John Hartigan, an anthropologist from the University of Texas at Austin, published this blog post recently:
One of the pressing concerns in multispecies research is how to extend and apply our analytics across species boundaries. The difference between, say, “a cultural history of plants” and an account that purports to render plants as ethnographic subjects is rather stark. The former is interested in these lifeforms as they’ve conformed to cultural uses; the latter begins from the recognition that much human thought is materially and metaphorically dependent upon plants, as well as the way many of them can be seen as manipulating us to further their species-extension through domestication. With such entanglements, how can we formulate reliable accounts of the world that don’t just include nonhumans but that become a basis for confronting anthropocentrism?
Read the rest of this article here.
See Hartigan’s book, Aesop’s Anthropology, here.