Ethnography Beyond the Human: The ‘Other-than-Human’ in Ethnographic Work

ABSTRACT

Recent calls for ‘other-than-human’ ethnographies draw attention to dimensions of life that have allegedly been overlooked or marginalised in anthropological writings. We take such critique as an opportunity to reconsider selected ethnographic accounts asking: What was the role of animals and plants in these accounts, and what ‘hidden stories’ may be discerned in texts and images? What might an informed and careful reading teach us about relations of ethnographic production beyond the human, and about the disciplinary conventions shaping how these relations could (or could not) be conveyed? Juxtaposing older ethnographic texts with state of the art ethnographic insight from the same region, we show that ethnographic attention to the ‘other-than-human’ is not new, but its mode of expression has been thwarted: Shifting theoretical concerns, and human exceptionalism, have shaped ethnographic writing and rendered such modes of knowing less significant than they might have been.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• posthumanism
• other-than-human
• animals
• plants

Acknowledgements

This introductory article and those that follow are products of an international research project (2015–2016) organised by Marianne Elisabeth Lien, focusing on Arctic Domestication in the Era of the Anthropocene. We thank the Center for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo for inviting us and hosting us during a memorable and productive stay. The authors are grateful for the generous funding at CAS that facilitated a workshop and subsequent collaborative work. We also acknowledge the support of our respective academic institutions, the University of Oslo and the University of Iceland. Special thanks go to Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Frida Hastrup, Britt Kramvig, John Law, Rob Losey, Andrew Mathews, Knut Nustad, Heather Swanson, Sverker Sörlin and Gro Ween, as well as the Ethnos editors.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Citation from ‘Fredrik Barth: From fieldwork to Theory’ (Sperschneider 2016).

2 Goodall’s approach has become less controversial since the 1960’s as more detailed studies of cross- and inter-species relations have re-introduced the notion of sociality within the life-sciences, making biology ‘more social’ (see, for example, Barbero et al. 2009; Meloni 2014).

3 Another expression of this can be found in Descola’s model of how humans construct their world, according to which anthropology would be located within the scientific realm, as what he calls ‘naturalism’. See also Latour (2002) on mononaturalism and multiculturalism, for a similar point.

4 Cf. Barth’s striking silencing of the experience of the warm beating heart against his neck to technical details about pastoral adaptation.

5 Our sample is obviously quite limited. None of the ethnographers on our list are women. We tried to solicit articles on the ethnographic works of several authors, including Mary Douglas, Frederica De Laguna (Travels among the Dena, 2000), and Audrey Richards (Land, Labour, and Diet in Northern Rhodesia, 1939), without success.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) Oslo, Arctic Domestication in the Era of the Anthropocene (2015/16).