A recent trend among a diverse range of studies within anthropology and geography has emerged from the field of post-humanism to draw attention to questions of people’s place in the landscape, to question categories of and relations between human, animal, place, and other more-than-humans.
In a similar vain to the ontological turn, these studies call into question the researcher’s analytical framework and analytical tools which assume a notion of one nature and many cultures: an ‘out there nature’ which exists separate to people (Lindblad and Furmage, 2016). Haraway (2008) and Tsing (2015), key multispecies thinkers, demand the discarding of human exceptionalism and an appreciation of the more-than-human connections that make up human lives. Whatmore (2006), publishing in the field of cultural geography, and fellow post- humanist Bennett (2010), also challenge academics to decentre the human and attend to the ‘vibrant agency’ of the more-than-human. These academics, among others, highlight how people, place and more-than-humans are relationally constituted through interactions and
entanglements. Emphasis is given to the co-agentive relational ways in which humans and more-than-humans interact; more-than-humans are given ‘voice’ and ‘taken seriously’ (Hartigan, 2016).
Many participants using this approach of de-centring the human, such as Whatmore (2006), connect their work with Latour’s ‘actor network theory’ which also descriptively traces the effects various human and non-human actants have on one another. However, multispecies approaches differ in their attempts to account for more-than-human intentionality (Candea, 2010b).
In order to take seriously and account for the intentionality of more-than-human entanglements (with humans), multispecies and more-than-human researchers encourage a move beyond theoretical subjugation of animals to symbols and other passive tools of human world-making. Studies which focus on symbolism and systems of classification ignore the ways in which such categories are sustained and mediated through social practices, dimensions of human-animal interactions, and the non-human actors themselves (Aisher and Damodaran, 2016; Lindblad and Furmage, 2016).
The move away from human-centric world-making illuminates the relational dynamics between people and the more-than-human through entanglements. More-than-humans are active agents in human society, rather than symbols of it (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010; Candea, 2010b). Haraway (2008) puts it, animals are not only ‘good to think’ but ‘good to be with’. ‘Social life’ does not simply entail relations between people but is co-produced through encounters between people and more-than-human things (Panelli, 2010).
In a podcast hosted by Lindblad and Furmage (2016), Tsing criticises the ontological turn for using human-centric cosmologies in attempts to account for the more-than-human. Like other proponents of multispecies ethnographies, Tsing moves away from cosmologies to a focus on practice and entanglements between humans and non-humans (including place) in order to account for their relational agency. Like Tsing, Hartigan (2016) and Wright (2016) praise multispecies ethnographies for being sensitive to everyday co-agentive relations and interactions between humans and more-than-humans in their mutually entangled ‘worlding’ projects.
This trend in post-humanism emphasises relational ways of knowing place. Aisher and Damodaran (2016) and Panelli (2010), in a review of multispecies ethnographies and a review of geographical studies of the more-than-human, respectively, comment on the ways that views of the world and history are rooted in place. Human and non-human relationships are place-specific and determine how places are felt, experienced and imagined. Moreover, in geographical circles, Massey (2006) shows how landscapes constantly emerge or ‘become’ through continual encounters between humans and non-humans, which take place within them. Likewise, experiences of people and more-than-humans constantly emerge or ‘become’ in relation to each other and place. Thus, space does not exist prior to interaction. Ingold (2007, p 31) also positions place as a “relational embodied achievement”: a recognition of the rich, intimate, ongoing togetherness of beings and things.
Wright et al. (2016) give voice to the land of Bawaka Country in North East Arnhem Land, Australia as a way to attend to the more-than-human connections that bind and constitute humans and their relations to other things. In tandem with the more-than-human trend in geography, they emphasise the place-centeredness and constant co-becoming of place through enacted connections between people and more-than-humans, but which includes the ‘supernatural’. For example, ‘spirits’ of those who once lived in Bawaka country continue as effective presences that constantly ‘become’ and co-constitute the landscape.
Wright et al. depart from the work of Haraway and Tsing, among others, by focusing on how daily enacted co-agentive relationality and emergence of all things (humans and non-humans) are structured by people’s cosmologically informed ‘rules’ of living. There is no place that is not bound up with how people, place and more-than-humans are continually co-created in specific known ways. In this way beings are place; becomings are more than networks of beings and things in a place, which is implied in Latour’s (2008) actor network theory.
Archambault (2016), continues the trend of multispecies ethnographies championed by Tsing and Haraway, by emphasising the experiential, lived, and felt aspects of ‘becomings’ between people, place and more-than-humans. However, unlike them and unlike Wright et al. who try and account for ‘co-becomings’ which people are often unaware of, Archambault makes the case for the continued relevance of anthropocentric analysis. Archambault’s enquiry into human-plant relations acknowledges its focus on human experience and does not attempt see the world from a ‘plants-eye view’.
Like Archambault, Galaty (2014), in a special journal edition focusing on multi-species ethnography, forwards an anthropocentric multispecies analysis among Maasai livestock herders. Galaty analyses how for Maasai, symbolism acquires meaning by being embedded in human-livestock interactions and intimacy. Galaty insists that for Maasai, tangible relations and experiential intimacy with their livestock creates ideas of what an animal is to a human and what a human is to an animal and how both relate to each other. This intimacy underpins the ways in which livestock are ‘‘good to think’’ and provide metaphors and metonyms for a wide variety of other social interpretations, such as meanings for society and personal identity. For example, a bull, to which someone has developed an intimate relationship with, is an appropriate sacrificial ‘holy symbol’ to represent that person, and link that person to Divinity and to society.
Yet unlike Wright et al., Galaty (2014) does not explore ‘supernatural’ elements that constitute livestock as ‘knowing beings’; and Maasai herder’s intimate relations with their livestock and place. Furthermore, in line with many multispecies studies, Galaty does not engage with the way Maasai cosmologies influence herder-livestock intimate relations. Perhaps an approach like Wright et al. that engages with people’s cosmologies would enable a different non- symbolic view of Maasai livestock-human relations, including sacrifice. For example, bulls may
be Divinity, not just symbolic of it.
In a review, Kirksey and Helmreich (2010) discuss how multispecies ethnographies centre on the ways more-than-humans shape and are shaped by political, economic and cultural forces. Panelli (2010), in a review of more-than-human geography studies, emphasises how social constructions, uneven power relations, and people’s engagement with politics incorporate the mutual, entangled ‘worlding’ projects of humans and more-than-humans. Archambault (2016) demonstrates the agency of more-than-humans in people’s engagement with conceptions of who they are, relations to others and place, and engagement with past and present politics. Wright et al. (2016) dwell on how ideas of belonging are wrapped up within daily experiences in which people, place and more-than-humans are known and ‘become’ relationally, within cosmologically bounded notions of what is possible.
2.3.6 Ethnographic approach to analysis of investments among Samburu pastoralists of