by Eben Kirksey, Craig Scheutze (University of California, Santa Cruz) & Nick Shapiro (University of Oxford)
Cite as: Kirksey, Eben, Craig Schuetze & Nick Shapiro (2011) Poaching at the Multispecies Salon: Introduction. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 99/100: 129 (Download article PDF)
Animal others and multispecies familiars have been of concern to anthropologists at least since Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1868 monograph The American Beaver and His Works. But, during the 20th century, such critters became marginalized in the anthropological imaginary. Biological anthropologists came to focus on the primate kin of Homo sapiens, while cultural anthropologists began to shine the spotlight almost exclusively on anthropos (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). As the science wars of the 1990s generated serious fault lines in the discipline, many contended that the sciences of human biology had little to say to cultural analysis. The “sacred bundle” of the four fields (cultural, biological, linguistic, and archaeological) began to come unwrapped (Segal & Yanagisako 2005).
An emerging cohort of “multispecies ethnographers” is reengaging with elements of biology. These scholars have started to bring creatures from the margins of the discipline – organisms often regarded as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols – back into the crosshairs of ethnographic studies and cultural analysis (reviewed in Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). There has been a recent flurry of work about natural-cultural history that departs from scholarship in science studies (i.e., Haraway 1991; Latour 1993) and animal studies (i.e., Haraway 2003; Franklin 2007), to explore human entanglements with fungi, microbes, as well as charismatic megafauna and flora. The 2010 meetings of the Society of Cultural Anthropology – “Natureculture: Entangled Relations of Multiplicity” – was just one site where ethnographers began to revisit some of these foundational subjects of the discipline.
Multispecies ethnographers gathered in November 2010 during The Multispecies Salon – a series of panels, round tables, and events in art galleries that have been taking place biannually, on the margins of the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), since 2006. The Multispecies Salon panel in New Orleans orbited around recently published and forthcoming texts by biological anthropologists, multispecies ethnographers, and scholars who represent kindred inter- and intra-disciplinary formations. We staged a lively discussion where authors-met-authors. Rather than conventional 15-minute papers about their own work, authors doubled as discussants, coming to the event with texts that they purloined from other participants. Panelists “poached” the writing of others.
References
Franklin, Sarah (2007) Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.
Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich (2010) “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25(4):545-687.
Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Segal, Daniel A., and Sylvia J. Yanagisako, eds (2005) Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press.
