Cunning as... a Wolf Multispecies Relations Between Humans and Wolves in Eastern Siberia

Recent anthropological reasoning fostered by the ontological turn debate, has tackled the issue of multispecies ethnography: it deals with the lives and deaths of all the creatures that for decades have stayed on the margins of anthropology. According to this approach, animals, insects, plants and other organisms have started to appear alongside humans with legibly biographical and political lives. Focused on the changing contours of the ‘nature’ wriggling within whatever ‘human nature’ might mean, multispecies ethnography recalls that “human nature is an interspecies relationship”, as Anna Tsing would put it (Tsing 1995, 94). This last statement may also refer to the connections between humans and animals. In my paper I will take into account relations and connections between wolves and humans among hunters in Sakha-Yakutia, Eastern Siberia.

How to Become a Mushroom: A New Nature Ethnography of Fungi in Aotearoa

<p>This thesis proposes that the moment of interaction between a person and a fungus is transformative of both subjects. Using new nature writing techniques in tandem with multispecies ethnography, this thesis seeks to present a rich, autoethnographic account of my encounters with fungi in the native forests of the West Coast of Aotearoa. Drawing on five days of ethnographic fieldwork spent at the Fungal Network of New Zealand (FUNNZ) annual Fungal Foray in the township of Moana, I explore the affective, emotional, sensory, intellectual, and corporeal experiences of interacting with fungi. Using new nature writing as an ethnographic medium, I suggest that narratives that pertain to the researcher’s experiences can render new understandings of nonhuman subjects. In doing so, I explore both the transformative potential of multispecies encounters for the researcher and the researched, and the literary potential of multispecies ethnography to illustrate the encounters themselves.</p>

How to Become a Mushroom: A New Nature Ethnography of Fungi in Aotearoa

<p>This thesis proposes that the moment of interaction between a person and a fungus is transformative of both subjects. Using new nature writing techniques in tandem with multispecies ethnography, this thesis seeks to present a rich, autoethnographic account of my encounters with fungi in the native forests of the West Coast of Aotearoa. Drawing on five days of ethnographic fieldwork spent at the Fungal Network of New Zealand (FUNNZ) annual Fungal Foray in the township of Moana, I explore the affective, emotional, sensory, intellectual, and corporeal experiences of interacting with fungi. Using new nature writing as an ethnographic medium, I suggest that narratives that pertain to the researcher’s experiences can render new understandings of nonhuman subjects. In doing so, I explore both the transformative potential of multispecies encounters for the researcher and the researched, and the literary potential of multispecies ethnography to illustrate the encounters themselves.</p>

Thinking global health from the perspective of anthropology

COVID-19 has brought about political, economic, cultural, and interspecies problems far from medical areas, which challenges academia to rethink global health. For holism principle, anthropology offers valuable insights into these health issues, including the political economy of inequality, cultural diversity, and cultural adaptations, as well as the study of multispecies ethnography. These perspectives indicate that unequal political and economic systems contribute to health problems when people acknowledge disease and illness mechanisms. Moreover, cultural diversity and cultural adaptation are essential for providing appropriate medical solutions. Lastly, as a research method of studying interspecies relationships, multispecies ethnography promotes one health and planetary health from the ultimate perspective of holism. In conclusion, global health is not only a bio-medical concept but also involves political economy, culture, and multispecies factors, for which anthropology proffers inspiring theories and methods.

The Anthropocene

Soon, the Anthropocene will be formally submitted as a chronostratigraphic unit of the Geological Time Scale. This means, in effect, that Homo sapiens will be recognized as a dominant geological force on the planet. But how are anthropologists engaging with this concept in ways that inform larger debates? And what vital concerns or challenges are being raised by anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines as the Anthropocene becomes an increasingly familiar framework for understanding humanity and its place on Earth? One of the underlying motives for the recognition of the Anthropocene is to call attention to humanity’s pervasive impacts on the planet, which are understood as largely damaging for humans and other organisms that live on the Earth. However, the Anthropocene’s root causes still remain hotly disputed. Some see the Anthropocene as a broader extension of humanity’s long-established tendency of landscape modification or niche construction while others assert that the capitalist system is the underlying cause of the Anthropocene’s emergence. Extending from these debates, anthropologists and other social scientists have looked into the ways that the Anthropocene intersects with histories of race and racism, colonialism and neocolonialism, extraction and extinction, and what anthropological methods—from archaeological excavation to multispecies ethnography—can tell us about the differing dimensions of this confounding time. In a more philosophical vein, the Anthropocene has prompted academic researchers to question basic disciplinary distinctions, heuristics, and taken-for-granted assumptions. For anthropologists specifically, it has prompted a re-evaluation of human-centered analytics and inherited notions about what constitutes “the human.” Without a doubt, this literature and the scholarly debates that animate it will only grow and evolve with time, but here a focus is placed on the origins and politics of the Anthropocene, with specific focus on its relationship to historical and contemporary inequalities. This bibliography also considers what the Anthropocene means for socio-cultural theory, anthropological methods, and movements toward decolonization and collective liberation in a deeply compromised world.