings insights from medical anthropology to multispecies inquiry and shows how humans and nonhuman species are entangled through disease. Paxson and Helmreich 2013 marks the beginning of a recent “microbial turn” in multispecies ethnography and science and technology studies (STS), showing how changes in the perception of microbes have farreaching political, ecological, and social consequences. Ingold 2013, on the other hand, rejects the term “multispecies ethnography,” and proposes an “anthropology beyond humanity” based on a phenomenological approach to the constitutive mutualities of dwelling and cohabitation: one that avoids foregrounding the categories of Western taxonomy. Also included here is a much older essay, originally from 1934, but reprinted from a 1957 English translation, von Uexküll 1992, the author of which was a forerunner of both cybernetics and biosemiotics. His work is influential for multispecies ethnography, and for his approach toward the phenomenal worlds or umwelt of living organisms.

Despret, Vinciane. 2013. Responding bodies and partial affinities in humananimal worlds. Theory, Culture & Society 30.7–8: 51–76. Draws attention to the ways in which scientists’ bodies are implicated when studying and observing animals. Contrary to classical ethology, where the researcher’s bodily presence was seen as a hindrance to detached and objective knowledge production, Despret calls for cultivating “embodied empathy” as a tool for connecting to nonhuman others.

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Fuentes, Agustín, and Eduardo Kohn. 2012. Two proposals. Cambridge Anthropology 30.2: 136–146. Drawing on Amazonian ethnography, Kohn proposes an “anthropology beyond the human” to help us attend ethnographically to the multispecies relations in which human life is embedded. Drawing on ethnoprimatology, Fuentes proposes niche construction as an analytic tool to understand how humans and other organisms occupy shared social and ecological space.

Ingold, Tim. 2013. Anthropology Beyond Humanity. Suomen Antropologi /Journal of the Finnish Anthropology Society 38.3: 15–23. Instead of “multispecies ethnography,” Ingold proposes “anthropology beyond humanity.” He takes issue with “multispecies” because the relational becoming of animate beings runs contrary to the Aristotelian order of difference implied by the taxonomy of species, and with “ethnography,” because the theoretical understanding of anthropology exceeds the descriptive particularity of ethnography.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement. American Ethnologist 34.1: 3–24. In this article Kohn proposes “an anthropology of life” to expand the reach of ethnography beyond the human. Overcoming the limitations of conventional analytic frameworks for the uniquely human and the commonly animal, he proposes an embodied understanding of semiosis that treats sign processes as inherent to all life.

Murdoch, Jonathon. 1997. Inhuman/nonhuman/human: Actornetwork theory and the prospects for a nondualistic and symmetrical perspective on nature and society. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15.6: 731–756. Frustrated by the humanist position that privileges humans as actors, and the restrictive naturesociety dualism it depends on, this article critically considers the application of Law, Latour, and Callon’s actornetwork theory to account for the nonhumans, both living and nonliving, that constitute the material and semiotic world we inhabit.

Nading, Alex M. 2013. Humans, animals, and health: From ecology to entanglement. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4.1: 60–78. Drawing on recent work in medical and environmental social sciences, this review article focuses on disease to show how humans and other animals are intimately entangled. The article brings together historical literature on the “animalhuman health nexus,” as well as social studies of disease ecology and the biopolitics of health.

Paxson, Heather, and Stefan Helmreich. 2013. The perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas. Social Studies of Science 44.2: 165–193. Exemplifies a recent “microbial turn,” showing how microbes are no longer associated only with hazards but also with positive possibility. The authors present two case studies: US based artisanal cheese production where microbial communities serve as “model ecosystems,” and astrobiology, where microbial research inspires speculations about http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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extraterrestrial life.

Sagan, Dorion. 2011. The human is more than human: Interspecies communities and the new “facts of life.” In Cultural Anthropology. Sagan explains the symbiogenetic and multispecies entanglements of our evolutionary and ecological becoming. He does this by reminding us that the human body is a multispecies assemblage, comprising a plethora of microbial communities, many of which are crucial to metabolic processes, and that much of the DNA in our cells comes from cohabiting bacteria.

von Uexküll, Jakob. 1992. A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. Semiotica 89.4: 319–391. Von Uexküll rejects mechanistic approaches to organismic life as objects possessing sensory and motor organs in favor of an approach that recognizes organisms as perceiving and acting subjects. Demonstrating how human and nonhuman life forms make sense of their surroundings, he shows how we can investigate their phenomenal worlds.

Anthologies The interdisciplinary field of multispecies ethnography draws from a wide range of disciplines in the environmental humanities and social sciences. Its publications are still fragmented, and articles applying a multispecies approach to ethnography are found in a variety of anthologies that deal with a great diversity of (mostly environmental) issues. With the exception of Kirksey 2014, which presents the work of anthropologists, environmental thinkers, and bioartists who took part in the landmark events of the multispecies salons, there exists no anthology specifically on multispecies ethnography as yet. However, a number of volumes contribute to bringing about the paradigm shift that multispecies ethnography seeks to achieve. Ingold and Pálsson 2013 provides an ambitious and innovative compilation of chapters that seek both to dismantle the rift between biological and sociocultural anthropology, and to arrive at a more inclusive theory of life understood as a mutually constitutive and dynamically unfolding process of becoming. Corbey and Lanjouw 2013 is a recent volume seeking to arrive at a more morally just approach toward other species. The book is the outcome of an interdisciplinary roundtable on humans and apes organized by the Arcus Foundation, that combines recent scientific studies on animal behavior and cognition with philosophical, normative, and ethical engagements with human animal relations. Dransart 2013 takes a more experimental approach to human/nonhuman interactions, presenting the heterogeneous essays of anthropologists, philosophers, and artists that creatively deal with a wide range of issues, from tree symbolism and sensuous photography to wildlife tourism. Through conversation between political ecology and STS, Goldman, et al. 2011 contributes to multispecies ethnography through a focus on the politics of knowledge that underlie humannonhuman relationships. Finally, Sodikoff 2011 represents an anthology dedicated to debates on cultural as well as biotic extinction, one that brings interesting insights to multispecies ethnography by reflecting on the political, cultural, and ethical dimension of the rapid loss of species diversity in our present times.

Corbey, Raymond, and Annette Lanjouw, eds. 2013. The politics of species: Reshaping our relationships with other animals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Comprising twenty scientific and philosophical essays, this wideranging volume addresses the moral and legal implications of assumptions of human superiority. Drawing on http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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evidence revealing the rich mental, social, and emotional lives of other species, and concerned with increasing empathy, concern, and inclusion, it raises profound questions regarding conservation and captivity.

Dransart, Penelope, ed. 2013. Living beings: Perspectives on interspecies engagements. London: Bloomsbury. This collected volume engages discussions of agency, actor networks, phenomenology, and relational ontology to consider vital processes and recursive relations among living organisms in a shared world. Chapters explore human indebtedness, cycles of life and death, naturalist imaginaries, photographic engagement, conceptual art, ecotourism and alienation, somatic simulation, and more.

Goldman, Mara J., Paul Nadasdy, and Matthew D. Turner, eds. 2011. Knowing nature: Conversations at the intersection of political ecology and science studies. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Comprising research from political ecology and science and technology studies, this volume draws attention to the “politics of knowledge” that underlie humannonhuman relationships. The volume contains several essays exploring how knowledge about different species is produced, circulated, and applied, including marine turtle conservation, wolf management, and microbes.

Ingold, Tim, and Gísli Pálsson, eds. 2013. Biosocial becomings: Integrating social and biological anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Announcing a major paradigm shift, this volume bridges the divide between anthropology and the life sciences, bringing together diverse essays that redefine life as a process formed through ontogenesis, humanity as relational achievement, the inextricability of the social and the biological, and understanding humans as “becomings” rather than “beings.”

Kirksey, Eben, ed. 2014. The multispecies salon. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. This volume presents the experimental work of multispecies ethnographers, artists, and theorists emerging from the “Multispecies Salon,” an art exhibit held in San Francisco, New York, and New Orleans. The essays speak of “biocultural hope” in times of destruction, unravel “microbiopolital entanglements,” and reflect upon “life in the age of biotechnology.”

Sodikoff, Genese Marie, ed. 2011. The anthropology of extinction: Essays on culture and species death. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. The essays of this edited volume deal with biotic and cultural extinction. Exploring power relations, asymmetries and hierarchies of value, several ethnographic chapters show that species extinction, as event and through discourse, provides insight into the moral, ethical, and political dimensions of morethanhuman relationships in multispecies worlds.


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Monographs Booklength works in multispecies ethnography have only begun to emerge during early 21st century. This selection of highly regarded texts indicates the range of intellectual resources and topics already being embraced. Helmreich 2009 provides an ethnographic study of the world of marine microbiology, involving fieldwork at an aquarium, at biotech labs, at professional conferences, and on oceanographic expeditions. This account of scientific engagement with microbes explores their significance in debates about the origins of life on earth, the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, climate change, and technocapitalist applications. An awardwinning and highly distinctive book, Raffles 2010 presents a series of connected essays that explore numerous instances in which human and insect lives intersect, revealing their emotional, culinary, sexual, and scientific significances in multiples cultures and locations. Song 2010 reveals the actors, practices, ideologies, and meanings arising from an annual pigeon shoot in Pennsylvania, in a book that treats birds not just as ciphers for human interests but also as living beings. Ogden 2011 explores the ways in which human and alligator lives and deaths are intertwined in a Florida landscape reserved as prized wilderness yet far more anthropogenically complex than many people realize. Rose 2011 focuses on the Australian dingo to explore the contrasting relationships that native and settler populations have forged with this wild dog, revealing differing attitudes toward animals and environments in an age of extinctions. Cormier 2011 goes beyond previous work exploring the ethnoprimatology of an Amazonian huntergatherer group and several species of monkey kept as pets and eaten as food, to explore the coevolutionary history of malaria through human and other primate species in relation to niche construction and changing patterns of land use. Van Dooren 2014 combines ethology with philosophy to explore the threats faced by various bird species facing extinction as a result of human activity, considering moral implications, ethical responsibilities, as well as practical attempts to prevent extinction. Finally, Kohn 2013 riffs on the title of LevyBruhl’s 1910 book How Natives Think to argue for a more diffuse understanding of thinking in which multiple life forms can be said to participate in processes of signification. Kohn shows us how the Amazonian Runa, nonhuman animals, and their shared floral environment are connected through nonlinguistic semiotic communication as well as through ecological relations.

Cormier, Loretta. 2011. The ten thousand year fever: Rethinking human and wildprimate malarias. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast. In this highly interdisciplinary book, with important implications for public health, the author charts the historical trajectory of a notorious disease. The author draws on molecular biology, ecology, epidemiology, ethnoprimatology, and sociocultural anthropology to consider the dynamic relations between malarial parasites, mosquitoes, humans, other primates, and deforestation and development.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2009. Alien ocean: Anthropological voyages in microbial seas. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. Presents a multisited ethnography of marine microbiologists in research labs, at conferences, and on oceanographic expeditions. Exploring the sociopolitical contexts and consequences of marine microbial research, it focuses on the genomic analysis of microbial communities, arguing that their alien quality is crucial for our stewardship of nature.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. Explores how the Amazonian Runa relate to otherthanhuman beings. Arguing for an approach to life constituted through “semiosis,” Kohn’s anthropology “provincializes” language, acknowledging the nonverbal sign systems that humans share with the world of dogs, birds, plants, and spirits in the forests of lowland Ecuador.


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Ogden, Laura. 2011. Swamplife: People, gators, and mangroves entangled in the everglades. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome, this largely historical ethnography explores the dynamic relation between the flora, fauna, and people implicated in the anthropogenic landscape of the Florida Everglades. Ogden focuses on two groups with intimate knowledge of the Everglades; the outlaw Ashley Gang, and illegal alligator hunters.

Raffles, Hugh. 2010. Insectopedia. New York: Pantheon. Comprising twentysix essays, this book explores the ambivalent relationships between insects and people. Alphabetically ordered, the chapters draw on anthropology, history of science, and STS to present heterogeneous accounts of critter life, including: fighting crickets in China, deformed insects after radioactive contamination, and lice in antiSemitic discourse during the Holocaust.

Rose, Deborah Bird. 2011. Wild dog dreaming: Love and extinction. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. This book looks at dingoes, death, and native and settler Australians. We learn about police actions and panic in Aboriginal villages during dingo extermination campaigns, about social fragmentation among surviving dingo populations, and about Aboriginal relations of interspecies love and responsibility, from which Rose develops the idea of ecological existentialism.

Song, Hoon. 2010. Pigeon trouble: Bestiary biopolitics in a deindustrialized America. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. Despite the author’s own fear of birds, this book focuses on a Labor Day pigeon shoot to explore interspecies politics and subjectivities. It takes us from communal solidarity and charitable giving to conflict and animosity, from wholesome food to epidemiological danger, and from prejudice and killing to caring and insight.

van Dooren, Thom. 2014. Flight ways: Life and loss at the edge of extinction. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Reflects on the ethical and practical implications of anthropogenic extinction through a study of five threatened birds. We encounter albatrosses afflicted by human waste, vultures poisoned by drugs, penguins in the midst of urban development, cranes enduring interventions for captive breeding, and crows absent from forests they once enriched.

Reference Resources A variety of online resources are available that either provide commentary on published texts and key issues in multispecies ethnography or represent sources in and of themselves that are crucial to this developing interdisciplinary field. The “Fieldsights” section of the web pages for the journal Cultural Anthropology feature textual and video presentations as http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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well as commentary. Kirksey and Helmreich 2010 represents a supplementary resource that summarizes the foundational text by the same authors. Faier 2010 supplements the methodological innovations of the Matsutake Worlds Group with a meditation on “poaching” as a form of collaborative, consensual sharing that circumvents plagiarism. Alvarez 2010 discusses the second “Multispecies Salon” event, while Sagan 2011 (cited under Foundational Texts) presents an important lecture concerning the multispecies reality of the human being as coevolving with and playing host to a plethora of microbial communities, as well as commentary by Fuentes, Helmreich, Hird, and Tallbear, all researchers making significant contributions to multispecies ethnography. The Multispecies Salon’s website accompanies the edited volume Kirksey 2014 (cited under Anthologies), and gives insight into the work of artists, authors, ongoing events, and multispecies exhibitions, and presents the collaborative project of the Multispecies ABC, a participatory dictionary. The Somatosphere blog provides reviews of two books important for multispecies ethnography: Keck 2013 reviews Kohn’s How Forests Think (Kohn 2013, cited under Monographs), and Fitzgerald 2013 reviews Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture (Descola 2013, cited under the Ontological Turn). The supplementary webpages of the journal Society and Space draw on the recent recommendation in India to designate dolphins as nonhuman persons to discuss “the multispecies turn” and the legal and ethical implications of extending personhood beyond the human. Finally, the web page of the Extinction Studies Group represents a portal with which to explore those aspects of multispecies ethnography that intersect with issues of extinction in a time of anthropogenic environmental crises.

2011 Culture@Large Session: The Human is More than Human. Cultural Anthropology. These pages feature video and text of Dorion Sagan’s talk on “the new facts of life” along with responses from Myra Hird on philosophy and microbiology, Stefan Helmreich on “Homo microbis,” Kim Tallbear on the role of indigenous standpoints in interspecies thinking, and Agustin Fuentes on the extended mind.

Alvarez, Patricia. 10 October 2010. The Multispecies Salon II: Gleanings from a parasite. Cultural Anthropology. Focusing on the 2008 event in San Francisco, this article introduces the Multispecies Salon, a series of “paraethnographic” events at which anthropologists, artists, and exhibits were brought together to explore crossspecies encounters, becomings, and biocultural possibilities. Descriptions are provided of the multimedia, multisensual exhibits, along with some video clips.

Bertoni, Filippo, and Uli Beisel. Morethanhuman intelligence: Of dolphins, Indian law and the multispecies turn. Society and Space Commentary. Drawing from the decision of the Indian Central Zoo Authority in 2013 to declare dolphins “nonhuman persons,” the authors discuss the recognition of nonhuman sovereignty in relation to the multispecies/morethanhuman literature. Confronting the criterion of intelligence, they raise the question of an ethics of togetherness in a time of extinctions.

Extinction Studies Group. This page introduces a group of scholars from the humanities and social sciences who approach extinction from a multidisciplinary perspective. Providing profiles, blog posts, project and publication information, the site is dedicated to exploring the cascade of loss in multispecies communities through issues of time, death, generations, and extinction.


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Faier, Lieba. 2010. Thoughts for a world of poaching Cultural Anthropology. Explains how mycorrhizal mushrooms that develop in a dependent relation with tree roots provide a metaphor for thinking about nature, power, and global capital. Also discusses a productive experiment in which two members of the Matsutake Worlds group engaged in collaborative exchange, “poaching” from each other’s draft papers.

Fitzgerald, Des. 2013. Phillipe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture. Somatosphere. Provides a critical introduction to Descola’s grand theoretical project of deconstructing and transcending the natureculture dualism so integral to Western thought. Discussion of Descola’s account of the historical development of the natureculture binary, along with Amazonian alternatives to the ethnocentric peculiarities of this Western naturalism are particularly helpful.

Keck, Frédérick. 2013. Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Somatosphere. Provides an insightful guide to a monograph much anticipated by scholars interested in multispecies ethnography and relational ontology. Remarking on its combination of ethnographic description and theoretical innovation, the author explains how Kohn applies Pierce’s ideas about signs to an ethnographic project aiming to “decolonize thought.”

Kirksey, Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology. This is a useful companion to the special issue on multispecies ethnography. It includes a video of Donna Haraway discussing human exceptionalism as a starting point for the “species turn” in anthropology, a video of Anna Tsing discussing human nature as an interspecies relationship, as well as some classroom discussion questions.

Multispecies Salon. This website complements the edited volume by Kirksey 2014 (cited under Anthologies). It introduces the book’s contributors, presenting short texts, interviews, and audiovisual material of bioartists aligned with the salon’s travelling exhibitions. The site also contains the Multispecies ABC, a developing dictionary of topics that goes beyond disciplinary and species boundaries.

Theoretical Background As an emerging interdisciplinary field, multispecies ethnography draws on a variety of intellectual influences, discursive fields, and disciplinary domains. Posthumanism represents a critical philosophy that includes interrogations of the conceptual architecture of humanism, specifically the generative role of dualist ontologies such as nature/culture, human/animal, and subject/object that have been crucial to the configuration of Western disciplinary knowledge practices. In so doing, it questions the exceptionalism by which the human has been http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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made to stand alone, separated from the earthly life processes and interactions in which the species necessarily participates. The accompanying subsection explores posthumanism further, introducing the key concepts and arguments of major theorists whose work is influencing multispecies ethnography. Ontological Turn represents a development in anthropology and in science and technology studies concerned with the theoretical consequences of humanism’s disembodied rationality. Challenging the static assumption of a preexisting, objective natural world in which humans act and make meaning in diverse ways, it suggests that worlds are made through the intersections of performance and materiality. The subsection Ontological Turn explores this theoretical perspective further, introducing key sources to guide the reader while highlighting its relevance to multispecies ethnography. Variously influenced by posthumanism and “The Ontological Turn,” Science and Technology Studies or STS, is relevant to multispecies ethnography for its development of actornetwork theory, which incorporates nonhuman agency into accounts of human practices, its concern with the blurred boundaries between the social and the natural, and its application to situations involving multiple species. HumanAnimal Studies represents a discursive domain that investigates multiple aspects of the humananimal nexus through the lens of diverse disciplinary interests and perspectives. It has proven significant for multispecies ethnography through its questioning of anthropomorphism, and its concerns with domestication and cohabitation. Finally, MoreThanHuman Geography is significant as a parallel development to multispecies ethnography, similarly concerned with overcoming the limitations of anthropocentric thought and its dualist ontologies, and with understanding crossspecies entanglements and their mutual becomings.

Posthumanism To overcome anthropocentrism and blur the humannonhuman divide in theory and methodology is a central concern for multispecies ethnographers. This quest is part of a larger turn in the humanities and social sciences toward a posthumanist approach, which was significantly prepared by feminist science studies. Haraway 1989 is a landmark for bringing issues of gender, race, class, and power into the study of humananimal relations and for establishing the field of critical humananimal studies. Drawing on quantum physics, Barad 1996 makes the seminal argument that humans, objects, and entities do not exist independently but come into being through “intraactions.” Haraway 2003 shows how humans have coevolved with their “companion species” and coconstitute each other, while Haraway 2008 highlights “naturalcultural contact zones,” spaces of “becoming with” where binary oppositions between human and nonhuman worlds break down, and where species share, shape, and are shaped by a common political, social, and biophysical environment. Besides the influence of feminist science studies, Deleuze and Guattari 1987 breaks new ground by generating nonhierarchical theory that recognizes the social and political world as rhizomatic and composed of morethanhuman assemblages of objects and signs. More recently, Wolfe 2010 draws on systems theory to reject the ontological dualisms of humanism, reaching out for an inclusive posthuman ethical pluralism. In a similar vein, Badmington 2003 advocates rewriting humanism and extending humanist epistemology to incorporate nonhuman life forms. Finally, Castree, et al. 2004 discusses the usefulness of posthumanist approaches for a morethanhuman geography.

Badmington, Neil. 2003. Theorizing posthumanism. Cultural Critique 53:10–27. Here posthumanism is characterized by a concern with deconstructing the legacies of anthropocentric certainty about a rational mind or soul, distinct from the body. For Badmington, posthumanism is about rewriting humanism, an endeavor crucial to the epistemological incorporation of additional life forms that multispecies ethnography is concerned with.

Barad, Karen. 1996. Meeting the universe halfway: Realism and social constructivism without contradiction. In Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science. Edited by L. H. Nelson and J. Nelson, 161–194. Dordecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. This seminal article in feminist science studies draws its insights from the field of quantum physics to argue that humans, objects, and entities come into being through “intraactions.” When “thinking with atoms” no phenomena preexist independently, entities “materialize” in intraaction, making the Cartesian separation between subject and object obsolete. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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Castree, Noel, Catherine Nash, Neil Badmington, Bruce Braun, Jonathon Murdoch, and Sarah Whatmore. 2004. Mapping posthumanism: An exchange. Environment and Planning A 36.8: 1341–1363. A series of discussion pieces by geographers and cultural theorists, this article explores the role of posthumanism for a morethanhuman geography. Dispensing with posthumanism as a temporal break in the human condition, the authors explore posthumanism as a sensibility critical of the traditional means of discursively constituting “the human.”

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone. This landmark analysis of capitalism and modernity presents the concepts of “assemblage,” a composition of heterogeneous objects and signs, and the “rhizome,” a horizontally spreading rootlike entity, to generate theory that produces nonhierarchical and decentralized knowledge. The authors emphasize “multiplicity,” “becoming,” emergence, and the connectivity of social and political life.

Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. London: Routledge. A seminal publication for feminist theory and science studies, this book engages the history of primatology to draw attention to the white male bias of science and theories of human evolution. The book raises pivotal questions of humannonhuman difference, gender, race, class, and power that underlie both human and animal experience.

Haraway, Donna. 2003. The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm. In this small pamphlet Haraway coins the term “companion species” to deconstruct the boundaries between human and animal, self and other. Companion species have coevolved and include “such organic beings as rice, bees, tulips, and intestinal flora, all of who make life for humans what it is—and vice versa” (p. 11).

Haraway, Donna. 2008. When species meet. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. This influential book explores how human and nonhuman beings are relationally constituted through “lively knotting.” Focusing mainly on “companion species” such as dogs, the book visits interspecies “contact zones” (laboratories, farms, and dog shows), to argue that “naturecultures” are produced in morethanhuman encounters of “intraaction” (e.g., Barad) and “becoming with.”

Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is posthumanism? Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Combining the insights of systems theorists Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann with those of Jacques Derrida, this book questions the theoretical and http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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philosophical frameworks of humanism, rejecting the ontological separation between humans and other living beings, in order to reach “a new more inclusive form of ethical pluralism.”

The Ontological Turn “The Ontological Turn” refers to a set of theoretical insights about the contingent variability of the fundamental categories that coordinate conceptual thought, with implications for how humans understand relations between themselves, other life forms, and the worlds they inhabit. Historically, this intellectual trend derives from critical reflection on Western oppositions of nature and culture, human and animal, subject and object, often through ethnographic understandings of alternate configurations. This is evident in Descola 2013 and Viveiros de Castro 2012, which both draw on Amazonian ethnography to disrupt Western convictions in an objective nature upon which culturally variable meaning is imposed. These works locate the dualist ontological style of Western thought in Abrahamic cosmology and the traditions of ancient Greek and European Enlightenment philosophy. Viveiros de Castro 2012 thereby inverts the manycultures, oneworld logic of Western thought, suggesting instead a multinatural perspectivist approach in which there is no place for a unitary conception of nature, since variable and differently situated knowledge practices will determine what comes to count as nature. This multinaturalist idea is also influential in science and technology studies. Woolgar and Lezaun 2013 notes that this rejection of a readymade world involves the thesis that natures are produced through the intersection of practices, knowledges, and materials. Candea 2012 and Candea and AlcaynaStevens 2012 demonstrate that multinaturalism is as applicable to Western science as it is to Amerindian cosmology, and Bertoni 2012 provides an ethnographic account of earthworm research that disrupts naturalist assumptions, revealing how nature emerges from contingent ontologies and practices. Abram and Lien 2011 uses the term “relational ontology,” as do other works, to suggest how multiple natures emerge through knowledge practices, focusing on the ways that notions of wilderness are enacted. Finally, Paleček and Risjord 2013 explains how “The Ontological Turn” posits a relativist understanding of a plural world but in a way that circumvents the problem of incommensurability that fueled the rationality and relativism debate.

Abram, Simone, and Marianne Elisabeth Lien. 2011. Performing nature at world’s ends. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 76.1: 3–18. This introduction to a special issue is thematically concerned with the shift toward relational ontology as a way to understand how notions of nature and wilderness are enrolled and enacted. It does this by substantively addressing such performances in contexts of industrial modernity in settler societies.

Bertoni, Filippo. 2012. Charming worms: Crawling between natures. Cambridge Anthropology 30.2: 65–81. Concerned that demonstrations of multinaturalism from Amazonian ethnography retain assumptions of a unitary nature in Western science and culture, this article seeks to problematize and empirically investigate “Western naturalism” through an ethnographic exploration of earthworm research. This investigation reveals an assemblage consisting of multiple, contingent ontologies and coordinating practices.

Candea, Matei. 2012. Different species, one theory: Reflections on anthropomorphism and anthropological comparison. Cambridge Anthropology 30.2: 118–135. Presents contemporary behavioral ecology as “naturalist perspectivism,” analogous to the “Amerindian perspectivism” described by Viveiros de Castro. It argues that “taking http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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seriously” scientists’ evolutionary approaches to animal behavior and concerns about anthropomorphism, challenges our ontological assumptions as much as the seemingly more radical alterity of Amazonian multinaturalism.

Candea, Matei, and Lys AlcaynaStevens. 2012. Internal others: Ethnographies of naturalism. Cambridge Anthropology 30.2: 36–47. This is an introduction to an issue focusing on ethnographies of naturalism. It challenges the Western idea of a unitary nature upon which multiple perspectives or worldviews are overlain. From studies of scientific practices and humananimal relations that transgress the naturalist ontology supposedly integral to the West, it argues “we have never been naturalist.”

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Drawing on his fieldwork with the Amazonian Achuar, Descola demonstrates the provincialism of Western dualist thought that makes nature an objective reality upon which cultural projects and meanings are imposed. Revealing how untenable this naturalist approach to knowing the world is, he proceeds to develop an alternative epistemology for anthropology.

Paleček, Martin, and Mark Risjord. 2013. Relativism and the ontological turn within anthropology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43.1: 3–23. Explores anthropological thinking that rejects representationalist ideas of cultures as systems providing different perspectives on a single world, as well as the cleavage between the material and the semiotic they depend on. Instead, the authors introduce approaches in which worlds emerge from intersections between objects, relations, and categories.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2012. Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Masterclass Series. In this collection of openaccess lectures introducing the author’s influential ideas, we encounter a reversal of the Western, oneworld, manycultures viewpoint in favor of a culturalist multinaturalism. Initially demonstrated via Amazonian cosmologies, this helps us rethink oppositions including universal/particular, subject/object, mind/body, and human/animal, considered to ultimately derive from monotheistic cosmology.

Woolgar, Steve, and Javier Lezaun. 2013. The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies? Social Studies of Science 43.3: 321–340. Explores the shift from epistemology to ontology in STS, exploring ideas of “enactment” and “ontological politics.” It argues that this turn gives new momentum to issues of materiality and performativity by eschewing assumptions of a readymade, singular, ordered world in favor of the conviction that practices produce worlds.

Science and Technology Studies http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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By drawing attention to the socionatural hybridity of life and highlighting the role of science and technology in producing knowledge about a morethanhuman world, STS is exerting a significant influence on multispecies ethnography. STS scholars have provided analytical and theoretical tools, as well as terminology, to understand how the practices and politics of science shape discourses, definitions, values, and taxonomies of species. Actornetwork theory is a widely used approach in STS to investigate how a diversity of humans, animals, objects, and technologies coconstitute the social and political world. Callon 1986 is an early and influential example of an actor network approach that investigates the heterogeneous assemblages of scientists, technologies, fishers, and scallops in France. Among Latour’s many writings, the groundbreaking publication for multispecies ethnography is Latour 2004, which calls scholars to build “speech prostheses” to give otherthanhuman species a voice in democratic parliamentary assemblies. Latour 2005, proposes a “sociology of associations,” suited to analyzing socionatural actor networks. Sayes 2014 provides a helpful overview of the ways that actornetwork theory conceptualizes nonhuman agency. Cohen 2011, Crist 2004, and Sharp 2011 all represent exemplary applications of STS research relevant to multispecies topics. Sharp 2011 reviews the historical development of virology and describes viruses as “transboundary tricksters” inhabiting alien bodies. Crist 2004 demonstrates how the scientific discovery of honeybee dance language has implications for questioning human exceptionalism, while Sharp 2011 explores how the scientific imaginaries of crossspecies transplantation merge human and animal bodies. Finally, Hird 2009 provides an excellent demonstration of how ethnographic engagement with the microbial world can raise important questions about nonhuman communication, social intelligence, and sexual alterity.

Callon, Michel. 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge. Edited by J. Law, 196–233. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Contributing to the development of actornetwork theory, this muchquoted article examines how scientists study, cultivate, and conserve scallops in France. It proposes a symmetrical “sociology of translation,” to understand how science and technology create unequal power through defining and representing certain actants amongst a number of social and natural entities.

Cohen, ed. 2011. The paradoxical politics of viral containment; or, how scale undoes us one and all. Social Text 29.1: 15–35. Explores the ontological peculiarities of viruses as “transboundary tricksters” inhabiting alien bodies and as omnipresent, parasitic, nonautonomous, endlessly circulating figures of fear in an age of global pandemics. Through a playful semiotic mode of analysis, the author reviews the historical development of virology, demonstrating how a logic of containment emerged.

Crist, Eileen. 2004. Can an insect speak? The case of the honeybee dance language. Social Studies of Science 34.1: 7–43. Looks at how behavioral scientists have interpreted the honeybee dance as “language,” using symbolic codes. It describes the implications of this scientific discovery, as it challenges human exceptionalism, contesting the belief in insects as “natural automata,” while pointing toward the possibility of conscious awareness in otherthanhuman species.

Hird, Myra J. 2009. The origins of sociable life: Evolution after science studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by postDarwinist thinking and STS, this book brings sociological questions of communication, social intelligence, sexual difference, and social memory to the study of http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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bacteria and microbes. Arguing for a “microontology of life,” Hird uses theories of symbiogenesis and symbiosis to show how microbial colonies are highly complex, selforganized systems.

Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Proposes a new political ecology of nature comprising humannonhuman collectives, constituted through “matters of concern” rather than “matters of fact.” It calls on STS scholars to bring democracy to the nonhuman world by building “speech prostheses” that give nonhumans a voice in parliamentary assemblies, represented through human “spokespeople.”

Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actornetworktheory. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Rejects a “sociology of the social” that assumes preexisting social forces, proposing instead a “sociology of associations” that conceptualizes the world as relational, processual, and composed of morethanhuman assemblages. The “actants” or “actors” in these assembled networks are humans, animals, technology, and objects, all endowed with agency.

Sayes, Edwin. 2014. Actornetwork theory and methodology: Just what does it mean to say that nonhumans have agency? Social Studies of Science 44.1: 134–149. Argues that nonhumans have arrived in social theory. It identifies four different ways in which actornetwork scholars have understood nonhuman agency: as “condition for the possibility of human society,” as “mediators,” as “members of moral and political communities,” and as “gathering of actors from other times and spaces” (p. 140).

Sharp, Lesley A. 2011. Monkey business: Interspecies longing and scientific prophecy in experimental xenotransplantation. Social Text 29.1: 43–69. Explores crossspecies organ transplant research, an experimental and anticipatory science at the intersection of immunology, genetics, veterinary science, and surgery. Framed as the attempt to successfully merge components of animal and human species in single bodies, it investigates the scientific imaginary of xenotransplantation and its need for socio moral legitimation.

HumanAnimal Studies Humananimal studies or HAS, represents a shared discursive space for scholarship on multiple aspects of human relationships with other animal species. Developing over the span of three decades, it may be considered one of several formative influences on the emergence of multispecies ethnography. HAS features contributions from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences including anthropology, archaeology, cultural studies, geography, history, literary studies, philosophy, and sociology. It has its own journals, institutional networks, conferences, and taught courses. Unlike the more recent multispecies ethnography, HAS is less concerned with an integrated theoretical and methodological approach, tends to be less ecologically oriented, and, of course, its focus is restricted to human relations with other animal species. Sax 2009 provides a helpful orientation that enables readers to appreciate the genealogical strands and multiple designations for various traditions of humananimal studies that precede the emergence of http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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multispecies ethnography. Marvin and McHugh 2014 presents an effective discussion of the content and diversity of HAS in an introduction to a wideranging volume broadly grouped around the themes of the wild, the feral, and the domesticated. Hurn 2012 presents a largely anthropological survey of research in, and perspectives on, humananimal relations, while Ingold 1994 is an essay collection that remains relevant for multispecies ethnography by virtue of its exploration of the coordinates and genealogies by which the category of the animal emerges in traditions of Western thought, serving as a foil to the category of the human. Daston and Mitman 2005 represents a multidisciplinary collection that explores the history, debates, and implications of projecting human qualities as a strategy for understanding nonhuman animal others, while Knight 2005 represents a largely anthropological collection of investigations of intimate relations between humans and other animals. Urbanik 2012 is a helpful introduction to the subfield of animal geography, which has been integral to the emergence of morethanhuman geography. Finally, Cassidy and Mullin 2007 problematizes distinctions between the wild and the domesticated, encouraging us to reconsider the coevolution of species and environments, a concern taken up in multispecies ethnography.

Cassidy, Rebecca, and Molly H. Mullin. 2007. Where the wild things are now: Domestication reconsidered. Oxford: Berg. This edited volume brings together essays by anthropologists who reconceptualize domestication as dynamic relationships between humans, animals, plants, and the environment that have evolved historically. The diverse articles dismiss a clearcut division between “wild” and “domestic,” look at examples of codomestication, and reflect how new reproductive technologies influence domestications.

Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman, eds. 2005. Thinking with animals: New perspectives on anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. The interdisciplinary essays in this edited volume engage with the manifold uses and mechanisms of anthropomorphism. Engaging with the fields of history, evolutionary biology, anthropology, politics, and film studies, the articles show how our understandings and imaginations of animals and of ourselves have been influenced by anthropomorphic thinking.

Hurn, Samantha. 2012. Humans and other animals: Crosscultural perspectives on humananimal interactions. London: Pluto. This accessible book reviews literature in the social sciences and humanities that explores the diverse relationships between humans and other animals. The author brings together case studies from different cultural contexts and combines debates about animal domestication, food, wildlife conservation, and animal rights with insights from studies of science and medicine.

Ingold, Tim, ed. 1994. What is an animal? London: Routledge. This interdisciplinary volume, arising from the 1986 World Archeological Congress, contains essays questioning Western/European understandings of animals from anthropology, archaeology, biology, psychology, and semiotics. Chapters explore human constructions of animality, contest classifications of animals, and blur the boundaries between humans and nonhumans in order to ask what makes us human.


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Knight, John, ed. 2005. Animals in person: Cultural perspectives on humananimal intimacy. Oxford: Berg. This edited volume comprises ethnographic case studies from different cultural contexts, that treat animals not only as symbols or utilitarian objects but also recognizes them as active subjects and as constituents of human society. The essays highlight animal individuality, personhood, and humananimal intimacy while challenging anthropomorphism and human animal dualisms.

Marvin, Garry, and Susan McHugh. 2014. In it together: An introduction to humananimal studies. In The handbook of humananimal studies. By Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh, 1–9. London: Routledge. This introduction identifies the ubiquity of animals in human social life, pointing to the precision of the hyphen in suggesting how humans and animals are inextricably “in it together.” It discusses the rise of humananimal studies, and introduces the volume’s organizing theme of the wild, the feral, and the domesticated.

Sax, Boria. 2009. Who patrols the humananimal divide? Minnesota Review 73–74:165–169. Distinguishes several academic areas devoted to humananimal relations, including animal studies, humananimal studies, anthrozoology, and ethnozoology. It also discusses their intellectual geneaologies, theoretical influences and orientations, as well as their respective major journal publications, noting the cleavage wrought by the divisive issue of animal rights.

Urbanik, Julie. 2012. Placing animals: An introduction to the geography of humananimal relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. This accessible introduction to animal geography tracks the history of this young field, introduces its major debates, and situates them in the wider context of humananimal studies. The book engages with humananimal interactions around the world, with a special focus on working animals, pets and farm animals, and humanwildlife relations.

MoreThanHuman Geography Morethanhuman geography not only shares, but has also influenced the theoretical and methodological commitments of multispecies ethnography, with a special focus on the spatial aspects of natureculture hybrids. Like multispecies ethnographers, morethanhuman geographers have moved away from anthropocentric visions of nature, challenged dualist ontologies of modernist thought, and reconceptualized the world as relational achievement in which both human and nonhuman entities and organisms are credited with agency. Panelli 2010 provides a useful overview of the theoretical influences on morethanhuman geography. Whatmore 2002 is seminal for proposing a more relational kind of geography attentive both to spatiality and to the hybridity of the natureculture nexus, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s animate, threedimensional, and unfolding metaphor of the rhizome to think about the mutual becomings of species and environments. Whatmore 2006 discusses a renewed concern with life and materiality in geography, remarking upon a methodological shift from representational modes of analysis toward those based on practice, affect, and bodily interaction in dynamic spaces. Another strength of morethanhuman geography becomes apparent in its incorporation of geography’s longstanding engagement with political ecology. Building on political ecology’s commitment to exposing power http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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relations and the politicaleconomic contexts of humannonhuman environmental relations, Bennett 2010 proposes a “political ecology of things” that acknowledges the “vital materiality” and political agency of nonhuman entities such as landfills, streams of chemicals, and omega3 fatty acids that transform brain chemistry. Drawing on Bennett and Whatmore, Lorimer 2012 brings an ontologically multinaturalist approach to geography in order to rethink conservation in the Anthropocene. Lulka 2009 expresses a concern that morethanhuman geography retains a greater residual humanism than its theoretical claims suggest and argues that the rediscovery of materiality should be applied to a reintegration of human and physical geography. Finally, Bear 2011 argues for the validity of treating individual animals as subjects, instead of a more traditional engagement in geography with animal populations, thereby bringing discussions about interspecies affect into animal and morethanhuman geography.

Bear, Christopher. 2011. Being Angelica: Exploring individual animal geographies. Area 43.3: 297–304. Focuses on an aquarium octopus named Angelica in the interests of attending to the lived experiences of individual animals, and to life forms inhabiting nonairy spaces. It highlights the absence of animals as subjective agents in most animal geography and explores affective relationships across species and habitat boundaries.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Draws on the ideas of political theorists and philosophers in order to explore the possibilities of a political ecology that recognizes the “vital materiality that runs alongside and inside humans” (p. viii). Using Latour’s concept of “actants,” it analyzes political events as caused by assemblages of human and nonhuman forces.

Lorimer, Jamie. 2010. Moving image methodologies for morethanhuman geographies. Cultural Geographies 17.2: 237–258. Concerned that the methodology of a morethanhuman geography lags behind its theorization, this article suggests a “moving image” approach for researching humannonhuman interactions. After reviewing methods that move beyond a reliance on talk and text by attending to the material, practical, and affective, it applies this methodological proposal to humanelephant encounters.

Lorimer, Jamie. 2012. Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene. Progress in Human Geography 36.5: 593–612. Drawing on Latour’s concept of “multinaturalism,” this review article proposes a new approach for understanding conservation in the Anthropocene. It brings together recent work in geography, the ecological sciences, and political ecology to promote a “vital materialist ontology” (Bennett) that recognizes morethan human assemblages in a “multiplicity of biodiversities” (p. 606).

Lulka, David. 2009. The residual humanism of hybridity: Retaining a sense of the earth. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34.3: 378–393. Interrogates notions of hybridity, largely deriving from science and technology studies, with which geography has sought to rethink nature/society relationships. Challenging claims of analytic symmetry and keen to suture gaps between human and physical geography, it attempts to rethink hybridity to better acknowledge the scope of earthly agency. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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Panelli, Ruth. 2010. Morethanhuman social geographies: Posthuman and other possibilities. Progress in Human Geography 34.1: 79–87. In the context of a renewed awareness of the complex interconnectivity of life, this article reviews constituent influences on morethanhuman geographies. It discusses poststructuralist critiques of human/nonhuman relations, posthumanist theory, the contribution of indigenous cosmologies, as well as the significance of actornetwork and performativity theories for thinking about relational agency.

Whatmore, Sarah. 2002. Hybrid Geographies: Natures, cultures, spaces. London: SAGE. Drawing on biophilosophy, science studies, and theories of embodiment, performativity, and actor networks, this pivotal text critically examines the dualist ontologies configuring modernist thought. Revealing a more interconnected and hybridized world than that disclosed by the conventional lexicon, it also attempts to chart a more “enlivened” geography of encounters between spacesharing life forms.

Whatmore, Sarah. 2006. Materialist returns: Practising cultural geography in and for a morethanhuman world. Cultural Geographies 13.4: 600–609. Discusses a return to the intersection of the bio of life and the geo of earth through a renewed concern with materiality. It considers the methodological need to supplement humanist repertoires of talk and text with the sensorial, bodily, and affective aspects of things and beings in the world.

Methodology The challenge of attending ethnographically to morethanhuman encounters and multispecies entanglements has led to innovative and experimental methods that span disciplinary boundaries. Researchers interested in the ways that microbial intersections with humans configure our multispecies world draw on approaches from STS. They enter the laboratories of scientists to explore the enactment of technological natureculture hybrids. Other researchers enter the troubled naturecultures of capitalist exploitation to engage with multispecies relations in fish factories and in ecosystems devastated by ecological disaster. Such research strategies help reveal the effects of environmental loss, crisis, and extinction, as well as moments of hope through new interspecies collaborations. Kirksey 2014 (cited under Anthologies) takes an exploratory and creative approach to “responsibly speak with, and for others, across species lines,” while Kirksey, et al. 2011 finds methodological inspiration through collaborating with bioartists and biologists, pointing toward the tactic of “poaching” developed by the Matsutake Worlds Research Group (see Faier 2010, cited under Reference Resources). Choy, et al. 2009 demonstrates the possibilities of collaborative research conducted at multiple sites in order to follow “rhizomic socialities” that connect people and mushrooms through science, technology, global commodity chains, and culinary practices. With regard to interspecies encounters in humananimal hybrid communities, Lestel, et al. 2006 argues for a combination of ethnographic participant observation with ethological behavioral observation. Fijn 2012 applies these insights to ethnographic filmmaking as a strategy for multispecies research. Concerned with intimate encounters between intelligent social species, Lorimer 2010 proposes a methodology beyond words that can better attend to their material, practical, and affective entanglements. Fuentes 2010 combines the methodologies of primatology and sociocultural anthropology to investigate the “contact zones” between humans and their primate counterparts in shared environments. This involves behavioral, demographic, and ecological analysis, as well as analysis of interviews with tourists, farmers, scientists, and religious specialists in order to reveal the social, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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biological, epidemiological, economic, and geographical aspects of humanmonkey interactions. Locke 2013 argues that understanding bodily and affective engagement with captive animals in a hybrid community of humans and elephants requires attention to interspecies communication, and thus also to the methodological perspectives of the animal behavioral sciences. Rather than seeking methodological symmetry, Candea 2010, on the other hand, develops an understanding of humananimal encounters by attending to the interspecies interactions, commentaries, and theoretical models of meerkat scientists in the Kalahari.

Candea, Matei. 2010. “I fell in love with Carlos the meerkat”: Engagement and detachment in humananimal relations. American Ethnologist 37.2: 241–258. Selfreflexively discusses the challenges of interspecies ethnography. As a participant observer among Kalahari meerkats, the author compares his own interpretations of meerkat behavior with those of the biologists and reflects upon different ways of engagement and detachment with otherthan human animals. (Also in Multispecies Explorations).

Choy, Timothy K., Lieba Faier, Michael J. Hathaway, Miyako J. Inoue, Shiho Satuska, and Anna Tsing. 2009. Strong collaboration as a method for multisited ethnography: On mycorrhizal relations. In Multisited ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research. Edited by M. A. Falzon, 380–403. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. This article draws on “mycorrhizal relations,” entanglements between matsutake mushrooms and host trees, as metaphor for a new research design. It is a call for “strong collaboration” between researchers in order to understand the global connections, commodity chains, and morethanhuman networks and ecologies of highvalue matsutake mushrooms.

Fijn, Natasha. 2012. A Multispecies ethoethnographic approach to filmmaking. Humanities Research 18.1: 71–88. Drawing on fieldwork with a hybrid community of herders and herds in Mongolia, this article seeks to demonstrate an alternative methodology for ethnographic filmmaking and multispecies research. It argues an ethoethnographic approach must be attentive to visual and auditory communication between species.

Fuentes, Agustin. 2010. Naturalcultural encounters in Bali: Monkeys, temples, tourists and ethnoprimatology. Cultural Anthropology 25.4: 600–624. Demonstrates a methodology that integrates research practices from primatology and sociocultural anthropology to explore the coproduced social and ecological niches of humans and other primates in Bali. (Also see under Humans and Other Primates).

Kirksey, S. Eben, Craig Schuetze, and Nick Shapiro. 2011. Poaching at the Multispecies Salon. Kroeber Anthropological Society 100.1: 129–153. Presents the practice of “poaching” as a way to experiment with new forms of knowledge production. Inspired by the Matsutake Worlds Research Group and discussions at the Multispecies Salon, scholars use the idea of swarm intelligence and borrow each other’s ideas to find innovative ways of scholarly collaboration.


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Lestel, Dominique, Florence Brunois, and Florence Gaunet. 2006. Ethoethnology and ethnoethology. Social Science Information 45.2: 155–177. Argues for a combination of ethological and ethnographic methodology to create a new science at the interface of the human and animal sciences. Suited to the study of hybrid humananimal communities and their interspecific socialities, such a science must navigate the conflicting analytic styles of animal behavior and social practice.

Locke, Piers. 2013. Explorations in ethnoelephantology: Social, historical, and ecological intersections between Asian elephants and humans. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4.1: 79–97. Surveys research on humanelephant intersections from anthropology, geography, and history that demonstrate the possibilities of an integrated research methodology drawing on the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences. (See also Humans and Elephants).

Lorimer, Jamie. 2010. Moving image methodologies for morethanhuman geographies. Cultural Geographies 17.2: 237–258. Seeks to methodologically implement the theoretical insights of morethanhuman geography. A shift from the analysis of talk and text to a concern with practice, affectivity, and materiality therefore demands a different approach to research, tentatively demonstrated here with regard to humanelephant encounters. (See under MoreThanHuman Geography.)

Multispecies Explorations Some multispecies ethnographies focus on the intersection of humans with particular species. Others are more attentive to webs of relations between humans and multiple others with which they share a landscape, ecosystem, or habitat, which in some cases may be the human body itself. Others focus on particular issues relevant to environments humans share with other species, such as those of extinction and invasion. Despite the emergent status of multispecies ethnography, focal concerns with distinctive thematic and methodological orientations are already evident. These considerations inform the selection of subsection topics. Aquatic Relations groups together a range of work on intersections with inhabitants of watery environments. Fungal Intersections is concerned with human interrelations with a whole taxonomic kingdom, focusing particularly on the work of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. Humans and Elephants and Humans and Other Primates indicate the development of the distinctive subfields of ethnoelephantology and ethnoprimatology respectively. Insects, Invaders, and Pests collates work not only on a class of invertebrates, but also on unwanted species from other taxonomic groups. Loss and Extinction in Multispecies Environments features work concerned with biodiversity in times of ecological crisis. Microbes, Bacteria, and Viruses features work dealing with microscopic forms of life, in the human body, in the oceans, and deployed as culinary and biological technology. However, other work warrants coverage that stands outside of these themes and categories. BaynesRock 2013 explores the complex social, historical, and ecological assemblages of humans, hyenas, and territoriality in Ethiopia. In another ethnographic study also from Africa, Candea 2010 explores Meerkat science and televisual popularization in the Kalahari, rejecting the dichotomy between engagement and detachment commonly used for distinguishing humananimal relationships. Concerned with humananimal relations more broadly, in the context of ecological change, Cassidy 2012 reviews scholarly work looking at the changes and challenges that climate change brings multispecies communities in naturalcultural landscapes configured by capitalist civilization. Also concerned with changing environments, Kirksey 2012 draws attention to the sculptures of ecoartists who practice “interspecies care,” creating spaces of “biocultural hope” in habitats transformed by capitalist extraction. In the context of declining bee populations, Kosek 2010 demonstrates how human and animal histories are woven together and species remade to suit human http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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military interests. Maurstad, et al. 2013 rethinks the relationship between horses and humans through concepts of embodied mutuality, codomestication, and entanglement. Also concerned with humans and their companion animals, Freccero 2011 explores the intersections between status dogs, criminality, and heteronormative masculinity. Finally, Shir Vertesh 2012 presents an analysis of pet ownership in Israel that considers the conflicting interplay of animals both as personlike family members and as emotional commodities that may be discarded if continued care becomes too inconvenient.

BaynesRock, Marcus. 2013. Life and death in the multispecies commons. Social Science Information 52.2: 210–227. Defines the mutlispecies commons as places of humananimal entanglements involving social, biological, and historical processes. It explores conflict between hyena clans arising from a poisoned hyena outside the city walls of Harar, Ethiopia, through a consideration of history, landscape, territoriality, and social engagement common to humans and hyenas.

Candea, Matei. 2010. “I fell in love with Carlos the meerkat”: Engagement and detachment in humananimal relations. American Ethnologist 37.2: 241–258. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with scientists on the Kalahari Meerkat Project, this article argues that a moral dichotomy between “engagement” and “detachment” is inadequate for understanding humananimal relations. Instead, the author proposes “interpatience,” a position between intersubjectivity and absence of relations, as a mode for ethical knowledge production.

Cassidy, Rebecca. 2012. Lives with others: Climate change and humananimal relations. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:21–36. Cassidy is concerned with the impact of climate change upon humananimal assemblages, in which people, animals, landscapes, and climate are all aspects of an animate environment. It looks at intersections between indigenous subsistence cultures, disappearing species, and capitalist processes, through the lenses of perspectivism, political ecology, and multispecies ethnography.

Freccero, Carla. 2011. Carnivorous virility; or, becomingdog. Social Text 29.1: 177–195. Drawing on a fatal case of presa canario dog attack, this article explores violence and “the conjoined figure of man and dog.” The investigation covers the history of dog fighting, arguments about nature and nurture, commodity fetishism, tribalistic racism, animalized “bare life,” devouring dogs as symbols of resistance, and heteronormative masculinity.

Kirksey, S. Eben. 2012. Thneeds reseeds: Figures of biocultural hope in the Anthropocene. Rachel Carson Perspectives 9:89–94. Presents sculptures by Deanna Pindell that provide new habitats for species in clearcut forests. It draws “biocultural hope” from the work of bio and ecoartists engaging in “do it yourself bioculture,” cultivation, and “interspecies care” in order to explore the possibilities for species to flourish in damaged ecosystems.


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Kosek, Jake. 2010. Ecologies of empire: On the new uses of the honeybee. Cultural Anthropology 25.4: 650–678. Concerned about the drastic decline in honeybee populations in times of environmental crisis, this article is a call to consider the entangled histories of humans and bees. It explores how the modern honeybee has been remade as military technology, serving as a “sensory prostheses” for contemporary US warfare.

Maurstad, Anita, Dona Davis, and Sarah Cowles. 2013. Cobeing and intraaction in horse–human relationships: A multispecies ethnography of be(com)ing human and be(com)ing horse. Social Anthropology 21.3: 322–335. Based on sixty interviews with riders in Norway and the US Midwest, this article draws on Barad’s term “intraaction” to argue that human and horse are relationally constituted categories that come into being through “intraactivities.” It identifies three themes of cobeing: embodied mutuality, codomestication, and entanglement of two agentive subjects.

ShirVertesh, Dafna. 2012. “Flexible personhood”: Loving animals as family members in Israel. American Anthropologist 114.3: 420–432. Noting the disapproval of emotional bonds with animals in Judaism, this article explores patterns by which pets are incorporated into the family units of young couples. Pets are revealed as ways to extend family without the commitments or inconveniences of parenting, serving as proxy persons that provide emotional services.

Aquatic Relations A number of publications have emerged that look at multispecies relations in the fluid environments of aquatic worlds, such as seas, rivers, fish hatcheries, and the aquariums of scientific marine laboratories. Much of the work on aquatic multispecies relations has been inspired by STS, and scholars have followed marine biologists on their field trips and entered their labs to understand the biopolitics of aquatic knowledge production and its connections with the policies and practices of conservation, commerce, and technology. Helmreich 2003 and Helmreich 2009 (cited under Monographs) are excellent examples of STSinspired approaches to multispecies ethnography that demonstrate how scientific discoveries and technologies have radically changed human relations to the deep sea as scientists realize the potentialities of its microbial activity. Helmreich 2003 explains how contemporary marine biologists challenge the genealogical and classificatory understandings of life through the discovery of lateral gene transfer in deepsea vent microbes. In another STSinspired multispecies ethnography, Hayward 2010 presents a laboratory study of scientific knowledge production on the sensorial world of cup corals to understand nonhuman ways of being and sensing, through “finger eyes.” Meanwhile, a different set of aquacentered work pays attention to the themes of commodification, reproduction, and domestication of marine life in processes of capitalist accumulation. Bear 2013 analyzes the fluid assemblages of scallops, policymakers, conservationists, dolphins, and fishing technologies in Wales. Lien and Law 2011 focuses on the emergent character of Norwegian salmon through the performance of their domestication. Clausen and Longo 2012 engages with the consequences of genetically modifying salmon to enhance the productivity of fish industries. Probyn 2014 uses an actornetwork approach to describe an initiative of inland Bluefin tuna spawning, while Knudsen 2014 and Moore 2012 both raise questions of the agency of socalled invasive species in humandisturbed marine environments.

Bear, Christopher. 2013. Assembling the sea: Materiality, movement and regulatory practices in the Cardigan Bay scallop fishery. Cultural Geographies 20.1: 21–41. This article on scallop dredging in Wales argues that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “assemblage” is more useful than a spatial model to show how fluid environments such as the http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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sea are coproduced through morethanhuman actors and elements such as policymakers, conservationists, scallops, dolphins, wind, water, fishing technologies, and fishermen.

Clausen, Rebecca, and Stefano B. Longo. 2012. The tragedy of the commodity and the farce of AquAdvantage salmon. Development and Change 43.1: 229–251. Presents a case study of AquAdvantage salmon, the first genetically modified animal approved for human consumption that grows twice as fast as Atlantic salmon. It analyzes how capital accumulation processes, continually needing to increase the economic efficiency of production, have affected aquatic ecosystems and marginalized fishing communities.

Hayward, Eva. 2010. Fingeryeyes: Impressions of cup corals. Cultural Anthropology 25.4: 577–599. Based on fieldwork among scientists at a marine laboratory in Santa Cruz, California, this article is a sensuous ethnography of the ways cup coral communicate. The author coins the term “fingereyes” to highlight how “being” and “sensing,” vision and touch, simultaneously work together in the sensorial world of these aquatic creatures.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2003. Trees and seas of information: Alien kinship and the biopolitics of gene transfer in marine biology and biotechnology. American Ethnologist 30.3: 340–358. Drawing on ethnographic research with marine microbiologists, this article considers challenges to genealogical and classificatory understandings of life through the discovery of lateral gene transfer in deepsea vent microbes. Then it charts the assemblages of deepsea submersibles, biotech labs, and corporations involved in extracting microbial genetic material for commercial applications.

Knudsen, Ståle. 2014. Multiple sea snails: The uncertain becoming of an alien species. Anthropological Quarterly 87.1: 59–92. Drawing on fieldwork with Turkish fishers and marine scientists, this article uses a relational ontology approach, inspired by ANT, to understand the multiple ways in which Rapana venosa, a sea snail introduced to the black sea, is enacted in Turkey: as invasive species, as commodity, or as something forbidden (haran).

Lien, Marianne Elizabeth, and John Law. 2011. “Emergent Aliens”: On salmon, nature, and their enactment. Ethnos 76.1: 65–87. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and confounding the separation of nature from culture, this article demonstrates the historically emergent character of salmon through the performance of their domestication. The authors reveal classificatory indeterminacies and ask what counts as nature when “icons of wilderness are enrolled in regimes of domestication.”

Moore, Amelia. 2012. The aquatic invaders: Marine management figuring fishermen, fisheries, and lionfish in the Bahamas. Cultural Anthropology 27.4: 667–688. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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Critically reflecting on the role of maritime anthropology in economic development and resource management, this article focuses on fisheries, reef ecologies, and the invasive lionfish. It explores how environments are conceived, forms of life delineated, and their interrelations coordinated in an exclusionary ecology involving lionfish and fishermen as threats.

Probyn, Elspeth. 2014. Sustaining fishhuman communities? A morethanhuman question. In Ethnographic worldviews. By Elspeth Probyn, 155–171. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Documents a pioneering initiative of inland Bluefin tuna spawning. Looking at the shaping of identities through humantuna intersections, and influenced by Callon’s actornetwork study of the French scallop industry, the analysis reveals how human and tuna appetites forge sensual networks integral to the promotion of sustainable seafood markets.

Fungal Intersections The interconnected underground worlds of mushrooms have particularly appealed to multispecies ethnographers. Scholars from the Matsutake Worlds Research Group have made especially significant contributions to multispecies ethnography by investigating the complex relations between species that this valuable gourmet mushroom creates. The mycorrhizal webs that interact with the roots of trees serve as useful metaphors for conceptualizing the “rhizomic sociality” of morethan human social life, and as Choy, et al. 2009 demonstrates, Matsutake filaments have inspired an innovative model of collaboration in anthropology that enables a team of scholars to follow multispecies connections across geographical sites, and through commodity chains, while also tracing the flow of scientific knowledge. Faier 2011 looks at the ways that Matsutake commodity chains in Japan connect humans with nonhuman species through processes of cultivation, production, and consumption. Tsing and Satsuka 2008 compares two trends of scientific research on Matsutake, in Japan and the US Pacific Northwest, to show how different histories of science and forest management have influenced the methods, questions, and results of fungi research. Tsing 2010 takes a lesson from mushroom lovers, pickers, activists, and scientists to show how their “passionate immersion” can teach us something about democratic science and the possibilities of multispecies wellbeing in times of global capitalist destruction. Engaging with the biology of fungi, and the history of domestication and imperial conquest, Tsing 2012 shows us that “human nature is an interspecies relationship.” Tsing 2013 is a short essay from a special issue of the interdisciplinary journal PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature on fungi; it describes how migrant workers in Oregon use their embodied kinetic knowledge in a “crossspecies dance” to navigate the forest and find matsutake. In the same journal issue, which contains playful musings on lichen, “slime molds” (Fuligo sectipa), and the poetics of mycology, Bates 2013 shows how the yeast Candida albicans, represents an ambivalent “companion species” that has symbiotic and pathogenic relationships with humans and generates a vast economy of pharmaceutical products and research.

Bates, Tarsh. 2013. HumanThrush entanglements: Homo sapiens as a multispecies ecology. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 10:36–45. Explores the symbiotic and occasionally pathogenic yeast Candida albicans, a companion species integral to the microecology of human intestinal and urogenital life. It includes consideration of the ontological quandaries Candida represents regarding reproduction, specification, and environmental separation, as well as the economy of pharmaceutical products and research it generates.


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Choy, Timothy K., Lieba Faier, Michael J. Hathaway, Miyako J. Inoue, Shiho Satuska, and Anna Tsing. 2009. A new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology: Matsutake worlds. American Ethnologist 36.2: 380–403. Presents the research experience of six anthropologists in the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. It argues that a new form of collaboration is required to understand the matsutake mushroom’s “rhizomic sociality,” exploring the connections it creates across geographical sites, and through commodity chains while also considering the production and transmission of scientific knowledge.

Faier, Lieba. 2011. Fungi, trees, people, nematodes, beetles, and weather: Ecologies of vulnerability and ecologies of negotiation in matsutake commodity exchange. Environment and Planning A 43:1079–1097. This essay focuses on matsutake commodity chains connecting a variety of humans to nonhuman entities related to the cultivation, production, and consumption of these Japanese gourmet mushrooms. It discusses the multiple ways in which rural matsutake pickers and urban traders make sense of and negotiate the uncertainties of matsutake ecologies.

Tsing, Anna. 2010. Arts of inclusion, or how to love a mushroom. Manoa 22.2: 191–203. Imagining the webs and filaments of matsutake mushrooms as underground city and site of lively cosmopolitan transactions, this essay presents the stories of fungi enthusiasts, foragers, activists, and scientists as examples of “multispecies love” that lead to new forms of democratic science, “passionate immersion,” and “modes of wellbeing” for humans and nonhumans.

Tsing, Anna. 2012. Unruly edges: Mushrooms as companion species. Environmental Humanities 1:141–154. Conceptualizing mushrooms as companion species, this article shows that “human nature is an interspecies relationship,” historically evolving within webs of mutual interdependence between species. The author engages with the biology of fungi, the history of domestication and imperial conquest in order to search for biosocial diversity at the seams of global capitalism.

Tsing, Anna. 2013. Dancing the mushroom forest. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 10:6–14. Uses the metaphor of a crossspecies dance to describe how migrant matsutake pickers in Oregon use their embodied kinetic knowledge while navigating the forest to forage the commercially lucrative fungi. Tsing calls for attention to the intersecting lifelines of morethanhuman species in times of rapid ecological change.

Tsing, Anna, and Shiho Satsuka. 2008. Diverging understandings of forest management in matsutake science. Economic Botany 62.3: 244–253. Reviewing two trends of matsutake research, in Japan and the US Pacific Northwest, this article shows how two different understandings of forest management (that both depend on divergent forestry histories) can inform two distinct scientific legacies that pose different questions, have different methods of research, and arrive at different findings. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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Humans and Elephants Elephants are implicated in human worlds and human projects in many ways, and their consciousness and sociality raise important questions about their similarities with humans. Consequently, scholars from anthropology, geography, history, and science and technology studies have begun making significant contributions to a multispecies approach for understanding the complex intersections between humans and elephants. Whatmore and Thorne 2000 applies an actornetwork perspective that demonstrates the role of elephants in conservation assemblages involving wild and captive spaces. Thompson 2001 considers the conservation apparatus that develops around an elephant herd subject to longterm research, and how they get caught up in conservation controversies. Lorimer 2010 argues for the complementary role of natural and social science methods along with the relevance of biophilosophical concepts for understanding Sri Lankan elephant conflict and conservation. Munster 2014 shows how ambivalent relationships between humans and elephants are produced while working together for south Indian wildlife conservation. Jadhav and Barua 2012 looks at elephants in wildlife conflict in Assam from the perspective of the psychosocial wellbeing of humans and the adaptive intelligence of elephants, combining psychiatric, ethnographic, and ethological approaches. Barua 2014 considers the ways that elephants are enlisted in transnational conservation networks through a travelogue of humanelephant companionship, a charity event involving elephant sculptures, and on the ground as living beings. Nance 2013 presents a historical monograph on the agency of elephants in the American circus in which historiography is complemented by insights from the cognitive and behavioral animal sciences. Finally, Locke 2013 reviews a multispecies turn in studies of humanelephant relations, surveying work that recognizes the subjective agency of elephants, the mutually constitutive entanglements of humans and elephants, and the complementary benefits of methodological perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. On this basis, he proposes a shared discursive space and research program he calls ethnoelephantology.

Barua, Maan. 2014. Circulating elephants: Unpacking the geographies of a cosmopolitan animal. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39.4: 559–573. Noting its association with travel, circulation, and contact with itinerant others, this article considers how cosmopolitanism is coconstituted with nonhuman others. Concerned with elephants as icons of conservation, intimate companions, and unruly rogues, this article draws on three different types of interspecies encounter to explore their role configuring conservation assemblages.

Jadhav, Sushrut, and Maan Barua. 2012. The elephant vanishes: Impact of humanelephant conflict on people’s wellbeing. Health & Place 18.6: 1356–1365. Combining approaches from human geography, conservation science, and clinical ethnography, this article explores the psychosocial and bureaucratic implications of human elephant conflict in Assam, northeast India. Through a parallel presentation of ethnographic and psychiatric profiles, the authors demonstrate how conflict generates psychiatric illness and aggravates social inequality.

Locke, Piers. 2013. Explorations in ethnoelephantology: Social, historical, and ecological intersections between Asian elephants and humans. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4.1: 79–97. Identifies an emerging approach for studying humanelephant relations. Concerned with combining perspectives from the social and natural sciences, fully acknowledging elephant http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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subjectivities, and with exploring the mutual entanglement of human and elephant lives and landscapes, this article surveys research from anthropology, geography, and history that exemplifies this trend.

Lorimer, Jamie. 2010. Elephants as companion species: The lively biogeographies of Asian elephant conservation in Sri Lanka. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35.4: 491–506. Traces an assemblage linking actors, practices, organizations, and legislation involved in Sri Lankan elephant conservation while attending to nonhuman agency and interspecies conviviality. Refuting the notion of elephants as denizens of an unsullied wilderness, it demonstrates how humans and elephants have coconstituted their landscapes, disease ecologies, and phylogeography.

Munster, Ursula. 2014. Working for the forest: The ambivalent intimacies of humanelephant collaboration in south Indian wildlife conservation. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. Ethnographically explores the shared labor of humans and elephants in south Indian wildlife conservation. It draws attention to the ways in which interspecies relations are created through everyday working relationships, comprising both intimacy and violence. The author asks how history, political ecology, and power relations matter for multispecies studies.

Nance, Susan. 2013. Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Investigates the development of animal celebrity in the American circus without treating elephants merely as a cipher for human interests. By analyzing historical evidence about circus elephants in relation to animal behavioral science, the book reveals how elephants expressed their agency by rejecting the conditions of their captivity.

Thompson, Charis. 2001. When elephants stand for competing models of nature. In Complexities. Edited by Annemarie Mol and John Law, 166–189. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Examining conflicts over elephant conservation in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, this article shows how different scientific debates and management models inform politics, policy, law, economies, and values that people attach to elephants. The author argues that longterm conservation strategies must be “pluralistic,” responding to changing ecological and social situations.

Whatmore, Sarah, and Lorraine Thorne. 2000. Elephants on the move: Spatial formations of wildlife exchange. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18.2: 185– 203. Explores networks that connect humans and elephants through zoos’ computerized records of elephant breeding properties, and through an international program of conservation research involving corporate donors, paying volunteers, and field scientists. In so doing, the authors explore the significance of spatial connectivity in conservation assemblages that http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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enroll elephants.

Humans and Other Primates In the 1990s and 2000s, sociocultural anthropologists and primatologists have both sought to explore the interface between humans and other primates. Sponsel 1997 proposes an approach that incorporates humans in primate ecologies that he calls “ethnoprimatology,” which he tentatively demonstrates through a consideration of the overlapping niches of humans and monkeys in Amazonia. Fuentes 2010 and Fuentes 2012 takes up this call for an inclusive approach to primate interaction with humans, managing to disrupt a paradigm in primatology that was previously averse to including humans despite the prevalence of shared and overlapping social and ecological space. Recognizing the need to integrate the methodologies of sociocultural anthropology with primatology, Fuentes 2010 demonstrates an application of ethnoprimatology with regard to humans and macaques in and around Hindu temples in Bali. Fuentes 2012 provides a summary of the methodological principles and theoretical concepts of ethnoprimatology, emphasizing its relevance for understanding the humanprimate interface in a time of major anthropogenic disturbance. Hockings 2009 applies the ethnoprimatological approach to understand conflict and coexistence between humans and chimpanzees in west Africa, while Lee 2010 uses it to ask about the prospects for nonhuman primates at the margins of human agriculture. Equally pertinent though are interspecies ethnographies of humans and other primates, which do not combine the methodologies of the social and natural sciences. In an essay with comparative implications for Fuentes’s study of humans and macaques in Bali, Knight documents food exchange in Japanese monkey parks. Gandhi 2012 provides an ethnographic account of monkey capturers in Delhi that raises profound questions about nonhuman primate occupation of urban spaces and the multiple and contradictory attitudes and practices of humans regarding monkeys. Finally, Parreñas 2012 looks at ecotourism and orangutan rehabilitation in Malaysia, highlighting the affective encounters between human and orangutan in a challenging situation of custodial labor.

Fuentes, Agustin. 2010. Naturalcultural encounters in Bali: Monkeys, temples, tourists and ethnoprimatology. Cultural Anthropology 25.4: 600–624. Using a case study of humanmacaque interaction in Southeast Asia, this article outlines the theoretical and methodological approach of ethnoprimatology. Demonstrating the complementarity of ethnographic and primatological methods, it applies the concept of mutual ecology to analyze the intersecting lifeworlds of two primate species occupying shared social and ecological space.

Fuentes, Agustin. 2012. Ethnoprimatology and the anthropology of the humanprimate interface. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:101–117. Rejects trends for studying primates in isolation from humans and advocates the inclusion of anthropological approaches in behavioral ecology and biodiversity conservation. This article not only charts the emergence of ethnoprimatology and influence of multispecies ethnography but also argues for its significance in relation to climate change and anthropogenic habitats.

Gandhi, Ajay. 2012. Catch me if you can: Monkey capture in Delhi. Ethnography 13.1: 43–56. Draws on ethnographic research with municipal contractors who catch and relocate simians. Exploring competing dispositions toward monkeys involving fascination and repulsion, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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piousness and annoyance, it addresses themes of purification and displacement, neighbor and stranger, multispecies cohabitation, the circulation of gifts and sin, and planning and modernization.

Hockings, Kimberley. 2009. Living at the interface: Humanchimpanzee competition, coexistence and conflict in Africa. Interaction Studies 10.2: 183–205. Considers sustainable solutions to the dilemmas of humanchimpanzee conflict and coexistence through a case study of interactions in Guinea. Attentive to the risks and opportunities for chimpanzees in a humandominated landscape, the author explores rural people’s perceptions and chimpanzee interrelations with humans.

Knight, John. 2005. Feeding Mr. Monkey: Cross species food “exchange” in Japanese monkey parks. In Animals in person: Crosscultural perspectives on humananimal intimacies. Edited by J. Knight, 231–253. Oxford: Berg. Describes the ambiguities of touristmacaque interactions at “Saruyamas,” monkey parks in Japan. Visitors and park managers’ interpretations of handfeeding monkeys as an exemplary act of humanmonkey intimacy stands in stark contrast to the monkeys’ violent and aggressive behavior of food rivalry, which causes major difficulties for the parks’ management.

Lee, P. C. 2010. Sharing space: Can ethnoprimatology contribute to the survival of nonhuman primates in humandominated globalized landscapes? American Journal of Primatology 72.10: 925–931. Reviewing the conservation predicament of monkeys and great apes in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, this short article characterizes ethnoprimatology in relation to shared space and evolutionary history. It applies an ecosystem services approach to questions of nonhuman primate survival at the intersections of their natural habitats and human agriculture.

Parreñas, Rheana “Juno” Salazar. 2012. Producing affect: Transnational volunteerism in a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center. American Ethnologist 39.4: 673–687. Drawing on fieldwork at a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center, this article shows how the affective encounters between orangutans and humans (i.e., animal keepers and foreign volunteers) produce a form of “custodial labour” that commercially maintains the center. Risk and vulnerability are unevenly distributed in these affective interspecies “intra actions.”

Sponsel, L. E. 1997. The human niche in Amazonia: Explorations in ethnoprimatology. In New world primates, ecology, evolution and behavior. Edited by W. Kinzey, 143–165. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. The first to use the term “ethnoprimatology,” this essay notes a failure to consider humans as actors in ecosystems comprising other primate species. It outlines six lines of inquiry at the interface of human and primate ecology and then explores this crossspecies interface in traditional subsistence societies of Amazonia.


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Insects, Invaders, and Pests A move of empathy for the unloved critters in human lives, the literature on species that are considered unworthy, harmful, or as “matter out of place” in an ecosystem has contributed to a better understanding of multispecies relation in times of rapid environmental change. Fortwangler 2013 provides an insightful review of work in the ecological sciences and humanities on invasive species and discusses the multifarious ways of conceptualizing and managing them. Kirksey 2012 reminds us that what is considered alien and unwanted in an ecosystem changes over time with different management practices, uses, and perceptions of the landscape. Drawing on fieldwork with urban gardeners, Ginn 2013 proposes an “environmental ethics of everyday life” in order to highlight the moral dilemmas of nonconvivial relationships with companion species. Hustak and Myers 2012 reminds us of contexts where we do not think of insects as pests, and van Dooren 2011 offers a way to understand the concept of “invasiveness” without detaching it from its social, political, ethical, as well as ecological significance. Showcasing a scholarly affinity to insect life, Moore and Kosut advocate an “intraspecies mindfulness” as a way to describe the relationships of urban beekeepers to their honeybees. Ahuja 2011 explores the role of insects as part of a repertoire of coercive techniques of interrogation in Guantanamo prison that exploit detainee phobia. Finally, Nading 2012 explores the intersection of humans, insects, health, and ecology through an account of a community health program that seeks to minimize the ways humans inadvertently construct breeding spaces for mosquitoes that spread viral diseases dangerous to humans.

Ahuja, Neel. 2011. Abu Zubaydah and the caterpillar. Social Text 29.1: 127–149. Analyzes confinement with insects as a US technique of coercive interrogation, focusing on the case of a Guantanamo detainee. It considers the insect as affective weapon in a space of transspecies intimacy, highlighting the dystopian possibilities of posthumanism and the species turn in the context of neoliberal biopolitical formations.

Fortwangler, Crystal. 2013. Untangling introduced and invasive animals. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4.1: 41–59. Reviewing literature on invasive and introduced species from the ecological sciences, humanities, and social sciences, this article discusses diverse disciplinary ways of thinking, talking, and managing invasive species, ranging from culling to coexistence. The author encourages us to see the world through the perspectives and stories of introduced species.

Ginn, Franklin. 2013. Sticky lives: Slugs, detachment and morethanhuman ethics in the garden. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39.4: 532–544. Based on fieldwork with urban gardeners, this article explores curiosity and disgust toward an unwanted gastropod. Discussing encounter, detachment, and the creaturely regret of murderous gardeners, it argues for the need to attend to distanced relations between species, and to unloved others as part of an environmental ethics of everyday life.

Hustak, Carla, and Natasha Myers. 2012. Involutionary momentum: Affective ecologies and the sciences of plant/insect encounters. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23.3: 74–118. This article takes a feminist approach to interspecies relationality by attending to the “ecology of practices” among plants, insects, and scientists. In contrast to the reductive, deterministic, and agencystultifying approach of NeoDarwinists, the authors suggest Darwin was “affectively entangled” by his multisensual ethology of plant and insect practices.


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Kirksey, S. Eben. 2012. Living with parasites in Palo Verde National Park. Environmental Humanities 1:23–55. This essay describes the author’s failed attempt to bring Latour’s parliamentary democracy to the foam frog, an underrepresented species in Costa Rica. It calls for “thinking with care” about socalled parasites, as the value of wanted and unwanted species in an ecosystem changes with shifting visions of conservation and agriculture.

Moore, Lisa Jean, and Mary Kosut. 2013. Among the colony: Ethnographic fieldwork, urban bees and intraspecies mindfulness. Ethnography 15.4: 516–539. Discusses multisited research on urban beekeeping in New York, a practice gaining popularity in the context of colony collapse disorder and concerns about health and sustainability. Combining actornetwork theory and critical animal studies, while drawing on Barad, it proposes “intraspecies mindfulness” as a way to resist anthropomorphism.

Nading, Alex M. 2012. Dengue mosquitoes are single mothers: Biopolitics meets ecological aesthetics in Nicaraguan community health work. Cultural Anthropology 27.4: 572–596. This follows the exploratory learning of “brigadistas” whose task is to eradicate cleanwater breeding spots inadvertently provided for mosquitoes that spread dengue fever. The transformative recognition of this entanglement of people, mosquitoes, and habitat reveals an “ecological aesthetic” that articulates with the politics of life and mutual becoming.

van Dooren, Thom. 2011. Invasive species in penguin worlds: An ethical taxonomy of killing for conservation. Conservation and Society 9.4: 286–298. Highlights choices humans make conserving species and habitats through a study of predation in a mainland colony of penguins designated as endangered. Determining which exotic species are accepted as belonging and which are not, reminds us that “invasiveness” carries social, political, and ethical as well as ecological implications.

Loss and Extinction in Multispecies Environments From the outset, multispecies scholars have shared a common concern for the environmental predicaments of our time. Ethnographic work has sprung up that engages with the naturalcultural consequences of rapid species extinction in the era of the Anthropocene, the proposed name for a geological epoch defined by the agency of humans as the primary earthchanging force. A group of scholars led by Rose and van Dooren, have founded the Extinction Studies Group (see Reference Resources) that looks at the dynamics of life, death, and new becomings in multispecies communities around the globe. Rose and van Dooren 2011 introduces a special issue on disregarded species in times of species loss, presenting the interdisciplinary work of scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and the environmental humanities. Chrulew 2011 raises questions about the problematic biopolitics of species conservation at zoological gardens. Van Dooren 2011 looks at the entangled histories of vultures, cattle, and humans through the story of Indian vultures, a species rapidly disappearing after feeding on cattle treated by antiinflammatory drugs prescribed by veterinarians. In a special issue on Shared Life (see Foundational Texts), Kirksey, et al. 2013 presents a more hopeful story and draws inspiration from instances of “interspecies care” in ecosystems disturbed by capitalist exploitation and environmental disaster. Lestel 2013 addresses species loss from a semiotic perspective, and Jaclin 2013 provides a multispecies ethnography of “exotic” and endangered animals from the black market that are kept in the backyards of homes in the United States. Finally, Lowe 2004 looks at postcolonial primatology in Indonesia to show the power of taxonomic designations for mobilizing the http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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international apparatus of support for endangered species and protected area conservation.

Chrulew, Matthew. 2011. Managing love and death at the zoo: The biopolitics of endangered species preservation. Australasian Humanities Review 50:137–157. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, this article describes the ambiguous practices of species conservation at zoological gardens. It looks at “techniques of power” and how animals are captured, kept, bred, and euthanized. It also considers how their genetic material is archived to argue that protecting endangered life also “produces damage and death.”

Jaclin, David. 2013. In the (bleary) eye of the tiger: An anthropological journey into jungle backyards. Social Science Information 52.2: 257–271. This article presents a multispecies ethnography of “jungle” backyards in North America, where residents keep “exotic” animals from the black market. Analyzing the interactions between human keepers and their (manipulated) animals, the author coins neologisms such as “humanimalities,” “aniculture,” and “beastness” to challenge traditional taxonomies, ontology, and distinctions between wild and domestic.

Kirksey, S. Eben, Nicholas Shapiro, and Maria Brodine. 2013. Hope in blasted landscapes. Social Science Information 52.2: 228–256. Drawing on discussions at the New Orleans Multispecies Salon, this article finds moments of hope in the aftermath of environmental catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “Following species” such as hermit crabs, goats, and fish, we learn about “interspecies care” and mass mobilization in landscapes of disaster.

Lestel, Dominique. 2013. The withering of shared life through the loss of biodiversity. Social Science Information 52.2: 307–325. Responds to the contemporary collapse of biodiversity by advocating a radical critique of Western humanism. It highlights humannonhuman interrelatedness, addresses species loss from a semiotic perspective, as all species contribute to the meaning of life, and understands ecology as “the art of heterogeneous subjectivities sharing life in hybrid communities” (p. 320).

Lowe, Celia. 2004. Making the monkey: How the Togean Macaque went from “new form” to “endemic species” in Indonesians’ conservation biology. Cultural Anthropology 19.4: 491–516. Through a focus on the Togean Macaque, this ethnography of postcolonial science explores indeterminacy in species identification and its implications for research careers, biodiversity conservation, and protected area designations. In so doing, it reveals the subalternity of Indonesian primatology and conservation biology within transnational scientific contexts of funding and recognition.

Rose, Deborah Bird, and Thom van Dooren. 2011. Unloved others: Death of the disregarded in the time of extinctions. Australian Humanities Review 50. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780199766567/obo97801997665670130.xml?rskey=fapCAD&result=1&q=Multispecies&print#firstMatch

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This special issue’s introduction calls for attending to disregarded, unloved species in times of rapid species extinction. It presents the essays of anthropologists, philosophers, and geographers who engage with the lives of mushrooms, vultures, ticks, moths, flying foxes, zoo animals, and bees to think about multispecies love, ethics, and death.

van Dooren, Thom. 2011. Vultures and their people in India: Equity and entanglements in a time of extinctions. Australian Humanities Review 59:45–61. This article deals with the rapid disappearance of Indian vultures, scavengers that are unintentionally poisoned by feeding on cattle treated by the antiinflammatory drug diclofenac. In times of extinction, the author calls for a careful engagement with life and death in the entangled histories of human and nonhuman species.

Microbes, Bacteria, and Viruses Recent scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have acknowledged a “microbial turn” in biology that has led to renewed consideration of “nature” as a world where a multitude of microbial organisms operate together in the oceans, forests, air, soil, as well as in human and animal bodies, thus bridging boundaries between the human and the nonhuman. To discover the unexpected agency of microbes, bacteria, and viruses, Greenhough 2012, Schrader 2010, and Lowe 2010 follow microbiologists into their laboratories. Paxson 2008 discloses the “microbiopolitics” that underlie the portrayal of microbially mediated processes either as perilous or beneficial and promising. From the foundational texts section, Paxson and Helmreich 2013 (cited under Foundational Texts) shows us how microbial ecosystems have become hopeful models for solving problems of terrestrial pollution and even as examples for imagining the existence of extraterrestrial life. For Ingram 2011, the microbial agency in almost all metabolic processes of life calls for an acknowledgment of the hybridity of humannonhuman life forms. In a similar vein, Benezra, et al. 2012 understands human beings as “supraorganisms” composed of human and microbial cells and genes, and Hird 2010 introduces us to “microontology,” calling new sociological attention to the microcosmos of microbial life.

Benezra, Amber, Joseph DeStefano, and Jeffrey I. Gordon. 2012. Anthropology of microbes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109.17: 6378–6381. Calls for ethnographic investigations of human/microbe intersections, presenting the human being as a “supraorganism” composed of both human and microbial cells and genes. Also notes that microbial communities provide important clues to how and with whom we have lived in situations of ongoing technological and environmental change.

Greenhough, Beth. 2012. Where species meet and mingle: Endemic humanvirus relations, embodied communication and morethanhuman agency at the Common Cold Unit 1946–90. Cultural Geographies 19.3: 281–301. Explores a research unit that investigated relations between humans and mildly pathogenic viruses, recognizing their coevolution alongside pigs and fowl. Drawing on Haraway’s ideas about mingling with companion species, it concerns the role of viral agency and evolutionary affinity in shaping endemic spaces and their experimental regulation in the CCU.


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Hird, Myra J. 2010. Meeting with the microcosmos. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28.1: 36–39. Part of a special section thinking with Haraway’s “When Species Meet,” this article introduces an attempt to build a “microontology” by engaging with the sciences of the microcosmos. Hird applies questions of “becomingwith companion species” to organisms integral to the evolutionary history of life and the functioning of human bodies.

Ingram, Mrill. 2011. Fermentation, rot, and other humanmicrobial performances. In Knowing nature: Conversations at the intersection of political ecology and science studies. Edited by Mara Goldman, and D. Matthew Turner, 99–112. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Engages with scientific knowledge that rejects “antimicrobial attitudes” in favor of approaches to microbial agency in humannonhuman networks that influence discourses about health, food safety, and agricultural politics. Seeing microbes as actors involved in processes of breathing, eating, and digesting, it acknowledges the hybridity of humannonhuman worlds.

Lowe, Celia. 2010. Viral clouds: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 25.4: 625–649. Focusing on an avian influenza virus, this article draws on fieldwork with microbiologists, security consultants, and poultry farmers in west Java. It shows how anxieties over biosecurity and the breakout of a human pandemic, rearrange species relations between the virus, wild and domestic bird species, and humans, forming a “multispecies cloud.”

Paxson, Heather. 2008. PostPasteurian cultures: The microbiopolitics of rawmilk cheese in the United States. Cultural Anthropology 231.1: 15–47. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with cheese makers and “participantlabor” at a sheep farm, this article explores the microbiopolitics of rawmilk cheese in the United States. It shows how scientists create categories of microscopic biological agents, how microbes are evaluated anthropocentrically, and how human attitudes toward microbes change from “hygienic” to “probiotic.”

Schrader, Astrid. 2010. Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the fish killer) phantomatic ontologies, indeterminacy, and responsibility in toxic microbiology. Social Studies of Science 40.2: 275–306. Drawing on Barad’s notion of “agential realism” and Derrida’s “spectral logic of time,” this article argues that the toxicity of Pfiesteria piscicida, a fishkilling microorganism causing much political and scientific debate, is actually coproduced in relation to its environment and as “part of the experimental apparatus” of science.

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