More-than-human Ethnographies

More-than-human EthnographiesMETHODS ON THE MOVE: ADVANCED POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH METHODS SCHOOL

Ontologies 2

Session Overview Ethnography: overview Aspects of research design Expanding the scope of human geography More-than-human ethnographies in action Thinking through (more-than-human) ethnographic and geographic practice

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I: Ethnography – an overview

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What is ethnography? Descriptive account of a community or culture

19th Century Anthropology

Ethnology: historical and comparative analysis of non-Western societies

Rise of ethnography and decline of ethnology First-hand empirical investigation

Becomes synonymous with Anthropology

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What ethnographers do People’s actions in everyday contexts

Takes place in ‘the field’

Collect data from a range of sources Exploratory orientation

Detailed research design not planned at the outset

Categories of interpretation generated from analysis

Focus is on few cases

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What are the problems with

such an approach?

Geography and ethnography Herbert (2000): persists as a ‘peripheral methodology’

‘Uniquely useful method for uncovering the processes and meaningsthat undergrid sociospatial life’

Humans create social and spatial worlds that are symbolically encodedand thus made meaningful (cf. Geertz)

Ethnography pivotal for geography Unravels processes: structure and action

Understanding meaning from within

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What ethnographers do Everyday life: what others do, what we do ourselves Significant development of the ordinary modes of making sense “Thick descriptions” (Geertz) The etic and the emic

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Epistemologies and politics Positivism

Model is physical science, search for universal laws, foundation is observation

Naturalism Studied in ‘natural state’, fidelity to phenomena not methodological

principle, meaning within communities

Critiques Constructivism, relativism

Haraway: ‘partial perspectives’

Reflexivity

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What is the difference between a journalist, a spy, an anthopologist and a geographer?

II: Aspects of research design

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Problems, cases, samples Foreshadowed problems (Malinowski)

All problems cannot be anticipated, ethnographic work cannot be predetermined

‘Events’ during fieldwork Social and natural

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Problems, cases, samples Developing generative questions

Opposed to ‘foreshadowed’ problems

Questions to which an answer can be generated through thick description

Questions that enable theoretical formulations

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Problems, cases, samples Idiographic vs. nomothetic Constant interplay between topical and generic

Rules, deviant acts, ‘objections’

The ‘site’ Foreshadowed or generated?

Geography and ethnography

Case studies and comparison Multi-sited ethnography

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Access Geertz The Balinese Cockfight

Approaching the field Existing relations, gatekeepers

Formal and informal settings

Ethical considerations To deceive or not to deceive

(Im)partial information

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Generating materials Interviews Informal conversations Everyday life

Mundane

Temporalities: rhythms

The body Walking (Ingold)| Finding one’s feet (Geertz)

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Analytics for reflexivity Personal characteristics (of the researcher)

Ethnicity, gender, caste, class

Field roles Leaving the field

Relationships, anxieties

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III: Expanding the scope of human geography

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More-than-human geography Whatmore (2002) Hybrid Geographies Nature and society not pure realms but an ontologically

heterogeneous field Latour (1993) We have never been modern

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“”

Humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside a sticky web of connections or an ecology of matter’Whatmore 2006, p.603

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Animals’ lifeworlds Ingold Perceptions of the environment Cree and scientific explanations of the caribou hunt

Animal offers itself

Evolutionary response to predators

Consistent with each worldview People narrate events through a system of beliefs, animals do not

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Animals’ lifeworlds Jacob von Uexküll – pioneer of biosemiotics Environments as meaningful to animals themselves

Umwelt (environment-world): perceptual and effector worlds

The tick: three ‘meanings’ Smell (butyric acid), warmth (skin), touch (hair, blood)

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More-than-human geography Questions about agency Skills and knowledge spun between humans and nonhumans

Crossing porous bodies and human-nonhuman divides

This has epistemological consequences What kinds of skills, knowledges, practices matter to a given situation?

Reorients the notion of politics and governance

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Multispecies ethnography Kirksey & Helmreich (2010)

How organisms are shaped by and shape political, economic, cultural forces

Becomings-with (Haraway 2008) to ‘multispecies becomings’

Cultivating attachments/detachments

Has become immensely popular with the so-called ‘species turn’ Critiques: Ingold (2014)

Locked up in ‘species worlds’

Argument against Latour (2005), Marx (1844)

Participant observation (or participatory experience) not ethnography

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Ethno-ethology, etho-ethnology Lestel et al. (2006)

Human and animal lives are not separate

Shared meanings, shared interests, shared affects

Extends ethnographic practice to artefacts (not just species worlds)

Etho-ethnology Moves ethology to new space: control and interpretation

Ethno-ethology New turn in ethnology: comparative understandings of animals

(scientific, vernacular, state)

Reorients ethnographic practice

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Questions?

More-than-human ethnographies? How might landscapes be conceived if we took seriously the actions,

agencies and lifeworlds of nonhumans? How can everyday life be understood when the social is expanded? Who or what might influence political situations?

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IV: More-than-human ethnographies in action

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Events |Fieldwork ‘Do not brew liquor any and everywhere, or for elephant attacks do

prepare’

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Political ecology Apolitical ecology Structural relations: gender, class, caste Landscapes: products of social and political economic relations

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Ecologizing politics, politicizing materials How alcohol forges encounters and influences political situations The vibrant potential of materials and micropolitics of cohabitation Effect of alcohol on elephant bodies and ethologies

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A: Labouring bodiesFatigue | Sulai liquor

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Labour: crop-guardingNegotiating landscapes: feet | Fatal encounters

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1: Labouring bodies: ‘drinkscapes’Alcohol as a hidden actorCrop-guarding: fatigue, having to brave elephantsAlcohol consumption exceeds envelope of pure human causality

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B: Volatile materialsSecond event: affordances of alcoholAlcohol in the wild | Modes of distillationElephants: macrosmatic, like saccharides; fermenting molasses

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Local political economies of alcoholSelling sulai liquor to supplement incomeStorage

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2: Volatile materials Alcohol is eventful Relations between alcohol and elephants in excess of technocratic

faith Elephant incursions trigger excise raids

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3: Elephants in the Assam landscapeStress in landscape | 80% forest cover loss179 reported incidents of house damage (2009-2011)Hyperaggression | Violence, elephant breakdown (Bradshaw 2009)Quest for intoxication?

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ConclusionsMaterial and micropolitics: ecologizing political ecology

Bodies, ethologies

Politics/political situations: not solely a human affairCannot pigeonhole elephant lifeworlds, people’s responses, mediating effects of

alcohol

More-than-human ethnographies

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Reflections on methods What were the actors followed?

People, animals, materials

Ways of sensing Interviews Informal conversations Ethology

Everyday life Mundane Temporalities: rhythms

The body Walking, drinking, working

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Questions?

Workshop What would be your research questions?

What literatures would you ground this in?

How would you generate materials? What might they look like? Who might your ‘key informants’ be?

How would you sense/apprehend nonhuman actants?

How might your ‘participants’ object? How would you analyze materials? How would you ‘write up’ your ethnography?

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Commodities and social life How would you conduct a more-than-human ethnography of a

supermarket?

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Animals and political economy How would you conduct a more-than-human ethnography of a

zoo?

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Spaces of waste How would you conduct a more-than-human ethnography of a

waste site?

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Commodities and social life Animals and political economy Spaces of waste

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Is geography the same as ethnography?

Summary Ethnography enables understanding (1) processes, (2) meanings

More-than-human geography expands the scope of ethnographic practice

Not just about humans and animals, but also things, materials, forces

‘More-than-human’ ethnographies are still in their infancy and is an area of exciting future work that warrants development

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Further readingBARUA, M. 2013. Circulating elephants: unpacking the geographies of a cosmopolitan animal. Transactions

of the Institute of British Geographers, 39, 559-573.

BARUA, M. 2014a. Bio-geo-graphy: landscape, dwelling and the political ecology of human-elephant relations. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 915-934.

BARUA, M. 2014b. Volatile ecologies: towards a material politics of human-animal relations. Environment and Planning A, 46, 1462-1478.

BULLER, H. 2014. Animal geographies II: Methods. Progress in Human Geography.

CRANG, M. & COOK, I. 2007. Doing Ethnographies, London, SAGE Publications Ltd.

FALZON, M. A. 2009. Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research, Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate.

GEERTZ, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, Basic Books.

GEERTZ, C. 2001. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton University Press.

HAMMERSLEY, M. & ATKINSON, P. 2007. Ethnography: Principles in Practice., London, Routledge.

HERBERT, S. 2000. For ethnography. Progress in Human Geography, 24, 550-568.

HODGETTS, T. & LORIMER, J. 2014. Methodologies for animals' geographies: cultures, communication and genomics. Cultural Geographies, DOI: 10.1177/1474474014525114.

INGOLD, T. 2013. Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, Abingdon, Oxford, Routledge.

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Further readingINGOLD, T. & VERGUNST, J. L. 2008. Introduction. In: INGOLD, T. & VERGUNST, J. L. (eds.) Ways of Walking:

Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

KIRKSEY, S. E. & HELMREICH, S. 2010. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology, 25,545-576.

LESTEL, D., BRUNOIS, F. & GAUNET, F. 2006. Etho-ethnology and ethno-ethology. Social Science Information,45, 155-177.

MARCUS, G. E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95-117.

PHILO, C. 2005. Spacing Lives and Lively Spaces: Partial Remarks on Sarah Whatmore's Hybrid Geographies. Antipode, 37, 824-833.

SMUTS, B. 2006. Between species: Science and subjectivity. Configurations, 14, 115-126.

TSING, A. L. 2005. Friction: An ethnography of global connection., Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

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