The categories and the types of care we assign are very often tenuous and troubled in nature. The articles in this volume explore some of the intricacy, ambiguity, and even irony in our perceptions and approaches to “multispecies” relations.
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This volume explores some of the diverse niches created by humans in different times and places. The essays span the globe, from Texas to China, from Scandinavia to Papua New Guinea, exploring agricultural spaces and indoor biomes, human aesthetics, and Anthropocentric perspectives.
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Veit Braun explores the troubling and often contradictory nature of care, revealing the restrictions of simplifying the duality of caring or violent states.
Celia Lowe asks what it means to “write life” beyond the human as viral ethnography.
Susanne Schmitt explores the multifaceted ways in which the Syngnathid family is caught up in networks of care and storytelling.
Recognizing elephants as moral actors in the institutional space of the elephant stable, Piers Locke reconceives traditionally humanist ethnography as interspecies ethnography.
Ursula Münster shows us in her essay on silenced and silent practices of avian care in a postcolonial conservation landscape of South India, that care is never innocent, it plays out within established hierarchies and power relations, and it can reinforce long traditions of imperialism and exclusion.
Thom van Dooren draws on his current research on people’s shifting relationships with crows around the world to outline some of the core questions and approaches of “field philosophy.”
Etienne Benson considers the role that material interventions into the vernacular landscape play in solidifying our understandings of bodily difference across species.
Emily O’Gorman focuses on the Australian pelicans of South Australia’s Coorong region to examine how historical and contemporary ways of protecting these birds have been entangled with class politics, cross-cultural relationships, and the law.
