(((Knowledge Ecology)))

I made a post about these videos maybe a year or so ago and I have just been reminded by Jennifer Gibson (who has some nice Tumblrs HERE and HERE) of just how good they are. The videos feature UC Santa Cruz professors Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway on the topic of multispecies ethnography. These videos also coincide with an edition of Cultural Anthropology aptly titled “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” You can find a partial PDF of that issue HERE and more info about the publication HERE. The editors’ overview reads:

In the November 2010 issue of Cultural Anthropology, Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich explore how creatures previously appearing on the margins of anthropology — as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols — have been pressed into the foreground in recent ethnographies.  Multispecies ethnographers are studying the host of organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds. A project allied with Eduardo Kohn’s “anthropology of life”—“an anthropology that is not just confined to the human but is concerned with the effects of our entanglements with other kinds of living selves” (2007:4)—multispecies ethnography centers on how a multitude of organisms’ livelihoods shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces.