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Ethnography Beyond the Human: The ‘Other-than-

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Marianne Elisabeth Lien & Gisli Pálsson

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ETHNOS
https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1628796

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

Ethnography Beyond the Human: The ‘Other-than-

Human’ in Ethnographic Work
Marianne Elisabeth Liena and Gisli Pálssonb
a
University of Oslo, Norway; bUniversity of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland

ABSTRACT
Recent calls for ‘other-than-human’ ethnographies draw attention to dimensions of life
that have allegedly been overlooked or marginalised in anthropological writings. We
take such critique as an opportunity to reconsider selected ethnographic accounts
asking: What was the role of animals and plants in these accounts, and what ‘hidden
stories’ may be discerned in texts and images? What might an informed and careful
reading teach us about relations of ethnographic production beyond the human,
and about the disciplinary conventions shaping how these relations could (or could
not) be conveyed? Juxtaposing older ethnographic texts with state of the art
ethnographic insight from the same region, we show that ethnographic attention to
the ‘other-than-human’ is not new, but its mode of expression has been thwarted:
Shifting theoretical concerns, and human exceptionalism, have shaped ethnographic
writing and rendered such modes of knowing less significant than they might have
been.

KEYWORDS Ethnography; posthumanism; other-than-human; animals; plants

There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem 1992.
You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself […] They are
better than beings because they know, but do not tell: and the noise in the pool at noon excels my
piano.
Emily Dickinson, 1862, Letter to Mr. Higginson.

In a retrospective film about Fredrik Barth (1928–2016), whose fieldwork spans several
continents and many decades, the professor is asked about his most enjoyable fieldwork
experience (Sperschneider 2016). Barth selects his fieldwork among the Basseri as his
favorite, pastoral nomads of Southern Persia, where he spent eight months in 1957–
58. But what made it so enjoyable?
Explaining his preference for this particular fieldwork, he details the combination of
being in an extraordinarily beautiful landscape together with large herds of animals,

CONTACT Marianne Elisabeth Lien m.e.lien@sai.uio.no

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. E. LIEN AND G. PÁLSSON

particularly sheep, which he describes as very innocent and very lovely, and the Basseri
themselves, who were gentle, poetic and artistic people. He continues:
and to move through that, with the animal herd, living close to the animals, helping at the birth
of the lambs. The first couple of days we would carry the lambs because they couldn’t move on
migration. And we would hang them over our neck, you know, karakuli lambskin and a warm
beating heart against your neck as you rode with this thing slung over your shoulder. There were
a lot of joys like that … Simply being with them.1

It is a particularly moving sequence of the film (during the 16th minute), in which the
aging professor’s eyes light up, his lips curl slightly as he raises his hands towards his
neck to indicate the position of a newborn lamb, and then taps his hand gently at
the side of his neck to mimic its heartbeat (see Figure 1).
More than fifty years after the event, his memories are still vivid, a clear demon-
stration of the affective dimension of fieldwork. The affect, in this situation, seems inse-
parable from Barth’s experience of closeness to animals in every sense of the term, and is
suggestive of relations that more recent authors of the non-human turn capture through
notions such as ‘being-with’ and ‘companion species’ (cf. Haraway 2008; Ingold 2013).
Such ideas, however, were not commonly articulated in the anthropology of the late
1950s. In Barth’s written account of this fieldwork, the monograph Nomads of South
Persia: The Basseri Tribe of the Khamseh Confederacy published in 1961, there are
few traces of such pleasures, nor do we learn much about his experience of being
close to animals (Barth 1986 [1961]). The physical sensation of a warm beating heart
against his neck is not mentioned at all.
Immediately after this brief interlude, the interviewer (Peter Loizos) switches back to
the theoretical achievements of Barth’s fieldwork among the Basseri, whereupon Barth’s
face turns serious again, as he describes his ‘depiction of the set of balances by which a
pastoral adaptation becomes possible’. As he elaborates on his own theoretical

Figure 1. The late Fredrik Barth reminisces the feeling of a newborn lamb’s warm beating heart against his neck
(Sperschneider 2016). Reproduced with permission.
 ETHNOS 3

achievements, the herd gets attributed with what he refers to as the ‘Malthusian
problem’, and the pastoral landscape is no longer extraordinarily beautiful, but ‘pastures
with limited carrying capacity’. Basic elements of ecological analysis are laid out in his
account of how diverse mechanisms of control lead some nomads to settle, and others
not. The Basseri analysis was to become the empirical foundation for his analysis of gen-
erative processes. But what became of the animals? What became of his affective
relations with the material world? And what became of the poetry? Affect and
emotion had not been theorised at the time of Barth’s fieldwork although they would
later set their mark on the literature (Lutz 1986; Stewart 2007).
This affective interlude in what is otherwise a sober retrospective account of a pro-
minent anthropologist’s life and work gives us a glimpse of ‘another’ Fredrik Barth than
the one he exposed through his own writings. A scholar with an impressive analytical
stringency and theoretical rigor, Barth did not offer much ethnographic redundancy in
his texts. Literary prose without rhetorical efficacy rarely found its way into his writing.
It is therefore all the more striking, when in his eighties, his face lights up so vividly as he
recalls the soft skin of Karakuli lambs. It is indicative of the ways in which the visual
media, photography and film, occasionally offer a ‘crack’ into something which is other-
wise left in shadows, a crack where – rephrasing Leonard Cohen – ‘the light gets in’. It is
also indicative of the ways in which theoretical concerns and scholarly debates of the
time of writing shape ethnographic accounts, sifting and filtering the unruly assemblage
of fieldwork experiences so that only that which strictly speaks ‘beyond itself’ gets
spoken. It is against this backdrop that e.g. Jane Goodall’s (1971) pioneering studies
of chimpanzees’ family and social life, and their tool-making capacities, became so
controversial.2
This special issue draws attention to the ‘other-than-human’ in ethnographic texts. A
singular focus on meaning, symbolism or utility (Willis 1990; Douglas 1966; Rappaport
1984) has often sidelined other relational practices. Inspired by a current turn towards a
more inclusive notion of the social, as well as calls for attention to generative and
affective relations beyond the human, we perform a kind of ‘archeology of the other-
than-human’ in ethnographic accounts. We ask what such accounts tell us about
other-than-human relations and practices, and about the nature of the relations
involved, but also how shifting scholarly attention to the ‘beyond’ may tell us about
anthropological inquiry more generally. Our concern then, is with ethnographic omis-
sions as well as with the ‘cracks’, i.e. the moments when the significance of the other-
than-human gets revealed in spite of disciplinary and disciplining efforts.
The other-than-human is not restricted to the ‘living’, in the conventional sense. Fol-
lowing the recent geological turn in the humanities and social sciences (see, for instance,
Raffles 2012; Palsson & Swanson 2016), humans necessarily dwell in the geologic,
especially during the current age of the Anthropocene, and, moreover, they are geoso-
cial formations. As Vladimir I. Vernadsky (1863–1945) emphasised, ‘the material of
Earth’s crust has been packaged into myriad moving beings whose reproduction and
growth build and break down matter on a global scale … We are walking, talking min-
erals’ (see Margulis & Sagan 1995: 49). The geologic, then, also has ‘agency’, it is not just
inert matter ‘under the direction of something nonmaterial, that is an active soul or
4 M. E. LIEN AND G. PÁLSSON

mind’ (Bennett 2010: 10–11). Appreciation of our mineral being draws attention to
points of contact between geology and social-cultural theory, crafting space for
down-to-earth form of ‘geopolitics’ that exceeds classic notions of the term, attending
to the other-than-human in the broad sense, to solid rock and the planet ‘itself’.
Our project responds to a set of intellectual and theoretical developments that have
inspired anthropology after the turn of the twenty-first century, that we may refer to
here as an emergent recognition of ‘sociality beyond the human’, which is. This
broader move is promoted by many names, including ‘more than human’ (Whatmore
2002), ‘posthumanism’ (Smart & Smart 2017) ‘posthumanist performativity’ (Barad
2003), ‘becoming with’ (Haraway 2008), ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helm-
reich 2010), ‘ethnography of life forms’ (Hartigan 2015), ‘co-domestic’ (Fijn 2011),
‘more than human sociality’ (Tsing 2013), ‘biosocial becomings’ (Ingold & Palsson
2013), the ‘anthropo-not-seen’ (de la Cadena 2015), the ‘non-human turn’ (Grusin
2015), and ‘co-species histories’ (Tsing et al. 2017), just to mention some. It has been
further elaborated through attempts to reconsider and challenge conventional
notions of domestication (Anderson 2004; Cassidy & Mullin 2007; Swanson et al.
2018) as well as non-animate materials such as ocean, stones, air, soil and petroleum
spills (e.g. Helmreich 2009; Raffles 2012; Flikke 2018, see also Guzman-Gallegos, this
volume). These sign-posts gesture towards lively debates and varied theoretical commit-
ments, and share an engagement with aspects of the other-than-human as something
more than merely symbolic, utility-based, or the anchor of cultural meaning.
Drawing on different sources of inspiration (from Deleuze to Law and Latour, from
Haraway to Whitehead and Tarde), they seek to avoid the assumption of human excep-
tionalism associated with dominant theories of twentieth century social sciences, and
refuse to grant an a-priori analytical privilege to the fundamental oppositions of
human/nonhuman and subject/object (see also Grusin 2015).
We take inspiration here from the way in which these proposals invite us to explore
other modes of knowing and being, and call for ethnographic attention to the ensembles
of relations that constitute both biosocial and geosocial becomings (Palsson & Swanson
2016). For us, attention to the ‘other-than-human’ does not signal a turn away from the
human, which will continue to be at the forefront of anthropological inquiry. Instead, it
signals a shift from a concern with culture and sociality as a strictly human attribute. If
‘holism’ is understood as a ‘comprehensive approach to the human condition’ (Bubandt
& Otto 2010:3), then a pursuit of holism in anthropology encourages us to consider the
associations between humans and other-than-humans (whether they are pigs or ances-
tors, spirits or machines, parasites or rock). For some, such an approach to holism
signals a posthumanist approach, and it is argued that ‘posthumanist approach helps
us to better understand the human condition’ (Smart & Smart 2017:6). Others
suggest a more restrictive use of the term, and prefer to see such an engagement as a
necessary extension of thick description that encompasses a ‘more-than-human social-
ity’ (Tsing 2013). Such extended sociality can be of many kinds, animate and inanimate,
beings and things, but also entities that are less tangible, such as spirits. While animals
are central in many of the ethnographic accounts in this special issue, our argument is
broader, inviting the attention to situations when ‘other-than-human sociality’ exceeds
 ETHNOS 5

conventional categories that distinguish animate from inanimate, and tangible from
intangible beings.
Our intervention is a critique of the way in which certain anthropological
approaches to holism, such as social and cultural wholes, and structural and functional
wholes, have shaped theoretical agendas at the expense of a more general (equally hol-
istic) concern with the human condition. Classic ethnographies, such as for example
E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s ‘The Nuer’ and Roy Rappaport’s ‘Pigs for the Ancestors’ have
been canonised as stories about segmentary lineage and warfare, or cyclically structured
connection between ritual and nutrition, while rich ethnographic details about the
other-than-human characters of the story are easily, ignored, or (as in the case of
Barth’s sheep) translated into something else (stock, calories, power).
Drawing the attention to ethnographic publications that are less famous, but
impressive and rich in ethnographic ‘thickness’, we wish to highlight how attention
to the ‘other-than-human’ has been integral to the anthropological discipline since its
very beginning. Sidelined by human-centered theoretical pursuits, such examples of
ethnographic holism have sometimes received less attention than they deserve. We
ask what a careful reading of such contributions might tell us about other-than-
human relations and practices, but also about anthropology’s shifting theoretical con-
cerns. Juxtaposing ethnographic texts with original ethnographic material from the
authors’ own fieldwork, this special issue asks how ‘other-than-human’ approaches,
invite different readings of the older material. Our intervention is both a critique and
an invitation to consider the richness and fertile excess of classical anthropological
monographs, as it is precisely this that allows us to do this exercise, many years later.
Hence, our review is an attempt to cultivate an ethnographic curiosity ‘beyond the
human’, even as we read texts shaped by different theoretical agendas.

Sociality Beyond the Human

Anthropology has conventionally adhered to the thesis of human uniqueness, focusing
on tool-use, language, and cognition; humans alone, it was assumed, made and had
‘culture’ (cf. Tylor 1994 [1871]). Against the backdrop of Darwin’s evolutionary
biology, distinguishing humans from apes was part of the early anthropological
‘raison-d-être’. It is therefore not surprising that sociality was explored as an attribute
of human cultures, and that sociality amongst non-human animals disappeared from
sight (Lewis Henry Morgan is an early exception, see Feeley-Harnik this volume).
Among non-humans, it seemed, sociality was, for the most part, either non-existent
or radically different, simple and pragmatic. A related assumption in anthropology
has been that only humans act and ‘work’. Such an assumption renders animals and
the material world more passive and less relevant to the analysis than they might
have been.
Near the end of the twentieth century, traces of a more nuanced approach to
non-human sociality began to appear. In the US, Gregory Bateson explored the
realm of biology, challenged human exceptionalism and is a precursor to what
was later to become biosemiotics, (Bateson 1972). Pin the UK Tim Ingold’s article
6 M. E. LIEN AND G. PÁLSSON

‘The Architect and the Bee’ (1983) argued against the Cartesian idea of animals as
automata, posing the question ‘do animals work?’, a question readdressed by
Gillian Feeley-Harnik in her article on Lewis Henry Morgan’s work on the American
beaver (see Feeley-Harnik 2014). A few years later, in his Introduction to What is an
Animal? (1988), Ingold challenged the anthropocentric view more broadly, indicating
that the comparative anthropological project itself might be the problem: ‘Does not
the anthropological project of cross-cultural comparison rest upon an implicit
assumption of human uniqueness vis-à-vis other animals that is fundamentally
anthropocentric?’ (1988: 1).
Jacques Derrida similarly suggested that philosophy tended to discuss ‘the animal’ in
the singular, almost invariably in contradiction to ‘the human’: ‘All the philosophers we
will investigate (from Aristotle to Lacan), all of them say the same thing: the animal is
deprived of language’. (2008: 32). While Derrida emphasised ‘structural difference
between nonhuman types of animal’ (2008: 99) he seemed to see no point in exploring
genuine ethnography. A cooperation of anthropology and philosophy on this score is
timely and urgent.
Over time, each of the indicators presumed to demarcate human culture from the
natural world of non-human animals proved to be flawed (Manning & Serpell 1994;
Descola & Palsson 1996; Mullin 1999; Whatmore 2002; Haraway 2008; Kirksey &
Helmreich 2010; Lien & Law 2011). Neanderthals turned out to have coevolved and
intermingled with homo sapiens (Kolbert 2011). Further ‘down’ the primate ladder,
chimpanzees were liminal species, endowed with cognitive capacities and socialities
that nearly made them human (Marks 2002; Cohen 2010; Palsson 2013). Humans, like-
wise, were presented as quasi-chimpanzees. Schmelz et al. conclude (2011: 2): ‘If we
define thinking as going beyond the information given in perception to make infer-
ences, we may conclude that not only is thinking not the exclusive province of
human beings, but thinking about thinking is not either’. Plants and honeybees are
now often granted cognitive abilities that previously were securely limited to
humans. In one account, the dance of the honeybee disturbs ‘“the great chain of
being” still at large … ; the picture of man (and other “higher mammals”) at the apex
and invertebrates in the basement of a hierarchy of ability and value’ (Crist 2004:
35). It seems increasingly difficult to exclude ‘the basement’ from the republic.
As John Hartigan makes clear in Aesop’s Anthropology (2014), the exclusive assign-
ment of social features to the human realm is both recent and somewhat unstable, and
there have been moments when this dominant form of human exceptionalism was not
assumed. Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1723) combines allegory and satire
with a theory of sociability that transcends sharp species boundaries. In Hartigan’s
words (2014: 18), this ‘naturalization of society allowed for “lawlike” forms of social
explanation and were the foundations for fusing “social” and “science”’, inspiring a
number thinkers (including Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau). It was the idea of such ‘lawlike’ explanations that led Émile Dur-
kheim to postulate a ‘social fact’ as something that cannot be reduced to other
domains (the biological, chemical or psychological), and should thus be taken seriously
in its own right (Hartigan 2014: 18).
 ETHNOS 7

While this insight sparked significant developments in sociology and anthropology,

it also drew a sharp line between humans and other animals, stabilising society and
culture as unique attributes of the human domain, while establishing the ‘study of
man’ as the study of social and cultural features (see also Lien et al. 2018). If social
relations are confined to individuals of the same species, serious anthropologists, it
was implied, needed not bother with the other-than-human: This has been the legacy
of social anthropology for about a century, but the delineation is not inevitable. Dur-
kheim’s contemporary, Gabriel de Tarde, whose formulation of society as ‘a group of
beings who are apt to imitate one another’ (Tarde Laws of Imitation p. 68, cited in Har-
tigan 2014: 19) is applicable across species lines, and has recently seen a certain renais-
sance through proponents such as Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour (Thomassen 2012).
Related attempts to formulate lawlike social mechanisms applicable across species
divisions came from biology, through scholars such as Jakob von Uexküll. Attentive
to the relation between individual organisms and their environment, Uexküll argued
that organisms perceived the experience of living in terms of species-specific subjective
frames of reference called Umwelt (see Schroer, this issue). In spite of his coining of the
term biosemiotics, and his broad influence on philosophy (including Deleuze), Uexküll
is hardly a foundational thinker for biologists. Just as, until recently, Tarde was fairly
marginal to developments in sociology, Uexküll remained marginal in his own field.
Their destinies in their respective disciplines as original but slightly dubious scholarly
figures are indicative of the way in which both the so-called ‘social’ and the ‘natural’
sciences came to be shaped along the same onto-epistemological faultline: One that
organises the world according to the realm of humans on the one hand and non-
human animals on the other.3
The twenty-first century saw the arrival of a series of attempts to introduce the other-
than-human into anthropological discussions, significantly expanding the comparative
horizon. Anthropology, it was argued, might be expanded and redefined as the study of
more than one species, as the ‘anthropology of life’; Thus Kohn encouraged anthropol-
ogists to practice ‘a kind of anthropology that situates all-too-human worlds within a
larger series of processes and relationships that exceed the human’ (2007: 6). Surpris-
ingly, given his otherwise inclusive notion of ‘anthropologies of life’, Kohn’s work on
the Ecuadorian Quechua speaking Runa, illustrates the resilience of the human-
animal divide and the idea of human exceptionalism. Here Kohn recreates ‘nature-
culture’ through Peircean semiotics, arguing that symbolic thought is a species-
specific property, ‘that which makes humans unique’ (2013: 55).
When Anna Tsing proposed the idea of a ‘more-than-human-sociality’ (Tsing 2013),
the value of paying attention to the ‘more-than-human’ had been advocated for a
decade (e.g. Whatmore 2002), yet her move seemed radical to many anthropologists.
What would it imply for ethnography to study social relations beyond the human?
Why would any anthropologist bother to ‘follow a spore’ (cf. Tsing 2014), explore
semiotic affordances of forests (Kohn 2013) or, indeed, trace the becoming of salmon
(Lien 2015), or emergent geosociality (Palsson & Swanson 2016)?
Given the suppression of the other-than-human in social theory, it is not surprising
that ethnographic observations of human-animal relations have often been ignored.
8 M. E. LIEN AND G. PÁLSSON

Ethnographic facts that could have challenged the anthropocentric assumptions regard-
ing social relational practices have been systematically overlooked. Assuming that the
term ‘social’ is restricted to the human domain, one has failed to notice how cross-
species relations are crucial to cultural as well as social reproduction, but also how
these relations are embedded in and constituted by a realm which also includes inani-
mate presences of many kinds.
This special issue is a collection of essays that seek to mine anthropological texts ret-
rospectively for traces of animals, plants and other non-animate presences and
materials, asking: How have ‘other than human’ relations of ethnographic production
inform anthropological scholarship, and how did it ground encounters in the field?
How did the translation from field material to text transform or even silence those
encounters?
We recognise that anthropology has been defined by ‘culture’ – and that this cultural
realm has been, by definition, a human realm (cf. Tylor 1994 [1871]). We also note that
this axiom has exerted a certain discipline, delineating the scope of ethnographic
inquiry for many generations of anthropological scholars. Noting the marginalisation
of animals and plants in many ethnographic texts, as well as striking transmutations
and silencing of other-than-human entanglements as fieldnotes are translated to analy-
sis (from hosting parasites, to spirit possession, to affective animal relations4), we ask:
what is the role of animals, plants, materials and intangible presences in anthropological
stories? Our guiding hypothesis is that while other-than-humans may frequently appear
in ethnographic accounts – visual and textual – they are rarely present on their own
terms (nor do we see many attempts to consider what such terms might be, cf.
Despret 2016). We are interested in the ways in which their presence was muted, trans-
formed, or mobilised in anthropological arguments, but also their unruliness, as in the
way a stray dog suddenly appears in a picture, disrupting an image carefully staged for
something else (as in one of Paul Baxter’s images; see Neil Carrier, Michael O’Leary, and
Gisli Palsson, this issue).
As we examine ethnographies of the twentieth century, we note a systematic ten-
dency for animals and plants to take on a minor role in social relations, (including
those of the ethnographer, see below) or conversely for cross-species relations to be
side-lined by other theoretical concerns. Often, the animals that do appear in the orig-
inal texts tend to be ‘forgotten’ when the ethnography is reiterated by subsequent scho-
lars, or trivialised, or translated in line with the theoretical argument that frames story.
Such marginalisation reflects the ways in which subsequent generations of anthropolo-
gical scholars have framed and adapted the ethnography in relation to shifting theoreti-
cal concerns. Only rarely have such concerns invited curiosity towards associated
worlds beyond the human, or quality of relations in what Schroer calls ‘more than
human communities of practice’ (see Schroer, this issue).
Recent calls for a less human-centered ethnographic approach challenge the notion
that humans occupy the top of the hierarchy of life forms. But a certain re-centering is
also taking place, such as in discourses on the Anthropocene, that build on the assump-
tion that humans have become a geological force. Despite ‘writing’ themselves into the
crust of the planet, humans, it is implied, are privileged beings, charged with special
 ETHNOS 9

responsibility to speak for Gaia, and to address the global environmental problems of
the Anthropocene. Considering the revisiting of the other-than-human in this issue,
one immediate question would be: How might Anthropocene discourses be aligned
with discourses that invite animals, plants and the planet ‘itself’ to the republic, granting
them agency, if not mind and intentionality? This question lies beyond the scope of this
collection of articles, but in worthy of investigation in its own right.

The Other-than-Human (Re-)Turn

The other-than-human, of course, has never been absent in anthropological accounts.
In a commentary on Robert Paine’s book Herds of the Tundra (1994), Ingold remarks
on the ‘preoccupation – amounting at times to an obsession – with reindeer, at the
expense of the people who manage them. … The pastoral Saami, along with their eth-
nographer, appear to have reindeer on the brain … ’ (2013: 6). Why would the other-
than-human need to return if it’s already on people’s brains? Part of the answer
relates to the issues of subjectivity, sociality, and companionship, as the case of
Fredrik Barth illustrates.
More recently, the other-than-human domain has increasingly been addressed by
scholars representing a variety of fields and traditions. Several fields, including prima-
tology, ornithology, and studies of insects and plants, have extended the notion of
‘theory of mind’ way beyond the human, recognising subjectivities and cognitive
capacities that earlier generations of scholars have tended to ignore. Somewhat ironi-
cally, many anthropological informants have taken these subjectivities for granted,
while the anthropologists (for whom attributions of subjectivity to animals might
have seemed ‘unscientific’) have situated such ethnographic findings in the realm of
‘native belief’, animism or anthropomorphism, rather than an invitation to further
investigation (into cospecies histories and mutualism, for example, see Tsing et al.
2017).
Attributing agency to trees, plants or infrastructures, one runs the risk, some argue,
of ignoring the achievements of anthropology as cultural critique, and undermining the
achievements of a more politically motivated scholarship. But it does not have to be that
way. If we take seriously the assumption that social life is a heterogeneous assemblage of
human and non-human beings, then ‘the question of political or social change becomes
a question of changing our relations not only to other human beings but to nonhumans
as well’ (Grusin 2015: xviii). It would also involve a heightened attention to relations of
asymmetry, suffering and exploitation, in relation to animals for example, a topic largely
ignored in ethnographic accounts. Hence, to extend our academic and critical concerns
to include nonhuman animals and the nonhuman environment, ‘should be a politically
liberatory project in very much the same way that earlier, similar turns toward a
concern for gender, race, ethnicity, or class were politically liberatory for groups of
humans’ (Grusin 2015: xix).
A closer look at some monographs reveals rich and complex ethnographies that treat
interspecies relations and other-than-human beings with great attention and detail.
Anthropological approaches to African pastoralism, such as E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s
10 M. E. LIEN AND G. PÁLSSON

monograph on The Nuer (1940), could, for example, be described as a treatise on the
domestication of cows at a certain historical moment. Evans-Pritchard himself paid
thorough and genuine attention to both people and cows, noting that: ‘In truth the
relationship is symbiotic: cattle and men sustain life by their reciprocal services to
one another. In this intimate symbiotic relationship, men and beasts form a single com-
munity of the closest kind’ (p. 36). In anthropological accounts of this classic mono-
graph, however, this interspecies approach to the notion of community is often lost.
Instead, the book has become a classic account of human social organisation; i.e. of seg-
mentary lineage systems and political organisation in the absence of a state. Similarly,
while Roy Rappaport’s account in Pigs for the Ancestors (1984) could be read as a story
of domestication in Melanesia, it is more often referred to as a book about cultural
ecology and the dynamic nature of socio-ecological equilibrium. A further example, a
case from symbolic anthropology, would be Mary Douglas’s work (1966) on Purity
and Danger. Here the utility of animals, notably the pangolin, is seen in light of struc-
tural analyses of conceptual contrasts and binary oppositions, signifying avoidance and
taboos.
These classics have been repeatedly reprinted and endlessly recycled in classrooms
throughout the anthropological community, informing generations of students and
scholars. In our re-visiting of selected monographs we have chosen scholars who
were influenced, and perhaps even constrained, by such thinkers, but whose ethno-
graphic and photographic material reveals a much greater attention to – or presence
of – interspecies relations than one might expect. Could one extract a genuine
concern with the singular other-than-human through the cracks of their text and
photography?
Our selection of monographs is based on a careful search for – not only the ‘A-team’
of authors of best-sellers but also those that were perhaps not so famous, but were/are –
for various reasons – rich sources of insight into the entanglements of their ethno-
graphic field, and into the disciplinary practices of writing that guided and framed scho-
larly writing at the time.5 Some of our subjects, notably Harold C. Conklin and Donald
Thompson, may be less famous than the others, precisely because they failed to obey
conventional disciplinary faultlines.
Several of the articles in this issue explore the usefulness of ethnographic photo-
graphs, going beyond the text of diaries, fieldnotes, and monographs (Vokes 2012).
Although the use of the camera and its accessories reflects the prior views and
agendas of the photographer, and the ethnographer may have considered her photo-
graphs as ‘mere’ tools for note-taking, we argue that the photographs themselves
may nevertheless provide additional and highly useful insight into issues normally
missed by the texts, including relations of ethnographic production that involves
‘other than human’ companions. This is due, partly to the triangulation that such
sources provide, but also to the way in which photographs, even when carefully
‘staged’ are rarely completely controlled. Thus, characteristics of the relations
between humans and their non-human companion may be inadvertently appear or
unfold, as when stray dogs that are otherwise silenced in the ethnography repeatedly
turn up in front of the camera.
 ETHNOS 11

Relations of Ethnographic Production

To explore some of the dimensions of human and other-than-human relations, we
propose to expand the notion of ‘relations of ethnographic production’, i.e. the ways
in which ‘ethnographers – as visitors or guests – meet their hosts (and how they are
met by them), how they manage their lives among them, and how they report what
they experience … ’ (Palsson 1993: 16). Recognising the presence of other-than-
humans among our human hosts in the field, and our own relations with them,
helps to outline different modes of involvement and responsibility, including those of
biosociality, mutuality, and companionship. As Ingold argues, ‘Why should the rein-
deer or the baboon not be one of us, or we one of them?’ (Ingold 2013: 16). But it
also involves a recognition of relations that are threatening, or potentially toxic.
How anthropologists, including those discussed in this special issue, bring life into
text and image depends upon a number of factors, their personalities and background
and their relations with their hosts, human and other-than-human. A somewhat neg-
lected but timely paper by Tapper (1988) refers to ‘human-animal relations of pro-
duction’ to illuminate the different ways in which the human and the non-human
are represented and the different relations and hierarchies involved. It is useful,
Tapper suggests,
to cast a Marxian frame around the classic typology of production systems, which are charac-
terized by specific human-animal relations of production. These systems are hunting and gath-
ering, pastoralism, agriculture and urban-industrial production. (Tapper 1988: 52; emphasis in
the original)

Tapper’s comparison elicits several relational modes characterised, by, for example,
reciprocity, cooperation, slavery, contract, protection, and exploitation.
Brightman (1993) takes a similar perspective, focusing on Cree-animal relations:
‘Marx could hardly have imagined an Algonquian labour process in which humans
and animals successively participate as producers of the other, the animals willingly sur-
rendering the ‘product’ of their own bodies and the hunters returning it to them as
cooked food, all figured in the idiom of ‘love’. But his reflections on an authentically
social labour process are evocative of the benefactive model of Cree-animal relation-
ships’ (1993: 188). Haraway extends the Marxian perspective to modern biotechnology
and the fragmenting of life tissue and organs:
[W]hat if the commodities of interest to those who live within the regime of Lively Capital
cannot be understood within the categories of the natural and the social that Marx came so
close to reworking but was finally unable to do under the goad of human exceptionalism?
(2008: 46)

There is a growing body of work on both the labour of animals, for instance the use of
laboratory animals, and the traffic of animal substances (Corbey & Lanjouw 2013). In
light of such developments, it may be useful to speak of biosocial relations of production
(Palsson 2009).
Ethnography is sometimes rendered as the art of cultural translation. Our notion of
biosocial (and even geosocial) relations of ethnographic production has its kin in textual
12 M. E. LIEN AND G. PÁLSSON

studies and translation theory. Translation theorists have often imagined a two-dimen-
sional space as translators navigate from one textual context to another, from ‘source’
culture to ‘target’ culture. Lefevere and Bassnett suggest there is more to the story:
… in practice translation takes place on a vertical axis rather than a horizontal one. In other
words, either the translator regards the task at hand as rising to the level of the source text
and its author or … the translator regards the target culture as greater and effectively canonizes
the source text. (Lefevere & Bassnett 1990: 11)

Reconsidering ethnographic classics, we take a similar perspective, attending to what

might have been lost in conventional readings and why we might take a second look,
zooming in on the mutual relations of ethnographers, interlocutors, and the non-
human. What, for example, can be learned about human-animal relations from
reading classical texts about domestication, infrastructures, relational practices, and
becoming with – amplifying what is already there. Such an approach underlines the
hierarchies of the ethnographic rendering of human/non-human encounters (Weiss
2016), using a variety of terms – reciprocity, cooperation, companionship, slavery, con-
tract, protection, domestication, and exploitation.
This means attending to entire ethnographic context and granting agency to the
other-than-human, even those whose relations to humans are parasitic, acknowled-
ging for example the microbiotic relations of ethnographic production (Benezra
et al. 2012). Harré (2009) recommends paying attention to all those participating
in what he calls the ‘living laboratory’, including insects, organic clocks, model
organisms, and language-learning chimpanzees. ‘What if a chimpanzee’, he asks
(2009: 10), ‘has its own agenda in interacting with those who are studying it?’
This is not, however, a transactional ‘dialogue’ in the single-speaker-single-listener
model of the ideal conversation imagined by Saussurean linguistics. As Lestel, Bus-
solini, and Chrulew argue, the
idea of dialogue takes for granted isolation as the initial condition, and sociability a state that is
superimposed on it. … The important point is that … dialogue … is a characteristic of the shared
life and not its condition. (2014: 140; italics added)

The conviviality of humans and other living beings should be seen as a polyphonic
chorus where speakers and context mutually develop a long and noisy conversation.
This is what Mikhail Bakhtin referred to as ‘translinguistics’; language, he suggested,
is embedded in the stream of life, it is ‘social throughout its entire range and in each
and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract
meaning’ (Bakhtin 1981: 259).
Drawing upon phenomenology, Lestel, Bussolini, and Chrulew seek to ‘take the
animal seriously’. Challenging the ‘realist-Cartesian paradigm’ of animal studies, they
fuse ethology and ethnography:
One truly comes here into an epistemic space to be invented that is very different from that of
the usual western science. It is precisely along these lines that phenomenology and ethnography
can significantly contribute to the understanding and effectiveness of ethology (Lestel et al. 2014:
141).
 ETHNOS 13

Collectively, the papers in this special issue contribute to such a fusion of phenomen-
ology and ethnography, seeking to open up some of the cracks in ‘classic’ ethnographies,
following the light, sometimes weak and sometimes striking, in order to imagine modes
of other-than-human ethnography.

The Articles
Feeley-Harnik’s article draws the attention to Lewis Henry Morgan’s book The Amer-
ican Beaver and His Works, juxtaposing it to his far more cited work on kinship, Systems
of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Completed at the same time (1868),
and written with the same pen, the different fate of these two books in anthropology is
indicative of how the discipline established itself through firm delineation of the human
from the non-human animal, and a focus on speech as something that is the property of
the former. For Morgan and his contemporaries, this distinction was much less clear.
Morgan’s goal in both works was to elucidate semantic structures of communication
beyond human speech. As Feeley-Harnik details, speech distinguishes humans from
animals, but animals have their own semantic structures of communications, including
corporeal-environmental structures and practices, which also structure human
relations, more deeply perhaps, than ‘mere speech’. Morgan’s perceptive work on the
industrious beavers, their plans, and engineering, echoed ideas which had surrounded
beavers for centuries. Hence, it might have offered anthropological understandings of
the other-than-human highly relevant for a dealing of humans and their environment.
Yet, Morgan’s message about the astonishing scope of the beaver’s work and intellect
sank like a stone, and his work has been largely neglected by anthropologists (but see
Sahlins 1976 and Ingold 1983). Revisiting the archives of Morgan and some of his con-
temporaries, Feeley-Harnik concludes that even scholars who tended to see the human
animal divide as a continuum failed to appreciate and engage with his work. While
Morgan explored the plurilinguistic skills of his various interlocutors, he had compli-
cated relations with both the beavers and the people he drew upon, the Ojibwe
Indians. Feeley-Harnik points out that his work exemplifies the so-called ‘observer’s
paradox’; in getting close to the lifeways of the nocturnal beavers, and in establishing
(through his proximity to the scene), their skills and constructions, he contributed to
their destruction. The mode of biosocial relations of ethnographic production charac-
terising Morgan’s work foreshadows a contemporary concern with what may be
described as ‘sacrifice’, ruining for human purposes, indicative of the Anthropocene.
Natasha Fijn revisits the works of Donald Thomson, who conducted fieldwork in
Yolngu communities in Arnhem Land in the 1930s and 1940s, and with a particular
interest in relations between humans and animals. In addition to anthropological
texts, Thomson left an important legacy in the form of photographs, sacred artefacts
and botanical and zoological specimens. His powerful photography depicts encounters
between Yolngu and non-human species, offering insights into human-animal relations
partly concealed in his texts. Fijn details how Thomson actively engaged in a form of
more-than-human sociality during fieldwork which was exceptional among ethnogra-
phers in the region, a ‘multispecies approach’ to ethnography’ long before the term was
14 M. E. LIEN AND G. PÁLSSON

invented. His curiosity encompassed all kinds of relations, seamlessly questioning

human and non-human practices, and he treated his tamed animals as a kind of infor-
mants. Yet, his publications reflect a much sharper distinction between nature and
culture. His animal observations were published as natural science topics for a
popular audience, while his anthropological texts were much more bounded, ‘disci-
plined’, as it were, by anthropological conventions of his time. Unlike most of his con-
temporaries, Thomson was interested in Aboriginal Australians actually knew about
animal species. Revisiting Thomson’s rich field notes and photography, Fijn is able to
trace unique insight that was lost in his subsequent disciplinary publications, exposing
a rare and fascinating combination of natural history and anthropology.
The article by Carrier, O’Leary, and Palsson, focuses on the work of Paul T. W. Baxter
who conducted fieldwork among Borana pastoralists in northern Kenya in the 1950s.
the Borana and the Gabra of East Africa. Like Thomson, Baxter also left behind an
extensive collection of photographs from the field. Exemplifying anthropology in the
era structural-functionalism, Baxter was heavily influenced by his mentor and supervi-
sor Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, whose book The Nuer, an important contribution to
what might be called the British school of pastoralism.
Evans-Pritchard and his students and colleagues typically focused on the social
organisation of pastoralists, particularly indigenous political systems. ‘Sociality’ in
this sense was mostly a human affair. Despite the centrality of animals to pastoralist
societies, and despite Evans-Pritchard’s extremely rich and detailed account of Nuer
cattle, his legacy left pastoral peoples’ relations to their animals somewhat subdued,
or even ‘domesticated’ by theoretical pursuits grounded in a human-centred approach.
In their article, Carrier, O’Leary, and Palsson revisit Baxter’s extensive and detailed field
photography, now at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. What did it mean, they ask, to
pay attention to the other-than-human, and how do animals feature in Baxter’s photo-
graphs? By triangulating Baxter’s photographs with his texts they seek to fill in the
silences on the mutual entanglements of the human and the other-than-human, and
thus to shed light upon relational practices that may be silenced in the texts.
Harold Conklin was taught anthropology at Berkeley, by Robert Lowie and Alfred
Kroeber in the 1940s. During the following decades he did extensive fieldwork in the
Philippines, focusing on cultivation practices. Drawing upon his own Ifugao ethnogra-
phy, Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme revisits Harold C. Conklin’s Ethnographic Atlas of
Ifugao to show how the ‘excess’ in Conklin’s ecographic accounts of the jungle of agri-
cultural terraces offers an unexpected reading. Conklin’s book lends itself to a reading
that supports an understanding of other-than-human relations as relations of human
control, domination and exploitation of animals and plants. Yet, as Remme demon-
strates, the authors ethnoecological focus argues, in fact betrays this anthropocentric
story, and opens up for a rather different reading of the terraced landscape. Informed
by the notions of dwelling and interactivity, Remme throws light on what ‘hides well
between the lines’ in Conklin’s text. Conklin’s extensive use of imagery, Remme
argues, helps to fill in the broader picture of an assemblage of life forms, beyond the
dry text with its details, enumeration, and descriptions. The ‘sympoeitic’ caring for ter-
races is not a manifestation of human domination of territory, of management in the
 ETHNOS 15

modernist sense, but of relations of responsiveness, the mutual entanglement of

humans and a multiplicity of other-than-human beings.
Philippe Déscola is known for his contribution to the anthropology of Amazonia,
where he did fieldwork among the Ecuadorian Achuar in the late 1970s.. Taught in
the French tradition of structuralism, and a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss, his book
La Nature domestiquie; symbolisme et praxis dans l’ecologie des Achuar (1986) has
been widely read and translated, and is the foundation for much of his theoretical
work. Drawing on her own ethnography among the neighbouring Kechwa, María
Guzmán-Gallegos revisits the Spanish translation of Descola’s book, asking to what
extent Descola’s structuralist account allows an understanding of the specificities of
other-than-human entanglements. While she is sympathetic to Descola’s theoretical
contribution, she also notes how specific attention to gendered relations, and especially
to gardens as a female domain, have been sidelined. Concepts such as ‘mutual becoming’,
and ‘rendering capable’, along with a focus on gardening practices, she argues, allow a
broader understanding of the social, one that highlights, for example, the mutual depen-
dencies between a woman’s body, her caring and transformative abilities and her manioc
plants. A rich garden, she suggests, is made up of many species, the origin of which
Kichwa women trace to heterogeneous social relations. While her intervention is a cri-
tique of the foundations of Descolas typology, Guzmán-Gallegos concludes that his
modes of identification are still useful for challenging our concepts and ways of establish-
ing continuities and discontinuities between the human and the non-human.
Sara Schroer’s article takes us back, to Jakob von Uexküll, whose work from the turn
of the twentieth century has seen a recent renaissance in relation to current approaches
to the other-than-human and multispecies relations. Uexküll proposed a break from the
anthropocentric perspective that permeated the mainstream academic debate of his
time. Schroer’s article draws attention to the notion of Umwelt developed in his
book A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, an early attempt to understand
the subjectivity of other-than-human beings and their embeddedness in the web of life
they share with humans. Drawing on her own ethnography on falconry in the UK; she
revisits Uexküll’s original texts, with a view to their potential for insight as well as mis-
interpretation. Attending to the world from the animals’ perspectives, Schroer suggests,
helps the anthropologist to move beyond anthropocentric points of view that have set
their mark on intellectual debates for decades if note centuries. Observations of the
bonds of humans and birds of prey illustrate the need to ground subjectivity within situ-
ated practices. Schroer’s article is an invitation to move beyond humanist frameworks
and to trace how meaningful relations come into being through situations of learning in
which the researcher immerses herself ethnographically within the midst of multispe-
cies and multivocal world making, using their own lively corporeality as the necessary
baseline for understanding

Conclusions
In the making of anthropology, culture and sociality, as we have seen, became ‘huma-
nized’, firmly grounded in the realm of the human. Practices that have had the effect of
16 M. E. LIEN AND G. PÁLSSON

‘policing the faultlines’ have been numerous and powerful in the natural as well as the
social sciences. Accusations of ‘anthropomorphising’, for example, have been applied to
prevent or counter any attempt at imagining sociality beyond the human, and the traffic
of ideas and metaphors between the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ domain has been met with
suspicion on both sides of the divide.
It is time, then, to amplify the signs of the other-than-human in ethnography.
Mindful of the way in which human exceptionalism has dominated anthropological
scholarship for at least a century, the articles in this special issue ask how nonhuman
agencies and relations were ‘domesticated’ through theoretical appropriation that
placed humans squarely at the centre of anthropological inquiry. Informed by
recent contributions to human-animal studies, we have specifically sought to tease
out what ethnographic texts and images may render implicit, asking: What is
revealed in the photos, and what can be read ‘between the lines’ of ethnographic
accounts? How does this relate to what eventually becomes the main theme of the
account, once it gets published? As anthropological texts and images are often
rich in ethnographic detail, we search for subtle ethnographic information, asking
how the details might resonate with more recent theoretical concerns. How might
terms like biosociality, nature-cultures, and other-than human socialities invite
different readings of the material?
Drawing attention to biosocial relations of ethnographic production allows ethno-
graphers both to grasp the ‘other than human’ in their singular uniqueness and full
capacity, and helps to better understand the unfolding and representation of human
and other-than-human communion and collaboration in the complex stream of life.
Attention to the lively interaction, the affective relations and the communicative
exchange between human interlocutors and their other than human companions
holds the potential to enrich anthropology and to inform analyses more broadly
in relation to e.g. political economy, gender, sociality, materiality, spirituality, sus-
tainability and ethical responsibility. In this way, explicit analysis of biosocial
relations of ethnographic production contributes to the broader aim of holism in
anthropology.
While discussions of holism are not new to anthropologists – they have, indeed, been
around more or less since the beginning of their field – they have usually been focused
on challenging dualisms. Only recently have anthropologists seriously moved to the
next stage, beyond scrutinising the traps of the past, exploring, if not experimenting,
what abandoning dualisms would mean for anthropological theory and ethnographic
practice, outlining future avenues and opportunities (see, for instance, Otto &
Bubandt 2010 and Ingold & Palsson 2013). Such a perspective of holism, we think,
would have allowed Fredrik Barth, and many other ethnographers, to meaningfully
integrate the affective and the ecological, the individual and the relational, moving
beyond anthropocentrism, speciesism, symbolisim and utilitarian thinking. Plants,
animals, materials and intangible presences might then appear, as not only ‘good to
think’, and ‘good for use’ but as participants in ethnographic production on their
own terms, and in their own capacity.
 ETHNOS 17

Notes
1. Citation from ‘Fredrik Barth: From fieldwork to Theory’ (Sperschneider 2016).
2. Goodall’s approach has become less controversial since the 1960’s as more detailed studies of
cross- and inter-species relations have re-introduced the notion of sociality within the life-
sciences, making biology ‘more social’ (see, for example, Barbero et al. 2009; Meloni 2014).
3. Another expression of this can be found in Descola’s model of how humans construct their
world, according to which anthropology would be located within the scientific realm, as what
he calls ‘naturalism’. See also Latour (2002) on mononaturalism and multiculturalism, for a
similar point.
4. Cf. Barth’s striking silencing of the experience of the warm beating heart against his neck to
technical details about pastoral adaptation.
5. Our sample is obviously quite limited. None of the ethnographers on our list are women. We
tried to solicit articles on the ethnographic works of several authors, including Mary Douglas,
Frederica De Laguna (Travels among the Dena, 2000), and Audrey Richards (Land, Labour,
and Diet in Northern Rhodesia, 1939), without success.

Acknowledgements
This introductory article and those that follow are products of an international research project (2015–
2016) organised by Marianne Elisabeth Lien, focusing on Arctic Domestication in the Era of the
Anthropocene. We thank the Center for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of
Science and Letters in Oslo for inviting us and hosting us during a memorable and productive stay.
The authors are grateful for the generous funding at CAS that facilitated a workshop and subsequent
collaborative work. We also acknowledge the support of our respective academic institutions, the Uni-
versity of Oslo and the University of Iceland. Special thanks go to Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Frida
Hastrup, Britt Kramvig, John Law, Rob Losey, Andrew Mathews, Knut Nustad, Heather Swanson,
Sverker Sörlin and Gro Ween, as well as the Ethnos editors.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) Oslo, Arctic Domestication in the Era
of the Anthropocene (2015/16).

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