“Its Hand around My Throat”. The Social Rendering of Borrelia

This paper builds on biomedical and anthropological discourses of microbial agency to explore the important opportunities this discourse offers medicine, politics, anthropology, and patients. “Borrelia burgdorferi”, often termed “the Great Imitator”, is an ideal candidate for this discussion as it reveals how difficult it is to speak about Lyme disease without engaging with microbial agency. Based on 12-months research with Lyme disease patients and clinicians in Scotland, this paper offers a social rendering of the bacteria that reveals epistemologies of illness not available in medical accounts: the impact of social and psychological symptoms such as body dysmorphia, depression, shame, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide-related deaths on patients’ illness narratives. Divorcing agency from the bacteria silences these important patient narratives with the consequence of a limited medical and social understanding of the signification of Lyme disease and the holistic methods needed for treatment. This paper furthermore argues that the inclusion of patient worldings of Borrelia acting in the medical renderings offers a democratic determination of what the illness is. Finally, building on Giraldo Herrera and Cadena, I argue for a decolonization of Borrelia, exploring how the pluriverse both takes the epistemologies of patients seriously and reveals medical equivocation.

A Sea Cow Goes to Court. Extinction and Animal Agency in a Struggle Against Militarism

In Japan’s southernmost prefecture, Okinawa, the Japanese government is constructing a new military base for the United States Marine Corps despite ongoing local opposition and protest. Sea grass beds, which are potential feeding grounds of the critically endangered Okinawa dugong, are situated within the construction area. Because of its critical status close to regional extinction, the dugong was declared a Natural Monument of Japan in 1972, arguably putting it under protection of the United States National Historic Preservation Act in context of the base construction. Based on this assumption, and the dugong’s cultural significance for the people of Okinawa, the issue was brought to an American court, a rare case where an animal plays a central role in a lawsuit dealing with cultural property. Based on Eduardo Kohn’s anthropology beyond the human and his thoughts on life as a semiotic process the article explores the entanglements between dugongs and people. I argue that in this process dugongs play an active role. Through their interpretation of the generated indexical signs at the construction site and their resulting behaviour, these animals give humans the opportunity to convert their presence and absence into the sphere of symbolic human interaction.

“Agents of Description”. Animals, Affect, and Care in Thalia Field’s Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction (2016)

In this article, I explore questions of laboratory animal agency in dialogue with Thalia Field’s literary text “Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction” (2016). Using the framework of “care” (understood, following María Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, as a multi-dimensional concept comprising affect, ethics, and practice), I consider how Field’s synaesthetic descriptions of animal suffering create an affective response in readers, alerting them to a shared carnal vulnerability. Indeed, rather than anthropomorphizing animals through narration or focalization, Field “stays with the body” to consider how animals call to us not as experimental objects, but as ethical subjects, how they become – in other words – agents of the description (Stewart 2016). To develop this idea, I introduce the “practiced” dimension of care. More specifically, I explore how Field uses narrative strategies like first-person narration and second-person address, “bridge characters” (James 2019), and juxtaposition to morally structure the text and encourage “transspecies alliances” between readers and represented animals. I argue that such devices direct and train affect, allowing us to better appreciate how conceptions of nonhuman animal agency are always contextualized within particular sets of social, cultural, historical, and disciplinary frames and practices.

Conceptualizing Robotic Agency. Social Robots in Elder Care in Contemporary Japan

Japan is a hyper-aging society, and its government is encouraging robotic solutions to address elder care labor shortage. Therefore, authorities have adopted an agenda of introducing social robots. However, increasing numbers of people in Japan are becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic machines, and their introduction into elder care may thus be perceived as contentious. By exploring human engagement with social robots in the care context, this paper argues that rapid technological advances in the twenty-first century will see robots achieve some level of agency, contributing to human society by carving out unique roles for themselves and by bonding with humans. Nevertheless, the questions remain of whether there should be a difference between humans attributing agency to a being and those beings having the inherent ability to produce agency and how we might understand that difference if unable to access the minds of other humans, let alone nonhumans, some of which are not even alive in the classical sense. Using the example of an interaction between an elderly woman and a social robot, we engage with these questions; discuss linguistic, attributed, and inherent agencies; and suggest that a processual type of agency might be most appropriate for understanding human-robot interaction.

Distributed Skills in Camel Herding. Cooperation in a Human-Animal Relationship in Somaliland

This article examines interspecies cooperation in camel herding in Somaliland. It presents the case of a particular joint activity in this task-scape: moving a camel herd, by leading and driving it, from the night-camp to the daytime grazing area and back. The analytical aim is to clarify the role that skills and nonhuman agency play in the constitution of cooperative human-camel relationships. On the basis of empirical data, collected in a multispecies ethnographic project by following and observing one herd and herder closely, this article demonstrates how nonhuman agency, as an individual capacity to engage in an activity and an epistemological potential, manifests in this human-camel cooperative task. Cooperation is made possible through human-camel sociality and intersubjectivity, through the ability to interpret and respond to each other, and it depends on the empathetic acknowledgement of the enabling or disabling powers of each counterpart, her or his agency. Leading and driving camels is a skilled practice requiring the responding and enabling capacities of the cooperation partner. Hence, it is a case of distributed skills – distributed in the sense that skills of humans and nonhumans are intertwined in this practice, that they complement each other.

Is Skrei a Historical Norwegian Figure? The Nomadic Symbiosis of Fish and Humans in the Lofoten Islands

This paper draws from short ethnographic fieldwork and collected oral histories in the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway in 2019. In this paper I follow “skrei”, the Norwegian codfish (Gadus morhua). I explore what I call the “nomadic symbiosis” of islanders and skrei via their diachronic entanglements, as these appear in historical and present narratives, in changing ideas around economic development and progress, but also in the changes in the physical and political landscapes. These moments of connection, all challenge human-centric views arguing for skrei’s agency in cuisine-making, but also vis-à-vis identity-making, as skrei became recognized conjuring a newfound sense of belonging and becoming part of an imagined community within the Lofoten islands and beyond. I argue that these meaningful interactions create worlds that decenter human agency and revisit the notion of cuisine and nation-building processes as truly multispecies entanglements.

Animalismo e non violenza. L’incidenza della lezione gandhiana sul pensiero di Tom Regan

In opposition to the anthropocentric model of domination, in Gandhi as in Regan there is the full recovery of an ethical-philosophical tradition based on the model of kinship or fraternity and that insists on the possibility of extending the rules of justice to all living beings. The result of this perspective is the duty of vegetarianism and the radical opposition to any practice that treats animals as means at the service of human interests. But Gandhi’s lesson is particularly useful both to address the properly political issues arising from animal ethics, that are at the heart of Regan’s philosophy (starting with the debate on the nature and justification of animal rights theories and their possible inclusion in the political community), and to define the most appropriate non-violent fighting strategies for the achievement of the aims of animal rights defenders.