The Western notion of “the human” as we know it is unraveling. From fields as diverse as developmental biology, epigenetics, environmental history, science and technology studies, and anthropology, we are learning new ways that the histories and trajectories of humans are bound up with those of other species. We once imagined discrete, autonomous individuals, each programmed with a unique genetic blueprint and interacting with the “natural environment.” Today, the boundaries between distinct realms of (human) culture and (non-human) nature are dissipating. What implications, if any, might it have for anthropology’s key concepts, assumptions, and practices? How might it change the ways that anthropologists engage with environmental issues? What can specific examples of how people “become human with others” teach us about this emergent object of study? This thematic series of blog posts presents a set of multi-species stories in response to these questions.
Series Posts:
Ethnography of Life Forms
by John Hartigan
Multispecies Ethnography and Social Hierarchy
by Juno Salazar Parreñas
Animals, Humans, and Forms of Life
by Maya Ratnam
Becoming Human with Others in the Anthropocene: The Long View
by Agustín Fuentes
The Limpkin: A Poem and Short Essay
by Zachary Caple
Multispecies Methodologies and Human-Elephant Relations
by Piers Locke and Paul Keil
Cobra Grande: An Amazonian Vision of Human-Environmental Relations
by Nicholas C. Kawa
What Kind of People are Plants? The Challenges of Researching Human-Plant Relations in Amazonian Guyana
by Lewis Daly
What the Seed Knows of the Soil
by Kay E. Lewis-Jones
The Multispecies Life of Feral Dendezeiros: Ethnography in Motion
by Thiago Cardoso
Some Organs of My Primate Body
by Daniel Allen Solomon
Plantworlds in West Papua
by Sophie Chao
Who Is Afraid of CRISPR Art?
by Eben Kirksey
Things That Are Not Alive, but Which May Be Alive in a Certain Way: An Interdisciplinary Essay on a Relational Theory of Life
by Meredith Root-Bernstein
Capturing Spiders: Golden Orb Weavers in Gainesville, Florida
by Lisa Jean Moore
Read the original call for posts here.
Engagement 