ABSTRACT
“Species interdependence is a well-known fact – except when it comes to humans.” Multispecies ethnography changes that by revealing just how bound we continue to be, across disciplines, by a preoccupation with the human as center and subject and by an allegiance to humanist paradigms of agency and value. Multispecies ethnographies give a different view, or multiplicity of views, with narrators traveling from one field of relations to another. And showing, through both closely observed and serially juxtaposed localities, stories of seemingly idiosyncratic human actions to be entwined within much larger ecological, legal, economic, and political stories of how power and value get distributed. Multispecies ethnography builds on the “reflexive turn” in late twentieth-century anthropology in which disciplinary self-critique became a focal point of ethnographic texts marked by heightened narratorial self-consciousness. Another word very often recurs in multispecies ethnographies: “entanglement.” With the burgeoning of transnational approaches to literary studies, the metaphors we favor for challenging inequality have changed.
