Multispecies ethnography

Matthew Rosenblum T. Mutersbaugh GEO 600: Methods in Geography 17 October 2013 Paper #1 Multispecies Ethnography In a forthcoming piece entitled ‘Animals, Plants, People and Things: A Review of Multispecies Ethnography’ (Forthcoming) Laura Ogden, Billy Hall, and Kimiko Tanita define multispecies ethnography as “ethnographic research and writing that is attuned to life’s emergence within a shifting assemblage of agentive beings” (Para. 4). In this way these scholars mean to deploy multispecies ethnography as a methodological tool which is committed to recognizing the interconnectedness of beings. Drawing on a variety of theoretical traditions such as object-oriented ontology, hybrid geography, poststructuralist political ecology, posthumanism, science and technology studies, and others, it is a means of grasping “both… bio-physical entities as well as the magical ways objects animate life itself” (Ibid.). This disposition situates multispecies ethnography firmly in the tradition of Timothy Morton’s (2010) ‘ecological thought’: “The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the "truly wonderful fact" of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more now about how life forms have shaped Earth (think of oil, of oxygen—the first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural selection implies extinction” (29). Thus the ‘ecological thought’ is committed to blurring a variety of distinctions such as object and subject, dead and alive, human and non-human, etc., which are fundamental to the project of modernity. As a constitutive element of the ‘ecological thought,’ multispecies ethnography can be thought of as a means of analyzing the processes by which the relationships between entities are formed in ways that exceed their bounded materiality. Ogden et. al.’s use of the term ‘entities’ is no rhetorical flourish, but rather is a purposeful indictment of the hegemonic forms of classification that are alive in a centuries old ecological taxonomy. As such, the forms of analysis we call multispecies ethnographies take the problematization of certain naturalized categories as their raison d’etre, chiefly the human type. As Ogden and her colleagues argue, ‘human’ has served as a nodal point for scholarly research, whereby this uncomplicated subject has become the focus of various strategies for theorizing difference such as race, gender, class, etc. Channeling the work of Jacques Derrida (1978) Ogden et. al. argue that this disposition posits the human as the ‘fixed origin’ (278) whereby human difference is theorized but never collapsed. That is to say that the human is conceptualized in a variety of modalities but it’s very basic identify is solidified in relation to the exterior world of objects and subjects. Contra this framing of the human subject, multispecies ethnography posits the necessity of “seeing the human untethered from its fixed isolation from other beings and things” (Ogden et. al. Forthcoming; para. 7). Rather than seeing human-ness “as a biocultural given” this form of ethnography decenters the human by writing it “as a kind of incarnate essence that comes into being relative to multispecies assemblages” (Ogden et. al. Forthcoming; para. 6). Thus the purpose of the multispecies ethnography is not to analyze the relationship between humans on one hand and animals, plants, and other entities of the other hand, although it is theoretically indebted to early anthropological traditions that did (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; 549), but rather to show how the relationships between humans and other entities, and indeed any permutation of entities are producing multispecies assemblages which deny the discrete character of what is traditionally thought of as human, or any species at all. The literature base that is representative of the phenomenological encounters described through multispecies ethnographies exceeds the human category and also includes the encounters of nonhuman animals, plants, microbes, and other actants. The proceeding pages provide a partial snapshot of significant contributions to this endevour, within geographical analysis and without. In Das Kaptial Karl Marx (1990) describes human ‘species being’ via their creative function, that capacity which drives toward them the future. He contrasts this with the creative workings of the bee by arguing that humans are able to deploy imagination in their quest to create, whereas the bee is bound to the formulaic workings of its biology. The key distinction between humans and the bee is, for Marx, the role of consciousness in human creation. Problematizing this distinction, Jake Kosek (2010) examines “the militarization of honeybees and the use of ‘the swarm’ as a metaphor by the U.S. military in the ‘war on terror’” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010;) arguing that humans use ‘the swarm’ of the bee as a notionality for both the construction of bee-type robots and for the strategic use of human troops in the field of battle. Ironically, the difference between human and non-human, which for Marx is “on the back of the bee” (Kosek 2010;) is exploded by Kosek in his explanation of how human strategic endeavors exploit, precisely, the lack of intentionality on the part of bees and their “flexible, decentralized, adaptive form” (Kosek 2010;) in such a way where the semiotic and material figure of the bee becomes both the way of understanding the behavior of humans their products and blurring the distinction that is erected between them . Adam Keul (2013) uses the relationship between humans and alligators in the Atchafalaya River Basin to show the possibilities of bodies sharing and coexisting in space. Through what might be termed a soft anthropomorphism Keul shows how the particularity of the encounter between human tourists and alligators in the context of eco-tours facilitates a blending of (non)human emotions- “both scripted and improvisational…fearful and fearless, passive and aggressive” (3-4). In doing so Keul portrays a situation whereby “the dynamics of these encounters show not only that these animals are shaped by the human world, but also that they reciprocate an impact on us” (2). In this situation both ‘gators and humans are involved in performances that highlight a similar variety of affective dispositions and as such, the difference between the human and non-human becomes hazy; the alligator becomes embodied in ways that are related to by their human compatriots and in doing so the tourist comes to associate with the animality of their other. Amelia More (2012) provides an explanation of how invasive lionfish, fisherman, and fisheries in the Bahamas are bound together in a socially produced relationship which calls into question the naturalized quality of their association. As More has it both lionfish and fisherman are viewed as invasive entities due to their over-consumptive qualities. Because of the seeming impossibility of totally eliminating the lionfish from the Bahamas’ territorial waters, Bahamian ecological managers are described as acquiescing to the existence of these non-native fish by partially naturalizing them and incorporating them into the consumptive economy of the nation by encouraging fisherman, in this case also “imagined to be transgressive overfishers,” (More 2012; 682) to hunt them. In this relationship, both lionfish and their fisherman partners become parts of the natural landscape as it is imagined by those who regulate the territorial waters of the Bahamas- their seemingly invasive habits are thought to serve the interests of the other, they are co-constituting. As More concludes, “because of the social relations of knowledge and practice that create and are created through fishing, then the lionfish is in the process of socially becoming a fishery, part of a fishery, and a fish, in the sense that it can be fished” (Ibid.; 683). While Laura Ogden’s work in Swamplife (2011) precedes her direct engagement with multispecies ethnography, the distinction between that and what she refers to as ‘landscape ethnography’ is tenuous insofar as it refers to “the ways in which our relations with non-humans produce what it means to be human” (28). Of course Ogden makes reference to this seemingly problematic relationship in a destabilizing fashion; in her exploration of ‘gladesmen,’ a group she refers to as “marginalized, illegal, and largely forgotten” (3) she shows how their presence in the Everglades is not only constitutive of a human place in the swamp but the ways in which the swamp reflects back onto the human subject. Thus for Ogden, the Everglades “are assemblages constituted by humans and nonhumans, material and semiotic processes, histories both real and partially remembered” (p. 35). In this way, landscapes and the actants that inhabit them become indistinct; human activity in the Everglades becomes shaped by the myriad non-human actors that inhabit that space just as that space is performed by the naturalized identities of outcast, human, inhabitants. This co-constituting relationship highlights the ways in which multispecies ethnography “is marked by its attentiveness to nonhuman agency- stones, plants, birds and bees have the power to transform the world” (Ogden et. al. Forthcoming; para 43). This paper concludes with a reminder from Isabelle Stengers (2010) who argues that unicorns and other fanciful creatures are easily relegated to the productive capacity of the human imagination, and are subsequently denied an existence in material reality. Unicorns are, in other words, queer subjects for serious forms of consideration. Of course, while unicorns might not be popularly associated with the politics of contemporary life, there was a time when they were; unicorns were the subjects of serious human inquiry with purported material effects just as much as they were products of social construction. While the idea of having our everyday life affected by the existence of unicorns seems strange, the fact that they once figured prominently and thoughtfully in human culture is a fascinating way to examine the virtuality of our multispecies world. Indeed the unicorn is neither purely cultural nor purely nature, but rather a hydrid object which testifies to the creative function of those entities which might not even exist. Works Cited Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978. Print. Keul, Adam. "Embodied Encounters Between Humans and Gators." Social and Cultural Geography Ahead-of-print (2013): 1-24. Print. Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. "The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography." Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545-76. Print. Kosek, Jake. "Ecologies of Empire: On the New Uses of the Honeybee." Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010): 650-78. Print. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital: Vol.1: A Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007 [1867]. Print. Moore, Amelia. "The Aquatic Invaders: Marine Management Figuring Fisherman, Fisheries, and Lionfish in the Bahamas." Cultural Anthropology 27.4 (2012): 667-88. Print. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010. Print. Ogden, Laura, Billy Hall, and Kimiko Tanita. "Animals, Plants, People and Things: A Review of Multispecies Ethnography." (Forthcoming): n. pag. Print. Ogden, Laura. Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011. Print. Stengers, Isabelle. "Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening the Pandora’s Box?" Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life. Ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010. 3-33. Print.