Category: Potpourri

There is an interesting debate playing out between Eben Kirksey and Tim Ingold. In this article Eben responds to a critique by Ingold that he doesn’t understand the ‘species concept’.  I’ve scanned these and it is really interesting and will fit well with out reading of Descola.  Anyway, have a look:

Taxonomists, who describe new species, are acutely aware of how political, economic, and ecological forces bring new forms of life into being. Conducting ethnographic research among taxonomic specialists – experts who bring order to categories of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes – I found that they pay careful attention to the ebb and flow of agency in multispecies worlds. Emergent findings from genomics and information technologies are transforming existing categories and bringing new ones into being. This article argues that the concept of species remains a valuable sense-making tool despite recent attacks from cultural critics.

Download Eben’s article here:

Kirksey2015-Journal_of_the_Royal_Anthropological_InstituteSpecies: a praxiographic study

Download Ingold’s article here: ingold2013

The various seed banks around the world hold an interesting  promise in the anthropocene.  Most certainly they are a good idea, a bulwark against an unknowable future.  I think there are some challenging problems that are worth exploring in connection to these projects.  To think about the future of plant extinctions for example is also to think about the technics of plant (re-)introductions in rapidly changing ecologies   I’m curious about the future of farming and the politics of re-introducing plants to areas that no longer have the capacity to support them or areas that have never had them.  It opens questions around the definition of native and invasive species. Not only can we expect humans to be moving all over the place in response to climate change but we can expect plants to be doing the same (where they have the capacity and the help).

• Popular Science
• Rueters

 

Kim Tallbear (associate professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta) writes in the journal Cultural Anthropology about the importance of “Indigenous” perspectives (or standpoints as she says) in thinking about what has been called “interspecies thinking.” We are using ‘interspecies’ or ‘multispecies’ thinking as a critical valence for understanding the anthropocene.

Finally, it is not just indigenous voices, but queer voices that help us expand this conversation. Mel Chen has a new book coming out with Duke University Press, with a chapter entitled “Queer Animacies.” Chen uses the concept of animating and de-animating certain beings. We have seen some humans de-animated or made to seem less alive in order to justify hierarchies. And we see it in our classifications of nonhumans. That human/animal split engenders a lot of violence. And therein lies a key intersection between queer theory and American Indian metaphysics—an aversion to the human/nonhuman split because of an explicit understanding that it engenders violence. There are some really important—not new voices—but new-to-having-a-real-voice-in-the-academy voices that have important insights to offer this field. These voices can help us make our sciences more multicultural and thus more rigorous.

• http://culanth.org/fieldsights/260-why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints
• http://www.kimtallbear.com

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.