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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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