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Ethnography after Humanism
Lindsay Hamilton • Nik Taylor
Ethnography after
Humanism
Power, Politics and Method in Multi-Species
Research
Lindsay Hamilton Nik Taylor
Keele Management School School of Social and Policy Studies
Keele University Flinders University of South Australia
Staffordshire, UK Adelaide, Australia
v
Contents
Part I Foundations 21
2 Why Ethnography? 23
5 Visual Methods 89
6 Sensory Methods 111
7 Arts-Based Methods 131
vii
viii Contents
8 Hybrids of Method 153
Index 205
1
Introduction: An Ecology
of Ethnographic Methods
The idea for this book arose some years ago after we had completed our
first joint monograph together, Animals at Work (Hamilton & Taylor,
2013). In it, we presented a series of ethnographic vignettes of people
working with animals in some capacity or other, from those in car-
ing occupations, such as sanctuary volunteers, to those at the opposite
end of the spectrum working in abattoirs. We spent many hours, days
and, in fact, years interviewing people and observing places where ani-
mals and humans laboured together in some fashion. This took us to
some interesting and unusual settings: veterinary surgeries, animal shel-
ters, meatpacking plants and farms. We noticed that work with animals
took very different forms, from the close-up intimacy of the rescue shel-
ter to the distant, strictly zoned and highly mechanised factory floor of
the abattoir. While doing this fieldwork that interrogated meanings of
humanity and animality, we analysed modes of identity construction for
both human and animal groups, and assessed attitudes towards other spe-
cies. In doing so, we realised that this kind of ethnographic work nec-
essarily required us to acknowledge that we, as humans, were the ones
doing the research and the writing and that the animals, while present
together (Hamilton & Taylor, 2013) was the almost complete lack of
methods tailored to understanding human–animal interactions and
relations. Our use of ethnography accomplished a detailed portrait of
the entanglements of human and animal lives in the places we studied
them, but we felt a persistent niggle that despite our shared emancipa-
tory agenda, we were privileging the perspective of the human workers in
these organisations and were far less able to speculate about alternative,
animal subjectivities that co-existed in them. In doing our fieldwork, we
openly encouraged humans to tell us what they thought or suspected
about other beings and their perspectives; we asked for opinions and
ideas about the animals they worked with and we took their responses
seriously as internally logical and rational beliefs. We were not, however,
equipped to find a more direct route to be able to listen for and to the
voices of animals (so to speak). They remained largely silent, and there-
fore absent, throughout our tales from the field.
Robinson (2011, p. 6) argues that we humans are entangled by vari-
ous identities, and representing these within the research endeavour is
“confusing, amazing, and sometimes downright messy”. In short, our
characters and identities—be they human or otherwise—compose what
Eduardo Kohn (2007, p. 4) calls an ecology of selves in social life, an
ecology formed organically, naturalistically and independently by living
beings existing and working together, interacting and conversing. And it
is this confusing, amazing and messy ecology of selves which we are seek-
ing, as ethnographers, to account for in some way. It is not dissimilar to
the “anthropology of life” that Kohn has advocated as necessary (2007,
p. 6) to demonstrate that humans are only one part of a larger intercon-
nected web of agencies and that “all-too-human worlds” exist “within a
larger series of processes and relationships that exceed the human”. It is
a form of social life which is inadequately mapped, frequently misun-
derstood or just ignored. The question we have both deliberated over for
some years now is how we can begin to document this—to develop meth-
ods that allow us to see and understand the beyond-the-human world.
Ethnographic work is evolving towards a variety of different special-
isms, for sure, but are we ever really going to be able to tell a mixed spe-
cies story well enough, especially using a method predicated on writing
by and for humans? Our frustrations with the limits of existing fieldwork
6 Ethnography after Humanism
have been echoed by other scholars recently and a new buzzword, that of
multi-species ethnography has emerged. But what is multi-species ethnog-
raphy if, indeed, it is a method at all? Where has this development come
from? And what are its possibilities and limitations? These are the second-
ary set of questions that this book addresses. Our hope is that in writing
it, we will help to support and legitimise the rigorous endeavours of the
many hundreds of ethnographers who are now seeking to take a closer
look at human–animal relationships. It is worth noting, however, that we
have serious concerns with narrow labels like “multi-species ethnogra-
phy” and are reluctant to badge ourselves as multi-species ethnographers.
Given our concern about narrow labels as constraints, we use more
generic terms “multi-species methods”, “human–animal ethnography” or
“posthuman methods” consciously and interchangeably throughout the
book. When we do refer to multi-species ethnography, we do so to signal
narrow conceptions as used by those undertaking the work themselves.
Furthermore, while we call on a number of theoretical and philosophical
concepts, for reasons of coherence, we locate our own enquiry within
the field of human–animal studies, an area of study which—over the
last decade or so—has coalesced into a more recognisable field, variously
termed anthrozoology, human–animal studies, animal studies or criti-
cal animal studies. Like any academic field, it is not without its internal
cleavages or disputes, but it is a cohesive enough group to be considered
a field (which we choose to refer to generically as human–animal studies
throughout).
Our terminology reflects a practical choice on our behalf as we do
not wish to catalogue the differences of a field to those who have little
interest in internal politics, nor do we wish to have to write out the
different names every time we make mention of the field. The divi-
sions, which are often heartfelt and entirely real, can be difficult to
identify and are always contested so we could not pinpoint them to
everyone’s approval even if we decided to try (readers interested in
the emergence of the field and its differences are referred to Taylor &
Twine, 2014). Where we believe they matter most, we mention them
in the text. What unites this disciplinarily and ideologically disparate
field, however, is an interest in human relations with other animals,
which may include individual relations between different species or
1 Introduction: An Ecology of Ethnographic Methods
7
may focus upon societal and cultural relations with, and attitudes
towards, animals.
It is important to acknowledge, then, that all the terms used in the
field, including our own choice of human–animal studies here, are prob-
lematic. In large part, this is because they reinstate the binary of human
vs animal that our scholarship in this area is trying to problematise. They
are also problematic because they assume animal as a generic category,
one which includes a vast array of different beings whose (often glori-
ous) differences should not be overwritten by simply labelling them ani-
mal. By extension, “animal” then comes to stand for “not human”, which
underlines that our terminology can shore up our pretensions to human
superiority. This, too, is problematic.
Our reservations about labelling human–animal research as multi-
species ethnography (even though it is an emergent paradigm) are that
it may become yet another novel way to understand the human, and
so, perhaps, inadvertently, reinscribe the very human–animal binaries
it purports to deconstruct. For example, Kirksey, Hannah, Lotterman,
and Moore (2016), in an attempt to “render visible the ongoing violence
taking place in laboratories behind closed doors”, subjected Loretta, an
African clawed frog, to an “outmoded pregnancy test” (p. 37). According
to the authors of the paper written about this public experiment, they
started “from a position of non-innocence, confronting the routine vio-
lence of experimental practices face-to-face with a captive frog” to con-
sider “how humans have become dependent on complex entanglements
with animals, ecosystems and emergent biotechnologies” (p. 38). While
the apparently unethical nature of this project is given a token mention,
much more is made of how it enabled those conducting it to blur “the
boundaries between performance art, science, and ethnography” (p. 37).
This is a clear example of how narrowly conceived multi-species ethnog-
raphies can fall into the trap of prioritising human knowledge over the
material and lived realities of what we feel amounted to animal abuse
with limited interest or application to questions beyond the extremely
narrow agenda of this particular project. As Dinker and Pedersen (2016)
note, it is worrying that we can “gloss over asymmetric human–animal
power relations” in pursuit of new methods, methods that may even con-
stitute “new euphemistic instantiations of human narcissism and desire
8 Ethnography after Humanism
Contents of the Book
In this book, we consider how ethnography could utilise different forms
of data gathering and interpretation and propose new possibilities for
designing research which draws on a blend of literatures, theories and
techniques to offer a pragmatic step forward in methodology; a way of
studying social spaces without the unwitting suppression of species that are
other-than-human. To make this ambitious project more reader-friendly,
we have divided the book into two parts: Foundations and Fieldwork.
“Foundations” considers the philosophy of research approach and design,
14 Ethnography after Humanism
making the case for the adaptation of ethnography for social actors of all
species. The Fieldwork part then takes these philosophical arguments and
places them into practical context by speculating on a number of tools,
methods and techniques that multi-species researchers might find help-
ful or inspiring. Each part can be taken alone or read in the context of
the whole book just as each chapter can be read alone or in the context
of others.
In the first part of the book, we are concerned with the context of
research methodology and begin by considering ethnography’s intellec-
tual heritage and approach. We think about how and why this makes it a
suitable vehicle for a multi-species agenda. And while we think ethnogra-
phy itself might be a useful method to study human–animal relations, we
broaden this by arguing that some of its foundational principles might
be adapted to include different methods in order to bring other animals
into our research. We then draw on this contextual analysis to call for
a change in the way that ethnography is conceived—not as a purely
anthropocentric suite of methods for researching human life-worlds but
as an approach which could and should move towards a more compre-
hensive and inclusive view of social relations. We go on to consider the
contemporary research environment and investigate how changes in the
types and locations of methods give rise to challenge and possibility in
equal measure. We do this to set the scene for later sections on the prac-
ticalities of research and to get the reader thinking about some of the
basic—but difficult to resolve—problems when planning a multi-species
research project.
Chapter 2 opens up the approach of ethnography and considers how
this method has changed over time. In charting some of the key moments
or “turns” in its history, we highlight two of its key strengths: its critical
and emancipatory agenda on the one hand, and the literary potential for
documenting nuanced social scenarios on the other. These two strengths
lay the foundations for a multi-species ethnographic approach to research
design for understanding social interactions across the species borderline.
We follow this in Chap. 3 by asking why and how we might want to lis-
ten for the voices of animals, by building the case for change. We discuss
the political and philosophical difficulties of taking a posthuman view
in conducting our research and outline the interconnected (or we could
1 Introduction: An Ecology of Ethnographic Methods
15
for public engagement and for opening out the world of research to a
greater audience. Chapter 8 sets out with a different aim: to investigate
the potential of blending different disciplinary knowledges and modes of
working in mixed methods or through interdisciplinary research designs.
In considering the potential of differently skilled researchers working in
teams, providing new research questions and lenses with which to view
findings, we note the problems of bringing together different research
paradigms and different ideas about what constitutes knowledge (and the
representation of that knowledge). We speculate about the term “hybrid-
ity” as a metaphor of interdisciplinary work, suggestive of the transgres-
sion of usual disciplinary boundaries and divisions. While offering no
clear solutions to the difficult problems that can result from hybrids of
research, we suggest there are grounds for hope.
Chapter 9 turns to one of ethnography’s most important processes—
writing. We consider its literary nature as a means of telling stories but
also consider the inadequacies of writing and how emancipatory theory
such as posthumanism and feminism can inform a different type of
writing process. We consider the role of advocacy in our writing about
social settings by discussing the idea that speaking for animals may pres-
ent a partial way forward in ensuring their interests are accounted for
in some way. While under no illusions that advocacy is an explicit act
of humans speaking on behalf of another agent or actor, our argument
in this chapter is that this presents one (of very few) options open to us
when seeking to bring animals into our writing; arguably ethnography’s
most important tool of dissemination. Acknowledging the embodied and
inescapable reality of being human and communicating in human ways,
we nonetheless seek to reflect on it critically, openly and with a view to
provoking further thoughts on how writing can be done differently.
To conclude, we are aware that animals communicate in ways that are
often beyond human comprehension, engage in behaviours alien to our
own and exist in their own unique life-worlds, and that it is provocative
to ask whether, by seeking to take special note of their agencies in social
science research, this book is looking for answers to puzzles that we have
no way of solving. However, even if this is the case, simply omitting or
ignoring the presence of other animals in our social lives and thus in our
research is not the solution, no matter how discomforting it might be to
18 Ethnography after Humanism
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Part I
Foundations
2
Why Ethnography?
This chapter asks: Why is ethnography the right approach for studies of the
interactions and relations between humans and other animals? Our focus is
on ethnography (rather than other qualitative approaches) for two rea-
sons. The first is because it has been infused by a strong liberal and eman-
cipatory agenda which lends itself to critical, boundary-pushing and
inclusive research. This makes a good starting point for considerations of
multi-species settings that, by their very nature, push taken-for-granted
(academic and epistemological) boundaries. The second is that we think
ethnography—with its emphasis upon thick description and nuanced,
poetic writing—holds much promise for the documentation of human–
animal interactions and relationships. As we shall show in the following
chapters, ethnographic work has proven analytical strength in unravelling
the contradictory, paradoxical aspects of human practice and the subtle
workings of power. We argue this ethic could be extended fruitfully in a
number of creative directions to enhance understanding of human–ani-
mal contexts and, in doing so, take research beyond the narrow confines
of traditional and hegemonic humanism. In what follows we begin to
explore this argument by considering the case for posthuman ethnography
‘from the inside out’ (Burford, 2015). As Hammersley (2006) states: ‘The
task [of ethnographers] is to document the culture, the perspectives and
practices, of the people in these settings. The aim is to get inside the way
each group of people sees the world’ (p. 4) and we would add to this: sees
and experiences a world shared with other species.
As to how this ‘getting inside’ works practically, it is helpful to refer
to the etymology: ethno relates to the human while -graphy relates to
the written representation of those humans. Thus, ethnography requires
that the researcher is physically and mentally ‘present’ in the field and
can then write about the speech, behaviour, routines and patterns and—
more challengingly—the sensory atmosphere of that particular place.
Traditional ethnography has made use of various techniques such as
work-shadowing, interviews, focus groups, and content analysis. Yanow
and Schwartz-Shea (2015) helpfully summarise ethnographic work as
a trio of observation, interaction and text analysis which can be inter-
changeable. Hence, ethnographers may carry a voice recorder, notepad
and pen or tablet for keeping track of what has happened and what has
been said and done. The fieldnotes taken in situ form a cornerstone of
the method, a way for researchers to detect recurrent themes, ideas and
issues. Because of the need for immersion, ethnographers tend to inves-
tigate a small number of cases, perhaps even one, and unlike quantitative
researchers they do not depend upon statistical significance to produce
worthwhile findings. Indeed, the fieldnotes become their data and it is
their analysis that provides the commentary and theorisation of the site.
What is apparent to many ethnographers, however, is that in order to
do justice to this process, one has to truly understand a field, an area’s
social capital and culture, its community and values, its objects and mate-
rials and the ways that these are enrolled in various routines and practices.
This ‘getting inside’ can be described as carving out a niche for participa-
tion and it is important for the deployment of the specific tools of the
trade—work-shadowing, note-taking, interviewing and so on—to take
place naturalistically. Simply turning up with a notepad does not provide
the quasi-insider status that is so often required to get access to the most
interesting data. By virtue of the subjective nature of this embodied and
literary approach, good ethnography often rests upon being in the field for
a long period of time and on the development of careful observations from
28 Ethnography after Humanism
Ethnography in Context
In this section, we turn to the historical context of this approach by
examining the work of some of the earliest ethnographers. Rather than
acting as a historical footnote, we think this is an important analytic step
in reconfiguring the methodological co-ordinates of contemporary eth-
nography towards the study of mixed species settings. Ethnography (as it
currently stands) is attuned to and informed by a number of theoretical
approaches that put inclusivity at its heart; not just posthumanism but
postcolonialism, feminism, queer and ecocritical theory (to name just a
few). These resources support and anchor forays into the extant human/
animal borderlands by creating a liberal and emancipatory empathy for
‘the other’. They also centralise and problematise the workings of power
which are crucial to our understandings of (how we treat) those ‘others’.
But they do not arise from nowhere and can be tracked to a series of
‘turns’ and trends that have prioritised different ideas through time.
Ethnographic research—as a broad set of techniques along the lines
hitherto described—has ancient and venerable roots. In fact, as early as
the third century B.C., Herodotus travelled around ancient Greece and
the Middle East to document the political and social forms he discovered.
He published these accounts in a vast, nine-volume manuscript entitled,
History (which, in Greek, can be translated as Enquiry). More modern
forms of ethnographic writing, however, are exemplified by the anthropo-
logical studies of small, rural and often remote societies that were under-
taken by researchers such as Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) and Alfred
Radcliffe-Brown (1922) who participated in tribal communities over
long periods to document their social arrangements, traditions, myths
30 Ethnography after Humanism
and belief systems. These early ethnographers tended to reside in the field
for a year or more, aiming to live in remote and ‘primitive’ settlements by
learning the local language or dialect and, to the greatest extent possible,
by participating in everyday life. They collected objects, drew maps and
diagrams, collated data such as genealogical information and interviewed
local people. This method was called participant observation.
Malinowski spent a number of years in the Trobriand Islands of
Melanesia, publishing his findings in the now classic monograph Argonauts
of the Western Pacific (1922). One of his main interests was in the mate-
rial objects that the tribespeople used and exchanged. In tracking the gift
exchange of artefacts, for example, he argued that even in remote and
‘primitive’ or so-called ‘native’ cultures, there was evidence of rational deci-
sion making, gift economies, cultural symbolism and politics. Malinowski
carefully traced the network of exchanges of valuable jewellery such as
bracelets and necklaces across the Trobriand Islands, and established that
they were emblems enrolled in a system of exchange (something he termed
‘the Kula ring’), and that this system was linked to political power and
social hierarchy. Such interpretations set an authoritative tone for a wealth
of successive anthropological scholarship that was attuned to humans and
the objects which meaningfully furnished their life-worlds.
What connected the work of the earlier modern anthropologists was
that they shared an enthusiasm for the meaning of the social processes
they observed; the linkages between objects, people, systems and organ-
isational structures. Those engaged in traditional fieldwork with ‘native
cultures’, for example, looked at themes such as family and ancestral kin-
ship, marriage and child rearing and claimed that these structures, made
visible through everyday routines, objects and organising processes, were
where they could monitor the unfolding of systems of meaning-making
and the diffuse ways in which these were cultivated and contested (Garsten
& Nyqvist, 2013). Most were eager to understand and document the
contours of such relations as they pertained to a whole host of rituals,
exchanges and resources. Margaret Mead (1949 [2001]) puts it thus:
It is obvious that the sum of all the individuals in Zuni make up a culture
beyond and above what those individuals have willed and created. The group
is fed by tradition; it is ‘time binding’. It is quite justifiable to call it an organic
whole. It is a necessary consequence of the animism embedded in our lan-
guage that we speak of such a group as choosing its ends and having specific
purposes; it should not be held against the student as an evidence of a mystic
philosophy. These group phenomena must be studied if we are to understand
the history of human behaviour, and the individual psychology cannot of
itself account for the facts with which we are confronted. (pp. 231–232)
Lewis is critical of Said and his followers in relation to the way that the
broad field of anthropology appeared to have been ‘lumped together’ as
36 Ethnography after Humanism
if all approaches were the same. This, Lewis argues, wounded the disci-
pline. This was a problem for those intrigued by ‘exotic’ fieldsites but has
also created new forms of anthropological engagement and—during the
postwar period—gave momentum to a more emancipatory approach, a
style of work that has tended to be grouped together under the umbrella
term of critical ethnography.
Critical Ethnography
Moving distinctly out of the field of early scientific anthropology through
studies such as those pioneered by the Chicago School, critical eth-
nography took colonised, deprived and marginalised groups of people
as its mainstay. Critical ethnography was influenced by heavyweight
theories of social economics (such as Marxism) as well as concepts of
cultural power and domination (such as those posited by Gramsci in
1971). Themes such as alienation, identification and cultural symbolisa-
tion began to shape the critical ethnographic approach. An inextricable
ethos of this form of work was, thus, liberal and emancipatory in nature.
Betty Friedan (1963), for example, had interviewed and observed middle
and upper middle class women to make critical claims about the forces
of patriarchy that impacted upon their wellbeing. Meanwhile, Gloria
Steinem (1963/1995) played the part of a ‘bunny’ to write her feminist
ethnography of the Playboy Club.
Paul Willis’s (1979) book, Learning to Labour, typified the ‘new’, that
is, distinctively critical ethnographic approach. It was strongly attuned to
economics, social forces and culture. In his book, Willis documents the
lives of a group of school boys (‘the lads’) and discusses their transition
from the education system to work. His central analytic point is that for
such children, there was a marked lack of engagement and ambition.
The lads could not foresee a future that was different from the one they
expected to have as an operative on a factory floor or as an apprentice and
so saw their lack of engagement as ritualistic rebellion. Willis’s ethnogra-
phy presented the symbolic structure of working-class culture as a lived
form, alive and functioning in the schoolyard and on the street corner.
For Willis, adopting a Marxist grounding to his ethnographic fieldwork,
2 Why Ethnography?
37
it impinges upon speech, behaviour, humour and action at the local level;
how ‘macro determinants’ (p. 171) need to pass through the cultural
prism to be reproduced and refracted as new variants.
The descriptive and realist nature of ethnographic writing like this
and its ability to evoke and contextualise lived reality—and not least to
prompt a degree of empathy with those experiencing that lived reality—
is just one reason why the critical ethnographic method has become pop-
ular since the 1960s and 1970s. Using stories, characters and discourse
in naturalistic prose is helpful to get a grip on big questions, especially
when one considers the complexity of everyday social life and its interac-
tions, politics and negotiations. But although it is an over-simplification
to claim that there are neat phases in the development of ethnographic
methods, it is perhaps fair to say that many contemporary ethnographers,
while influenced by the critical project, have made a conscious turn away
from anchoring their accounts in totalising social theory popularised by
writers such as Willis. Instead, many have placed a stronger emphasis
upon forms of language itself, rather than regarding language as a local-
ised cultural form both standing for and reproducing powerful social
forces. This has been termed a linguistic turn.
represents the ‘social reality of others through the analysis of one’s own
experience in the world of these others’ (p. ix)—a reflective and embod-
ied approach that traces the implicit meaning rather than monitoring the
explicit frequency of words and phrases within the fieldsite, looking out
for the political charge of language in use; its oppressive or emancipatory
potential, both on the part of the research participant and the author
(Burawoy, 1991).
According to Van Maanen (1988, p. 7), various styles of writing pro-
duce different effects upon the reader. A realist account, for example,
can be described as ‘direct, matter-of-fact’ and as ‘a portrait of a studied
culture, unclouded by much concern for how the fieldworker produced
such a portrait’. The work is concerned with description of the fieldsite
and is not especially reflective. A confessional account is, by contrast,
significantly more reflective and ‘auto-ethnographic’ than the realist eth-
nography. The focus is ‘far more on the fieldworker than on the culture
studied’ (Van Maanen, 1988, p. 7) and there is a high degree of disclo-
sure of the methods in use, the experiences of the fieldworker and some
honesty about the effects they may have had in the field. An impression-
ist ethnography, by contrast, is highly reflexive, ‘personalised’ and often
artfully fragmented into ‘fleeting moments of fieldwork cast in dramatic
form’ (Van Maanen, 1988, p. 7). Borrowing from creative writing, the
impressionist tale borrows elements of both realist and confessional styles
and is often poetic and literary in nature.
In his analysis, all these genres of ethnography (and several others not
mentioned here) encompass a narrative, story-like approach to social
analysis that, most importantly, work with a layer of separation from
the lived cultural world in question. Characteristic of the perspective
that proliferated during the linguistic turn, Van Maanen emphasises that
‘there is no direct correspondence between the world as experienced and
the world as conveyed in a text, any more than there is a direct cor-
respondence between the observer and the observed’ (1988, p. 8). For
Van Maanen, ‘language (and text) provide the symbolic representations
required for both the construction and communication of conceptions
of reality and thus make the notions of thought and culture inseparable’
(1995, p. 141). The artefactual nature of language as a core of the ethnog-
rapher’s art is about paying attention to and theorising the words spoken
40 Ethnography after Humanism
The stories people tell do not just present grids of meaning. They also con-
vey a lot about legs, shopping trolleys, or staircases. What people say in an
interview doesn’t only reveal their perspective, but also tells about events
they have lived through. (p. 15)
support chosen and anchored to. In pragmatic terms, this means we can only
ever rely on our own human skills; the writing and painstaking analysis of
fieldnotes, listening, participation and observation. In this sense, ethnog-
raphy is a deeply human method and we, as ethnographers, dwell within
human bodies and use human skills to make sense of the world. At a basic
level, we must acknowledge this as a fact and get on as best we can. We
believe, however, that a reflective openness about the politics and poetics
of ethnographic writing—as well as adopting a degree of methodological
flexibility about what ethnography actually is or can be—opens the door
to, and legitimates the study of, human entanglements with other species.
This makes space to adapt this method to different, animalistic, forms of
agency. In our opinion, we can steer this human method towards the quest
of posthuman knowledge, making it appropriate for considering human–
animal relations differently. In this, we have been heavily influenced by the
turn to enactment which we argue lends itself readily to multi-species and
posthuman forms of ethnographic research. Such work lays clear emphasis
upon the ‘doings’ of social life, and hence encourages (or perhaps requires)
us to consider the role(s) of nonhumans in various settings. For Mol, for
example, ‘doings’ might revolve around motorbikes, staircases or shopping
trolleys; it is through and with such objects that the experience of social
lives become multi-layered and it is by following these things that ethnog-
raphers learn most about their chosen field. Attending to action enables us
to contemplate how we (as human actors) move through space and create
ripples of action and interaction. It also prepares us to think about how
Others, be they objects (like shopping trolleys) or animals, have the power
to impact upon us, to move us and to make us feel.
Importantly, then, such an approach also opens the way to closer
observation of nonhuman animals although we accept that at one level this
perhaps infers that animals fall into the category of things. But despite
that possible pitfall, the turn to enactment takes us further into negotiat-
ing the tricky questions of authorial power that have been raised through-
out ethnography’s history but have yet to be resolved in posthumanist
philosophy. For, if we can draw upon the everyday actions and objects
of a fieldsite to show how knowledge is created, this opens the way for a
fuller appreciation of the power relations that infuse certain perspectives
(usually human) and disempower others (usually animals).
46 Ethnography after Humanism
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2 Why Ethnography?
49
We must take yet another step, another post, and realize that the nature of
thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist … when we talk about
posthumanism we are not just talking about a thematic of the decentring of
the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological
coordinates…we are also talking about how thinking confronts that the-
matic, what thought has to become to face those thematic. (2010, p. xvi)
3 Listening for the Voices of Animals
53
when we try to incorporate animals because the actors in the field are not
all “like us” and do not share our language or cultural norms. An exam-
ple may help illustrate why this matters in practical terms. Consider the
world of police dogs and their handlers (Sanders, 2006; Sang & Knight,
2015). While dogs are key to law enforcement and can thus be seen as
central in the work process, they cannot easily be regarded as research
respondents or co-workers if we choose to focus on this particular milieu.
It would be, in many ways, far simpler to write an account of police dog
handlers and simply omit the dogs. Police dogs do not talk or write about
what is going on in their lives. It is questionable whether they wittingly
contribute to the experience of crime-fighting even when they have a
particular job to do (although, for a notable exception, see Bradshaw,
2011). This adds an extra layer of complication for researchers interested
in studying multi-species settings; not least, letting their voices be heard;
or perhaps put more modestly, trying to listen out for their voices.
Importantly, from our perspective, however, ignoring police dogs
because they are not amenable to our methods is unsatisfactory if the
aim is to produce multi-species or posthuman research. If that is our aim,
we should avoid thinking that the importance of these dogs lies purely
in their relationships to us and focus all our energies on what the human
part of the dyad thinks/feels about the other. Just because we believe we
cannot understand their minds should not necessarily be considered a
barrier to including them in our ethnographic research. So what are we
to do? One way forward may be to consider the interplay between dog
and handler as part of a larger network of relations that co-produce and
enact the process of crime prevention and control. We need not understand
the inner workings of the “wild minds” (Laurier, Maze, & Lundin, 2006)
of police dogs in order to comprehend their roles as actors in this net-
work, or indeed the world more generally. We can, following a number
of scholars intrigued by meshworks of materials and actors (e.g. Mol,
2003), track the movements of bodies and things, trace the contours of
this micro-social setting by attending to the actions and interactions that
produce important effects.
It is a starting point of our thinking, then, that we need to ensure
that animals are included in the first place with close attention to their
3 Listening for the Voices of Animals
55
We are suggesting that “animal minds are wild minds, shaped by a history
of environmental pressures” (Hauser, 2001, p. xvi), that these minds will
not be found by looking “inside their heads” but instead by studying
animals’ practical skills in the “wildness” of wherever it is that they
inhabit. To read Hauser (2001) somewhat against his own intentions, we
would extend the “wild world” to include human culture in its rich
heterogeneity. (p. 4)
While we may take issue with the reductive and binaristic implication that
animals represent wildness, particularly when considering them “work-
ers” as in the case of the police, we need to acknowledge that changing
attitudes and behaviour towards them rests upon challenging their object
status, something we cannot do if we relegate them to the sidelines of
inquiry. This is a dilemma for posthumanism. But it is not a new prob-
lem. Indeed, it would be a mistake to assume that animals have never
mattered to ethnographers and that they have always been deleted from
classical accounts. Ethnography has long been attuned to animals, or at
least the presence and significance of animals within human experiences
and cultures (Smart, 2014). Classical ethnography has presented animals
in accounts of sacrifice, hunting and companionship, albeit as a means of
shedding light on human cultures.
A good example of this is Clifford Geertz’s (1973) case study of the
Balinese cockfight in which cockerels stand for masculinity and the fight
ritual enables men to test their strength and virility by proxy:
The Bears were dressed for their great ceremonies completely in black bear-
skins, and even on lesser occasions they wore upon their arms the skins of
the bear’s forelegs with all the claws displayed. The Bears danced around
the fire, clawing the earth and imitating the motions of angry bears, while
the people sang the song of a Bear dancer. (p. 176)
One might imagine that nonhumans are in some way complicit with
their own utility in such imperialist accounts. What they reveal, however,
is that anthropology has largely been a project of us watching them, us
consuming them, us using them to do our cultural work, our analysing
them in terms of their importance to us and to our meaning-making
processes. Animals have mattered in anthropological accounts but mainly
because they are symbolically and physically important to humans.
Even where animals are central to performance of a specific ritual
(e.g. the cockfight), concepts of animals and humans in relation rarely
form the outright focus of participant observation. The participation is
with humans but the observation tends to be of animals. In fact, it is
fair to say that animal perspectives and their distinctive “voices” have
not been considered widely or heeded by fieldworkers. Rather, animals
have appeared as furnishings, props and materials, the unwitting bearers
of cultural meaning that complement the human world. Animals have
3 Listening for the Voices of Animals
57
been present, then, but perhaps not in the way that those interested in
the close workings of human–animal interactions would choose. In her
account of the Bear dancers, for instance, Benedict presents very little, if
anything, of the bear that once was, just as she neglects the practicalities
of the meetings between the species not least in acquiring the valuable
artefacts of claws and fur in the first place. Animals often seem to be a
part of the anthropologist’s implicit “materials of study” (Mead, 1949,
p. 43 [2001]), the furnishings of the symbolic culture in question; as
objects not subjects.
When we talk about listening for the voice of the animal, then, what
we are actually suggesting is not that ethnographers should literally try
to hear and translate animal utterances in some way but that we try to
include them (and include them more equably): that is, challenge the
unequal relationship between human researcher and animal subject that
denies their agency, that assumes their lack of voice, their import only as a
marked and imprinted subject of human meaning-making. Throughout
history, ethnographers have been implicated by the ethics of “voice”,
the inherent power that is carried by those who speak on behalf of and
for Others. Posthumanist and postmodernist theory adds a radical new
dimension to this challenge because, for us and a growing number of
multi-species researchers, those Others are animals and their relations to
us are slippery, undulating and sinuous (O’Doherty, 2016). Their voices
are not easily heard let alone understood.
not so subtle) ways that people speak and behave. This was Paul Willis’s
explicit aim in Learning to Labour (1979), in which the minutiae of day-
to-day school life highlighted the ways that working-class kids were sub-
tly groomed for working-class occupations. If we look for the effects of
power in human/animal context, we see that animals may be “good to
eat” but not “worthy of love”, while at other times, they are “cute”, “help-
less”, “tame”, or “wild”, reflecting broader social norms about certain spe-
cies as edible/inedible/lovable/dirty and indeed any number of adjectives.
Posthuman or multi-species researchers need to pay attention to cul-
tural rules like these to theorise how power plays out in mundane inter-
action at the local level. Doing so offers vital clues about the ways in
which animals are made sense of in lived relations. This may involve, for
example, looking at the relationships between pets/companion animals
and their guardians/owners. Observing someone washing the fur of a
cat or dog, for example, ethnographers can perceive how the enactment
of the task, and the way such work is described, becomes useful in the
creation of an affective relationship (Taylor, 2010). Importantly, attend-
ing to such a mundane example such as this points to the means by
which, in broader society, cats and dogs are deemed “worthy” of human
love, and thus carry a certain amount of affective power in interaction
with a wider population. By contrast, consider abattoirs and farms, for
example, where distancing moves are often expressed (or performed) by
language and a host of practical acts such that cattle are numbered rather
than named individually. This boundary work is echoed and supported
by the macabre processes of the slaughterhouse where animals are neatly
renamed with efficient organisational language to obliterate their pres-
ence in any capacity other than as “products” to be “harvested” rather
than killed (Hamilton & Taylor, 2013). This detailed attention to the
moves (Latimer, 2004) enactments and routines of everyday life with
animals represents the next logical step in the critical turn if we are to
examine (and hold to account) the hegemonic social norms which pro-
liferate about animals and, further, to look for and expose the effects of
subjugation and disadvantage on those very animals.
While researchers might take pains to track the operation of power,
however, the point of view of the animal is not always amenable to quali-
tative enquiry. Their very different communication styles make it highly
3 Listening for the Voices of Animals
59
2004) with other species (and with other subject disciplines and their
methods) rather than grand theories that make great claims about what
or who animals are, what they think and why they behave in certain
ways. Our next chapter outlines some ways in which we can transgress
these limitations, even if not always escaping the “traps” of humanism,
and so we ask, what can ethnography be?
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4
What Can Ethnography Be?
those which relate to species. This has resulted in the emergence of mul-
tiple and niche specialisms with nuanced differences, making ethnogra-
phy more difficult to define/contain coherently. Despite the potential for
confusion, however, this is a positive shift for ethnographers, who now
have a range of techniques at their fingertips which offer different ways
to access and analyse fieldsites. This gives us, as multi-species researchers,
significant hope. This hope also stems from the intellectual interest in
developing new views of agency and new analyses and critiques of the
processes of Othering through cross-fertilisation between a range of (tra-
ditionally human-centred) subjects such as geography, organisation stud-
ies and sociology. The traditional dualisms of the social sciences—micro/
macro, global/local, structure/agent—are breaking down (O’Doherty,
2016). As a result, new ways of thinking about the kinds of knowledge
that social research can be expected to “produce” and new ideas about
what is “researchable” are making breakthroughs in method. This degree
of change makes the development of multi-species methods timely and
exciting.
In addressing the possibilities of some of these changes and tracing
their potential for applied research in multi-species settings, we also
remain attentive to the political and practical difficulties that can make
innovation problematic or hard to manage. In particular, we note the
complexities of academic institutions and the bureaucratic funding envi-
ronment which, at times, stifle innovation and militate against change.
Confusing Times?
The proliferation of interdisciplinarity and new research tools can be
quite overwhelming on one level; we cannot all afford the time or mate-
rial resources to undertake research with a technological component, for
example, nor do we necessarily have the skills to understand literatures
or techniques outside our own area of familiarity (for more discussion on
this, see Chap. 8). Yet, as we see it, the expansion of ethnography and the
blurring of its definitional characteristics provides a valuable opportunity
for the multi-species researcher. The amorphous state of methodology
and the eagerness, in some quarters at least, to experiment makes time
and space for the seeds of posthuman research to find fertile ground. This
is needed if we are to bring animals to the forefront of our research and
to be inquisitive about the social and cultural mechanisms by which they
are often relegated to the background: a posthuman sensitivity to “the
perspective of the subordinate group” in human networks and hierarchies
(Becker, 1967, p. 240).
When we take the side of the “underdog”, the person or groups that
are routinely ignored in research, for example, we offer an implicit chal-
lenge to the “hierarchy of credibility”, that is, the belief “that members
of the highest group have the right to define the way things really are”
(Becker, 1967, p. 241). Accepting normative positions vis-à-vis the pro-
duction of knowledge about human–animal networks means that we
miss a great deal of the complex fabric of everyday social interaction. In
other words, it leads to partial and some would say “shoddy” scholar-
ship in that half of what/who we claim to study in human–animal rela-
tionships is missing when we focus solely on human understandings.
As Wels (2015) argues:
74 Ethnography after Humanism
and make room for their autonomy and self-ownership. While research
shows that tracking human family members often raises ethical con-
cerns, such as privacy issues and social tensions, these did not emerge
in our study. But could we construe the behavior of a dog who runs off
when the owner pops up from behind a tree as a desire for privacy,
which is violated by the tracking technology? Could we construe the
behavior of a dog who suddenly starts frequently checking on their
owner during walks as a sign of anxiety, which the technology has
shifted from the owner to the dog? If so, how could we articulate the
boundaries between protection and respect in our research on technol-
ogy-mediated human-animal interactions? Such research has the poten-
tial to redefine the way in which we understand our relationships with
other species and to contribute to the development of a more inclusive
society. (2012, p. 150)
the export of knowledge from university faculty to the world “out there”,
the very terminology of “impact” reinforcing some of these concerns
(Kelemen & Hamilton, 2015).
We share some of these concerns because we are attuned to the politics
involved when human actors seek to represent the life-world of animal
actors in qualitative terms. We too are concerned about the quality and
integrity of new developments (e.g. see our earlier discussion of Kirksey
et al’s frog experiment) as well as the unreflective reliance upon buzz-
words and jargon such as multi-species ethnography. We are also concerned
that creativity is being misappropriated to serve narrow and uncritical
agendas, to make certain ideas or discourses more powerful while silenc-
ing others (Fraser & Taylor, 2016). We are also mindful that the very
structures that should support boundary-crossing innovation are them-
selves entangled by these politics. Universities are not immune from the
reaches of neoliberalism (Fraser & Taylor, 2016; Harvey, 2005).
In fact, some academic researchers describe their experiences as working
in the “academic sausage factory” (Smith, 2000) where they are expected
to embrace the language and logic of neoliberalism; that is, the values and
ideals of economic rationality. In practice, this means ethnographers are
often expected to generate research funding, “leverage” corporate invest-
ment and funding opportunities and constantly innovate new ways of
disseminating results to wider and wider audiences even if that neces-
sitates a removal, or at least playing down, of the critical orientations of
such. This clearly has detrimental possibilities for the academy broadly
but, arguably, is far more damaging to research done into marginalised
topics and/or utilising critical or (perceived) radical frameworks or meth-
ods. Research is also speeding up, and “slow scholarship”—the kind often
needed to do ethnography, and to develop new methods and ideas, as
well as to build relationships across disciplinary and academic–practi-
tioner boundaries—is becoming rare. Quite simply, it is a concern that
ethnographic research is increasingly tethered to the agendas and interests
of business and that academic freedom and independence to select field
sites of interest is being eroded. The ongoing commercialisation of uni-
versities, in effect, polices the acceptability of ideas and engenders a push,
in terms of knowledge production, towards the conservative middle.
78 Ethnography after Humanism
enactment. We think this offers clear grounds for optimism and legiti-
mates the efforts of many scholars currently seeking to break through into
the study of humans and other creatures. Many posthumanists claim that
this can be viewed as part of a distinct epoch in history, the Anthropocene,
a time period in which human interconnectedness with the rest of the
natural world is increasingly accepted as a basis for reflection upon human
consumption, greed and responsibility (Nimmo, 2015).
Borrowing the terminology of Kirksey and Helmreich (2010), we sug-
gest that we can label the new enthusiasm for including animal Others
in ethnography a species turn. We need no longer consider animals the
“windows and mirrors” (Mullin, 1999, p. 201) into our own human
concerns and interests. Instead of being excluded or included symboli-
cally, the presence of animals can be seen as necessary, presenting the
researcher with messy “entanglements” (Haraway, 2008) and “engage-
ments” (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010) to make sense of and work with.
The species turn reflects posthumanism’s claim that humans and animals
inhabit the same social spaces with overlapping agencies and experiences,
which challenges extant sociological ways of seeing culture and specifi-
cally the “affected ignorance” towards animals (Haraway, 2003) that has
been traditional.
We support the notion that ethnography should partake in the turn to
species. Whether we subscribe to the view that this is part of a new age or
not, we think that we should now seek to explore the many and “varied
webs of interspecies dependence” (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010, p. 553)
that form rhizomes of social networks. These rhizomes and networks form
interspecies collectives (Haraway, 2008) that constitute the exciting new
spaces of research. Hence, there is no interest for us in comparing animals
with humans: our fascination lies in generating new understandings of
the contiguous nature of human–animal lives.
This fascination is shared by a growing number of multi-species
researchers. Indeed, we have already seen boundary-challenging work in
various mixed species settings such as laboratories (McAllister Groves,
1996; Philips, 1994), cat shelters (Alger & Alger, 2003), dog shelters
(Taylor, 2010), airports (O’Doherty, 2016) and in law enforcement
with K-9 police dog handlers (Sanders, 2006). There have been more
radical applications of this concept too, for example, in documenting
4 What Can Ethnography Be?
81
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philosophy and the philosophy of impact: A guide to charting more diffuse
influences across time. London School of Economics. Retrieved November 9,
2015, from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/05/26/
the-impact-of-philosophy-and-the-philosophy-of-impact/
Buller, H. (2014). Animal geographies 1. Progress in Human Geography, 38,
308–318.
Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The politics and
poetics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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changing organizations. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 3(1), 30–151.
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of Organizational Ethnography, 1(1), 83–95.
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Bristol: Policy Press.
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lectual: Species, gender and class in the production of knowledge. London: Palgrave.
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media and e-compositions of urban space. Retrieved October 19, 2016, from
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knowledge: Implications for academia. Education Policy Analysis Archives,
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84 Ethnography after Humanism
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phy. Cultural Anthropology, 25(4), 545–576.
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4 What Can Ethnography Be?
85
images not only can make arguments more vivid, but also more lucid”
(p. 84).
It is from such a strong tradition that the last three decades have seen a
growing theoretical and ideological interest in visual information within
the humanities and social sciences more generally (e.g. Barthes, 1977;
Berger, 1972; Emmison & Smith, 2000; Sontag, 1977), and an upsurge
of interest in a wide variety of visual artefacts, including film (Duneier,
Brown, Carter, West, & Hopper, 2010; Hayward, 1993) and everyday
images such as advertising (Barthes, 1972; Eagleton, 2003; Williamson,
1978). A wealth of recent publications has emerged in ethnographic jour-
nals as well as through the institution of journals such as Visual Studies,
Visual Communication and Visual Methodologies. Visual research is also
becoming increasingly popular in history, geography (e.g. Rose, 2001)
and economics (Thrift, 2008; see also Journal of Cultural Economy). There
have been some particularly fine examples of photoethnography (where
narratives are interspersed with photographs taken in the field) in these
publications as well as some interesting critiques of visual data gathering
and presentation (e.g. Pauwels, 2010). Some have even heralded a shift
from the “linguistic turn” (Rorty, 1979) to the “pictorial turn” (Mitchell,
1994).
The reach and impact of visual research is assisted by the fact that
it encompasses many forms, including the analysis of pictures, graphs,
film, internet sources, artworks, sculpture and architecture and is flexible
enough to draw from pre-existing visual material and/or researcher- or
participant-generated visual data (Banks, 2001; Pink, 2003; Ruby, 2006;
Warren, 2005). Visual research draws upon a growing interest in picto-
rial cultures (Baudrillard, 1994; Debord, 1992) that permeate—or, as
some would put it, “saturate” (Gergen, 1991)—everyday life through
newspaper photographs, films, television, video, web pages and social
media spaces, and whose dissemination has become ever easier through
mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, 1999) and digital technology such
as smartphones. These technologies make image capture and film-making
an everyday possibility and, in a research context, support the naturalistic
approach that ethnographers favour. Naturalistic enquiry is important
if we are aiming to build nuanced accounts from organic, immersive
and participatory methods. It is also a mode of enquiry that lends itself
92 Ethnography after Humanism
to capturing the subtle interactions that take place between the species.
From a posthumanist perspective, research that is not wholly reliant upon
the spoken or written word has added potential for revealing subtle inter-
actions which do not occur through language. This basic idea is simple,
although the methods that seek to embrace this ethos are perhaps less so.
Let us start, then, with some practicalities.
more freely about what they are seeing, thinking and feeling. The objec-
tive is not so much to study the images as to think about the ways that
participants respond to them and attribute their own “social and personal
meanings and values” (Bignante, 2010, p. 1; Ruby, 2006). In photoelici-
tation interviewing, for example, the researcher starts from the premise
that the images, the meaning(s) that are attributed to them, the emo-
tions they stimulate and the information they draw out of the partici-
pant generate insights that do not necessarily or exclusively correspond to
those obtained in verbal inquiry alone (Bignante, 2010). Because images
have many potential meanings and are indeterminate and open to fluid
interpretation, they potentially reveal more about how participants shape
their ontologies, how they observe and experience their surroundings and
how their judgements are filtered through and by structuring forces like
organisations, social and cultural institutions (Banks, 2001).
While undeniably human-centric, visual elicitation carries valuable
potential for building a more nuanced understanding of human–ani-
mal relations. Participants could be asked to reflect on photographic
images of animals, for example, to stimulate discussion. An alterna-
tive approach would be to use art, for example, Piccinini’s (2004) fan-
tastical sculptures that were developed from silicon, fibreglass, textiles
and human hair to explicitly challenge audiences to consider species
divisions deeply and critically. And while we are aware that neither
photos nor artistic images provide a means to give animals their own
“voice” in the research process, they do at least enrich our human
methods of data collection (Pauwels, 2016, p. 95) by generating use-
ful starting points for discussion about animals. Such a process is par-
ticularly helpful if the topic of research is difficult to explain (e.g. the
emotive bond between horse and rider) or carries the potential to be
emotionally troubling in some way (e.g. exploring perspectives on fox
hunting or bullfighting). While researchers have to bear in mind the
ethical concern that images can be shocking, confronting and provoc-
ative and that care needs to be taken in selecting them, we feel visual
images can be useful as data or as prompts for discussions, particu-
larly with participants who are neither “experts” nor “scientists”, those
who speak other languages and/or have limited literacy skills. People
from a variety of backgrounds can happily and easily interpret visual
94 Ethnography after Humanism
images, which perhaps make for a more inclusive approach than ver-
bal interview techniques alone.
In considering the inclusion of animals through visual methods, a
good example is highlighted by the work of the photoethnographer and
poet Harriet Fraser, who has produced extensive research on the culture
of upland hill farmers in the UK’s Lake District. Collecting visual rep-
resentations of animals and people has been vital in this endeavour. In
her project, Landkeepers, Fraser (2015) interviewed and photographed 30
farmers along with spokespeople from the National Trust (a heritage char-
ity), United Utilities (a water company), Natural England (a government
adviser) and the National Farmers’ Union. She observed and recorded
farmers’ stories about their lives with Herdwick and Swaledale sheep,
breeds that are native to the region and suited to the harsh demands of
the climate and terrain. Using traditional methods of participant obser-
vation, Fraser worked with farmers as they managed their animals, often
conducting quite demanding physical duties:
… Anthony shows me how to check that it’s done properly: I have to put
my hand right up and under the fleshy tail flap, into a world that’s warm,
moist and utterly foreign. Being a novice at this, I don’t put my hand up far
enough—Anthony does that bit for me—and then I fasten the end with as
tight a knot as I can manage. (http://www.landkeepers.co.uk)
c ultural world of Cumbrian farmers and their sheep. The exhibition was
complemented by a printed book and website which engaged thousands
more interested parties and generated relationships and networks long
after the exhibition had moved on. Fraser’s approach not only sought to
deconstruct apparent social divisions between farmers and “stock”, insid-
ers and outsiders, stakeholders and policymakers, but was also “respectful
of and resonant with the rich oral histories and cultural practices of indig-
enous communities” (Cunsolo Willox, Harper, & Edge, 2013, p. 129),
provoking a genuine dialogue and exchange about a life-world “marked
by uncertainty and the unknown” (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013, p. 7).
Reflecting on this, she writes:
Sometimes these are stories of joy and celebration, sometimes they shed
light on heritage. They may provoke further investigation or action, or
touch on issues of struggle or loss in a local-global system where everything
is connected, and balance can be elusive. (http://www.somewhere-nowhere.
com/)
A different but equally helpful example is the Loving Me, Loving You
project being run by Taylor and Fraser in South Australia. This project
is part exhibition, part research project, and aims to stimulate dialogue
and awareness about the links between domestic violence and animal
abuse, in particular, the need for animal-friendly housing in domestic
violence services so that women and children can keep their (often vul-
nerable) animals with them. It aims to demonstrate how the strong bonds
between women, children and their companion animals—who have
all experienced domestic abuse—can help with recovery from trauma.
Working with social care providers such as the Northern Domestic
Violence Service (South Australia), the counselling and support service,
Relationships Australia (South Australia) and community groups (such as
local photography clubs), the project asks women and children who have
experienced abuse to provide some form of art work that expresses their
relationship with their animal companion. These artworks are being col-
lated at the time of writing (Winter 2016) and will be exhibited in local
communities throughout 2017. They will also be used as focal points for
the interviews conducted with the women who produced them (children
96 Ethnography after Humanism
“the family dog” or the “pet”. In this study, by contrast, animals were
visibly present; viewers could see who they were and could learn a little
about them as individuals in a research project. A further strength of the
project was that it was accessible to non-academics. Given the need for
“public sociology”, particularly for those of us who embrace scholar-
activism, this was important (see Chap. 9 for a more developed analysis).
As Packard (2008) notes: “The problem we also have as a discipline is that
the way we write about everyday life can seem absurdly inaccessible to the
very people who inhabit it. Rather, we need to find ways to write about
everyday life that are open, recognisable and legible to those who live it”
(p. 834). In its open-endedness and flexibility we feel this objective was
successfully met. The number of visitors to the project website (at time of
writing close to 20,000 individual visitors viewing the various pages close
to 200,000 times) suggests this was a highly accessible piece of public
sociology, made appealing through the power of visual resources. Despite
this, however, the images that were included in the project were those
that humans thought represented their animals best; images that were
deliberately chosen and possibly manipulated by humans. This returns us
to a humanist bind for while the deep feelings from the humans towards
these animals in particular were certainly evident in the pictures, the ani-
mals remained (to some degree) objects. Animal agency, personality, liv-
ing, fleshy and sensory being could not be included in the research other
than in a static way, mediated by beneficent human concerns. So what of
this absent agency? Can we ever bring that into our pictures?
Our answer is a modest one, for visual data does not necessarily cir-
cumvent human interpretation or bias—there are power imbalances
inherent to any form of representation (Packard, 2008) and in all the
examples we have so far presented, they are also open to criticism on that
basis. Photographs are interpreted by human researchers and deliberately
chosen by human participants because they express something specific.
Art forms, poems and sculptures are made about animals but by people.
These specific messages are refracted through a lens of humanist concerns
which inevitably render any resultant dataset partial. But the inclusion of
images does, at least, ensure that animals are not entirely invisible. Their
social status—as companions/friends/pets/livestock—can be captured
for a very brief moment as they stand, sit or walk with the humans with
5 Visual Methods
99
for all their inclusive immediacy, are not immune from the charge of
humanist bias. While imagery and art opens new avenues of discussion,
then, it must be noted that simply (re)including the ocular senses in our
methods does not necessarily mean that we can and will include animals
in equal ways. Indeed, the privileging of the visual over the other senses
(particularly olfactory) may itself be seen as a form of species bias. We
must remain mindful that there is a risk of objectifying other creatures
through visual means as recent research in psychology has underlined by
measuring the effect of viewing of “cute” animal images on human stress
levels and mood (Nittono, Fukushima, Yano, & Moriya, 2012).
Despite the inevitably partial and fragmentary nature of visual
resources, we see significant potential for human–animal and posthuman
studies. The conscious viewing of carefully selected images of animals, be
they artistically stylised or more naturalistic and opportunistic, can pro-
voke a reaction in the onlooker that fuses rationality with emotionality.
When used to collect data, images or artistic representations of animals
can make the space for new forms of knowledge, discussion and under-
standing. Informed by emancipatory theories (such as feminism), for
example, visual resources can provide the basis for scholar-activist work
such as that carried out by Yvette Watt at the University of Tasmania,
who blends activism and art. Watt’s Animal Factories visual research proj-
ect highlighs the hidden institutional suffering of animals living in agri-
cultural settings. Similarly, Jo-Anne Macarthur’s We Animals project is
another useful example, a project in which she uses photographs to illus-
trate the lives of animals with humans in numerous areas such as those
reared to be food, those used in entertainment as well as those being
rescued from research environments to “retire” into sanctuaries.
Even if our aims are to advocate on behalf of other animals, however,
by taking photographs of them or using images of them to stimulate
debate, we run the risk that we are situating other species as objects in the
image, not necessarily as equal partners. Indeed, when we talk of visual
methods, we usually mean visual representation, with all that confers
about our abilities to present and re-present the world and others in it.
This may undermine the inclusive potential that we think visual methods
carry. We are reminded of this by Armstrong who opens his thoughtful
5 Visual Methods
101
essay The Gaze of Animals (in Taylor & Signal, 2009, pp. 176–199) by
describing his visit to a zoo and his encounter with a captive tiger:
I’m looking at the tiger, but she’s not looking at me. I’m in London’s
Regent’s Park Zoo, so of course there is heavy wire mesh between me and
the big cat. She’s surrounded by human visitors: The Sumatran tigers’
enclosure is roughly circular and they can be seen from any point on its
circumference. Indeed my snapshot captures the face of a woman peering
through a window on the opposite side. But it’s the animal’s own gaze that
gives me pause for thought. She is looking out of her cage, but not directly
at me or any of her other observers. Within this animal’s gaze but not the
focus of it, I feel uncomfortable, guilty, ashamed. This feeling returns
whenever I look at the photograph. (p. 177)
follow are not necessarily liberating or practically useful for them. In think-
ing further about the idea that methods may carry some practical utility
for animals, in the next part of this chapter we consider how other forms
of visual research may bring humans closer to the world of animals: to
viewing the world as they do, as agents. A key component of ethnographic
study, after all, is attempting to see the world as others see it. Assessing the
contribution that other disciplines have made to visual methods, we con-
sider whether animal-mounted and virtual technologies offer potential for
revealing the agentic perspectives of animals and improving their lives in
relation to humans, particularly within agriculture.
ity, this method shares ethnography’s aim of gaining insight into the lived
worlds of others (although here these others are pigs rather than humans).
While this is by no means a traditional form of data collection within
ethnography, attaching sensors and monitors to animals is nothing new
within the life sciences. Indeed, as cameras and sensors are growing smaller
and less intrusive, they can now collect and send larger packages of data
than the more cumbersome radio transmitters of old. Many scientists are
developing new ways of (quite literally) seeing the world through the eyes
of animals. In some regards, this fulfils an important ethical imperative
of human–animal studies, that is, attempting to present multi-species
viewpoints in research findings. Even if we, as ethnographers, are not
easily able to interpret big datasets or the footage from animal-mounted
cameras, we can at the very least examine and possibly empathise with
the lived realities of Others like pigs and cows to pose new questions for
debate. Some suggest that we can go further still in using technologies
of observation. Advocates of animal-mounted technology, for example,
claim that they carry the potential to improve the lives of animals, espe-
cially those living on farms and in other “organised” environments.
As to how this might work practically, it is helpful to turn to another
example from the natural sciences. Amory, Barker, and Codling (2012)
have developed a cow-tracking mechanism that can autonomously moni-
tor cattle behaviour over prolonged periods and trigger calls for help.
Using a new type of cow-mounted biosensor that combines real-time
local positioning, a 3D accelerometer to sense movement, a magnetom-
eter for orientation, and a temperature sensor, cattle are being observed
in multiple ways to track the relationships between movement and dis-
ease. A smartphone-like package is worn around each animal’s neck to
capture information about activity levels, their proximity to herd mates
and the locations of their interactions. Amory et al. (2012) point to dis-
tinct changes in animal behaviour associated with disease and so regard
the benefits to be far-reaching, stressing that raising awareness of abnor-
mal behaviours might provide a tool for animal keepers to take a closer
look at an individual or to accurately predict health problems for groups.
Technology may even pave the way for automated alerts to be sent to vets.
While this form of data collection may seem a long way from posthuman
ethnography, we think there are possibilities to build interdisciplinary col-
104 Ethnography after Humanism
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Amory, J., Barker, Z., and Codling, E. (2012). Use of tracking technology to detect
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ralistic inquiry. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
5 Visual Methods
107
nography) have used their senses in their methods. Our argument for the
necessity of multisensory methods is twofold. Firstly, and pragmatically,
because animals inhabit a deeply sensory world where language is less
significant, tuning into our own senses equips us better for the sort of
posthuman, species-inclusive ethnography we advocate. Secondly, priori-
tising disembodied, “sense-less”, research works to maintain normative
assumptions about rationality located in mind/body dualisms. Given that
much work with other animals rests upon challenging such assumptions,
it seems hypocritical to continue using methods that signal an unreflexive
acceptance of them.
Ethnography and Equality
The work of bell hooks provides a good example, particularly her view
that ethnography is a way to experience the view from below (1989).
While hooks focuses on race, her arguments that ethnography can and
should be a tool to shine a light on marginalised groups are transferable
to our argument about species. In her later work she notes: “How often
contemporary white scholars writing about black people assume posi-
tions of familiarity, as though their work were not coming into being in a
cultural context of white supremacy, as though it were in no way shaped
and informed by that context. And, therefore, as though no need exists
for them to overtly articulate a response to this political reality as part of
their critical enterprise” (2015, p. 124). The same is often done in eth-
nographies where humans and animals are present. Animals are ignored,
sidelined or considered from a position of familiarity. From this follows
the uncomfortable suspicion that many of us seeking to do good multi-
species ethnography will have to interrogate our species privilege more
critically. As hooks argues, “surely it is important as we attempt to rethink
cultural practice, to re-examine and remake ethnography, to create ways
to look at and talk about or study diverse cultures and peoples in ways
that do not perpetuate exploitation and domination” (2015, p. 128).
That ethnography lends itself to exposing exploitation and domina-
tion is clear from works as diverse as Walkerdine (1998), who deployed
ethnography to show how working-class women and girls contributed
6 Sensory Methods
113
to their own oppression, and Willis (1979), who revealed the subjective
viewpoint of the oppressed (in his case working-class “lads”) and the ways
in which their limited decisions entrap them to reproduce and shore up
powerful structures of oppression. In each case, ethnography evokes a feel
for the people under investigation, how their life-worlds are constituted
by the tastes, choices, conversations and emotions that they exhibit.
While our argument—stimulated by current interest in multi-species
ethnography—may seem radical and new, it is not. In fact, there is a
weight of existing work for us to build on. For anthropologists and eth-
nographers, an interest in the broad experience afforded by the human
senses has always been present (in some form) within their accounts. As
Howes (2011, pp. 437–438) points out, researchers on the Cambridge
expedition to the Torres Straight in 1898 (which marked one of the first
fieldwork expeditions within anthropology) deliberately selected physi-
cians with expertise in visual perception to accompany them and took
numerous devices to measure the other senses such as hearing, taste and
pain. The intended subjects of their tests and experiments were “native
islanders”. While this expedition marked one of the first attempts by
researchers to collect empirical data, the hypotheses these researchers were
working with assumed that “primitive” peoples had better senses because
less energy was being expended in “higher functions” of reasoned thought.
As such this early attention to the senses suited anthropology’s (and other
social sciences’) eurocentric racism. The experiments performed among
the Torres peoples threw the extant belief that the “noble savage” enjoyed
heightened sensory skills into some doubt but did little to destabilise
the implicit colonial hierarchy of the project which was, unfortunately,
an approach echoed throughout much nineteenth-century research. This
rested upon beliefs about differences between humans and other animals
with the notion of the “civilising process” (Elias, 2000) implying that
to be cultured, one must be above animal senses because “high culture”
required the suppression of the “lower” senses (Classen, 2012).
Problematic historic examples like these demonstrate that the way
we perceive the senses is itself ideological and tied up with social norms
and stereotypes. While contemporary ethnographic work is no longer
tethered to this pervasive colonial agenda and has moved firmly beyond
the treatment of senses as racially determined, there is still, arguably, a
114 Ethnography after Humanism
Sound and Movement
An explicit agenda to include the senses in ethnographic work offers some-
thing important to human–animal studies, then, extending an already
strong foundation within this research approach. As to the practicalities
of this, motion-based studies (e.g. walking, bicycling, rambling, driving)
116 Ethnography after Humanism
are useful vehicles for study. The fields of media and communication,
cultural studies and critical human geography (Zieleniec, 2007) have
already made use of these techniques, creating first-person accounts of
their movements with voice, music and/or sound recording (e.g. Giraud,
2016) to offer a multifaceted account that does not rely on descriptive
text alone. In a walking study, the researcher moves through spaces like
streets and public parks (Zieleniec, 2013), attends to the full range of
senses that come into play; the smell of cut grass, the sound of children
playing, the screech of birds and so on.
Recordings from their surroundings can be used alongside photos and
film from the walk to create an ethnographic vignette and that can be
used as a basis for further analysis. For example, fusing music compo-
sition with computing, Parker (2012) has attempted to document the
invisible infrastructures that lie behind the internet by listening to (and
recording) the unusual noises of server banks. In his view, this has pro-
vided a sensory method to politicise the social and cultural relations that
enable people to carry out mundane activities (such as sending an email
or uploading a picture to a social media site). There are some interesting
connections to be made here with the work of other thinkers who have
discussed the everyday aesthetics of digital culture. Fuller and Goffey’s
(2012) Evil Media, for example, draws attention to the relationships
between infrastructures, technologies and ecologies while Hine’s (2000)
Virtual Ethnography depicts the internet as both a site of cultural for-
mations and a cultural artefact moulded by people’s understandings and
expectations. Hine’s argument is that this complex online world requires
a new form of ethnography.
Responding to contemporary literature on digital, material and vir-
tual methods, as well as the ancient Japanese tradition of Shinrin-Yoku
(taking in the forest atmosphere or “forest bathing” for health benefits),
Giraud (2016) has made developed ethnographic tools that draw on the
senses. She has adapted walking as aural narrative or soundwalk, and she
combines auditory technologies with critical reflection (often in “blog”
form) as she travels through a particular space and meets the Others
who inhabit such spaces. On a soundwalk, Giraud argues, the researcher
should attend to a range of auditory cues: ambient sounds (difficult to
pinpoint, “white noise”, a background sound like distant traffic); sonic
6 Sensory Methods
117
Monstrous Methods
Braidotti’s use of the term “monster“ is useful in advancing an under-
standing of their radical methods further. The roots of the word monster
come from the Latin monstrare, which means “to show” (the scientific
6 Sensory Methods
121
nue of study might be to focus upon the labour that goes into suppressing
the sight, smells, sounds of animals in our social settings.
Following the actor network theory path, for example, encourages us
to see anything that makes a difference to an environment as potential
data; it matters less whether that is speech or it is something else entirely,
a smell, a sound or a sight. Pink supports this principle when she suggests
rethinking the ethnographic process through reflexive attention to what
she terms the “sensoriality” of the experience (2003). This is an argu-
ment that Bennett’s (2009) Vibrant Matter develops further although it
is not written with methodology at heart. Bennett’s analytic focus is not
the human experience of objects, but the objects themselves. Written
from a political theory perspective, the argument is that theorists should
recognise the active participation of nonhuman forces in processes and
events. She posits a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bod-
ies, both human and nonhuman, and suggests that our reading of events
might change if we accept that agency always emerges as the effect of ad
hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She claims that rec-
ognising that agency is not solely the province of humans helps develop
a more responsible, ecologically sound politics resulting in policies and
practices that take account of the subtle web of forces affecting everyday
situations.
A pragmatic means of approaching a multisensory or embodied eth-
nography is to use a combination of sound recordings, film and photos as
field data to evoke a sense of the researcher moving meaningfully through
space with others or alone. Carol Taylor’s sensory and walking research
into posthuman methods for educational environments provides a useful
case in point although it is not in the strictest sense about the inclusion
of animals. She argues (2016) that the notion of posthuman bildung may
offer conceptual sustenance to scholars intrigued by the concept of mov-
ing through space as part of their learning. The German word, bildung
refers to the qualitative learning experience, beyond the straightforward
acquisition and recall of facts and relates to self-development, reflexivity
and maturity. It is a holistic way of understanding how the whole person
develops character and who one is in the world. In German, a bild is also
the word for a picture (or photo), and bild, together with ung (referring
to a process), is how an image or artefact is moulded and evolving.
124 Ethnography after Humanism
In bending over and sniffing the dog I get lost in the disgust produced by
the odour. Only after this do I conceptualise/see “a dead thing” as the
source. The dog stinks, has particles of dead thing on her and is over-
whelmingly a DOG, that for dog reasons, is trying to cover her smell and,
in doing this, is much less my humanised companion. In contrast, the
olfactory mediation after the dog has had a bath and effectively smells like
a deodorised human is much more my humanised companion. (2006,
p. 3)
6 Sensory Methods
125
While we are aware that the approach taken in all the examples we
have cited so far need much more scrutiny regarding these claims, and
there are certainly questions over the utility of the outputs to sustain
legacies of discussion and critique of a sociological nature, they at least
demonstrate how becoming attuned to the senses can offer intriguing
new grounds for creative participant observation with other creatures. At
the same time, we are aware that when discussing the senses in relation to
research most will probably wish to omit a consideration of some senses,
in particular taste. While taste has a place in a multisensorial approach to
studying various topics, as Foster’s attempts to eat worms and Thwaites’s
to eat grass demonstrate, including it in everyday (and less technologi-
cally oriented) human–animal studies research is difficult, if not impos-
sible for most of us. It may be that future research needs to attend to the
role of tasting other animals but this is not something we could advocate
and nor is it something we intend to study here ourselves (although those
interested in “meat culture” would do well to start with Fiddes, 1991 or
Potts, 2016).
Thinking about sound, smell and movement means researchers will
probably learn things they had never anticipated or expected, things
which their own senses do not pick up. We do not need to be etholo-
gists to interpret why these things matter and nor do we need to live as
a badger, deer or goat to utilise aspects of the sensory approach to field-
work in our everyday craft. Simply going on a walk with a companion
animal can be immensely revealing of the Otherness of animals as they
dwell with us in social space. So too can observing the sensory interac-
tions of others (as Hamilton did in the veterinary practice). Of course,
there are limits to our knowledge in using our senses just as there are
limits to animal awareness and interest in us as humans (and certainly
human researchers). In this chapter, we do not claim to have solved
the problem. What we can be confident about, however, is that an
attention to sensory information (and inclusion rather than the rejec-
tion of the messy and corporeal realities of animals) takes us further
towards empathy and understanding of the enmeshed life-worlds that
encompass a range of agencies, moving through space, having affects
and changing things. Ethnography has always taken a strong interest
in what our senses reveal and is an ideal vehicle to propel us forward
128 Ethnography after Humanism
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others by a domestic-dog (Canis familiaris): Tales of displaced yellow snow.
Behavioural Processes, 55(2), 75–79.
Bennett, J. (2009). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Borthwick, F. (2006). Noisy, smelly, dirty dogs: A sensorial autoethnography of
living with dogs. ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference, Australian
Consortium for Social and Political Research Inc. (ACSPRI) (pp. 1–8), Sydney.
Braidotti, R. (1996). Signs of wonder and traces of doubt: On teratology and
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goddesses and cyborgs. Feminist confrontations with science, medicine, and cyber-
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nist theory (p. 61). New York: Columbia University Press.
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Classen, C. (2012). The deepest sense: A cultural history of touch. Chicago:
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tions. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Fiddes, N. (1991). Meat: A natural symbol. London: Routledge.
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Profile Books.
6 Sensory Methods
129
Barone and Eisner (1997) have pointed out that visual, auditory and arts-
based approaches have become more popular and acceptable within the
ethnographic community. At the same time, the range of techniques on
offer to ethnographers has vastly expanded, particularly as the use of web-
sites and audio-visual recording devices have become increasingly user-
friendly, affordable and commonplace (Hine, 2000; Pink, 2013, 2015).
We have highlighted some of the creative techniques on offer in the fore-
going chapters. Here, we expand our purview to review non-standard
ethnographic approaches further and consider how a deeper engage-
ment with the arts (specifically drama, poetry and craft) could be used to
improve our empathy and understanding of human–animal relations. As
Bhana (2006), Jones and Leavy (2014), Kara (2015) and the many oth-
ers who advocate arts-based methods have pointed out, when conducted
well, they can generate rigorous, exciting and relevant research that is
more accessible to nonacademic audiences. With an emphasis on practi-
cal tasks rather than interviews or focus groups, art-based methods like
drama and craft pave the way for engaged participation from community
members (Kara, 2015), decolonising social research (Denzin, Lincoln, &
the arts-based approach that allowed this topic to be discussed and opened
out.
Further literature in this new field of creative methodology is begin-
ning to show some interesting effects on those who participate in arts-
based projects, including new experiences and ways of thinking, improved
empathy for other people as well as growing networks and bonds between
academics and indigenous people (Kelemen & Hamilton, 2015). Hence,
arts-based methods carry the potential for transformational learning
(Lawrence, 2008) because they are immersive and require those involved
to be mentally and bodily engaged, rather than standing back to observe.
In turn, they encourage ethnographers to behave as rounded individu-
als that successfully juggle the “scholar-self ” with the “artist-self ” and
perhaps also the “activist-self ” (Burford, 2015, p. 3). Arts-based methods
differ from traditional modes of working in that they do not seek to dis-
engage the researcher from the field of study in neat or simplistic ways.
This stands in direct contrast to the ways that many traditional research-
ers have sought to erase themselves from their findings by segregating
their scientific researching selves from their domestic ones (for a classic
case study example, see Latour & Woolgar, 1978/1986).
Creative methods seek to unpick the powerful myth of research objec-
tivity at the seams, and its advocates are asking important and timely
questions: How do we acknowledge and work with/through the tensions
between observers and practitioners in writing ethnographic accounts?
How can community members and practitioners, with everyday forms of
knowledge, effect control over academic agendas and findings? How can
we decentre subject expertise and interact within research sites in more
democratic ways? These questions are highly relevant to the current cli-
mate of “impact” in research as well as to philosophy of methods.
Unlike many traditional data-gathering methods that seek to “fix and
limit meaning in a reductive way”, creative methods help ethnographers
to work with and through “the multiplicity of meanings that exist in
social contexts” (Kara, 2015, p. 8). Lawrence (2008, p. 65) states that the
“arts engage our senses, provoking strong, affective responses for both the
creator and the witness of art. Our emotions can provide a catalyst for
informal adult learning beyond traditional, cognitive ways of knowing”.
Ethnography is ideally suited to experimentation with the arts, for, as
7 Arts-Based Methods
135
Mose Brown and Dreby (2013) argue, there is already significant overlap
between the ethnographic immersion of the researcher-self with a whole
host of other identities: they suggest this method, in its embodied quali-
ties, constitutes a “bizarre mixture” of a whole variety of selves (p. 6).
Putting this into practical terms, some researchers (e.g. White, Bushin,
Carpena-Méndez, & Ní Laoire, 2010) are now using drawing and dia-
gram making to encourage participants to show their views in ways that
feel comfortable to them. Participants are shown an image or engage in
discussion, for example, and are then invited to reflect on how it makes
them feel (Kara, 2015, p. 89). This is used as the basis for their own
drawings or self-portraits (Elden, 2013). The resulting images can then
be used as a form of data and, in sufficient quantities, may also be used as
a basis for ethnographic theme analysis. The ethnographic (over)reliance
upon text is disrupted by creative visual techniques like this because they
invite us to work with materials other than participant observation and
transcribed interviews and conversations. Advocates of drawing as data
suggest that this can be just as revealing of the complexity of social situ-
ations as traditional field methods (Bartkowiak-Theron & Sappey, 2012)
and is an especially helpful method when there are language difficulties,
(e.g. when seeking to bring children or multinational participants into
research, White et al., 2010). In these respects, it is easy to see that such
methods have much to offer those wanting to better understand human–
animal relations. And while there are limitations due to species difference,
discussed later, such methods provide a starting point for alternative way
of seeing, chronicling and understanding our relations with other species
(and by extension the “natural” world).
Dramatic Methods
Drama is another technique that may offer alternative ways of under-
standing these relations and can be used at several stages in the process
of research. For example, ethnodrama is a process by which fieldnotes are
collected and analysed in a conventional way but are then edited (often
with participants) to create a script, voice-over, poem or monologue by
selecting “narrative collected through interviews, participant observation,
136 Ethnography after Humanism
field notes, journal entries and/or print and media artefacts” (Saldana,
2005, p. 2). The terms ethnotheatre and reality theatre are also used to
describe similarly creative processes (Saldana, 2005). Advocates argue
that the immersion of participants in the process of acting a part can
trigger transformational learning and creative thought about social issues
and situations that matter (Kershaw & Nicholson, 2011). When used at
the end of the research process as a form of dissemination, for example,
advocates suggest that drama can enrich engagement between academic
and indigenous audiences by bringing them together through the experi-
ence of the performance. Saldana (2005) suggests that this exceeds the
reach of usual ethnographic publications (e.g. in journals), and thus
opens highlighted issues out to consideration by a far wider public.
The interactive documentary drama named Untold Stories of
Volunteering (Kelemen, Mangan, Phillips, Moffat, & Jochum, 2015)
provides a useful practical example. This ethnodrama was designed col-
laboratively, scripted from a collection of research data including ano-
nymised transcripts of nineteen interviews with volunteers (carried out in
2014 across the UK), and used material artefacts, props and scenery cre-
ated in five community-based workshops on the theme of volunteering.
The drama focused on organisational practices relating to volunteering as
well as the challenges faced by individual volunteers. The resulting per-
formance included voice-overs and scripted lines made up of interview
extracts as well as songs and poems written by the participants. It was
showcased in UK towns and cities, including Newcastle-under-Lyme,
Leicester and London in 2014 in front of large and diverse audiences.
The aim was to break down borders between academics, practitioners
and community members firstly, by taking ethnographic accounts out of
the “ivory tower”, and secondly, by removing its reliance upon text as the
prime means of communication.
For those keen to use dramatic techniques in this way, theatre pro-
vides “opportunities for participants with marginalized ‘offstage’ status
in everyday life to stand centre stage and tell their stories” (Saldana,
2005, p. 67). The performance itself mediates that engagement, the the-
atre being a place of creativity and imagination infused with possibilities
for exuberance and make-believe. The theory behind the volunteering
research project, for example, was that drama presents complex and
7 Arts-Based Methods
137
Aristophanes, for example, frogs, wasps, weasels, birds, and various other
creatures function as literary and dramatic devices to draw humorous
comparisons between humans and animals (Putz, 2006). In Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, Reynard the Fox warns humans of the dangers of flat-
tery and cunning. While animals are part of the story as characters in
their own right, they are vessels for human values, meanings and story-
lines. From Shakespeare’s donkey-headed buffoon, Bottom, to flocks of
real sheep being herded down mountains to create a climactic spectacle in
The Gathering, other-than-human creatures are usually moving props that
showcase human action and speech.
Perhaps one possible answer to this problem lies in new theatrical
prop-making and technology. Michael Morpurgo’s (2007) novel War
Horse, for example, presents an emotive storyline of a horse and boy set
against the backdrop of World War I. When this was dramatised with
life-sized puppetry, sounds and animatronic machinery, the character
of Joey the horse was made symbolically and physically present on stage
to highlight the affective bond between horse and human—without
the need for a genuine horse to be present. Nonetheless, the effect of
this on audiences has been powerful for, as Morpurgo stated in inter-
view (2014):
magazine, March 2013; see also Goode, 2014). The audience is informed
that the cat is called Antonio, and according to a contemporary review
of the show:
His presence creates unexpected ripples in the still waters of a watching and
listening audience. He’s a scene-stealer, all cats are, and […] he makes us
particularly aware of our presence. By being as interested in us as he is in
the performance, he contributes to a truer democracy of presence, a feline
demolition of the hierarchy of performers and their public. (Exeunt maga-
zine, http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/the-forest-the-field/, 9 March
2013)
But how does Antonio feel about being on stage? Is this cat simply per-
forming in a circus? Can we experiment with theatre and ethnodrama
that includes animals?
Poem One
Transformation
Metamorphosis, Rebirth
Change, Invigorate, Rumble
Doing, Doing, Doing, Doing
Done?
Poem Two
Us
Diverse, Together
Challenges, Boundaries, Messages
Compromise, Survive, Discriminate, Story Telling
ME/WE
In both examples, the research team noted that participants regarded
academic impact as something that was best achieved through genuine
collaboration between researchers and nonacademics. The line “Diverse,
Together” and “ME/WE” make this particularly plain. When we, as
authors, attempted to use the cinquain technique with a human–ani-
mal theme, we decided to use similar instructions; a synonym or differ-
ent meaning of research in lines one and five, line two contained two
words that described our relationships with animals, line three was to
be three words that described the challenges faced by those interested in
human–animal ethnography and line four was to comprise four words
that expressed positive feelings about challenging them. We produced the
following cinquain very quickly:
7 Arts-Based Methods
143
Poem Example
Investigation
Joyful, Fascination
Voiceless, Hierarchies, Difficult
Motivation, Emancipation, Creativity, Change
Look again
While neither of us would claim that this is by any means good poetry
as defined by literary scholarship, it is important to note that this was
never really the aim of the exercise. Attempting the cinquain for ourselves
demonstrated how quickly ideas formed when structured into five lines
with tightly controlled rules for each. The bounded nature of the writing
made it easy to spark ideas and prompted us to think about what words
mattered most. This technique could work in a number of ethnographic
settings, especially as a non-academic means to start a discussion (just as
visual and artistic images can do) or as part of a bigger workshop or focus
group. It is useful in teaching; indeed, it has already been proven an excel-
lent way of breaking the ice and starting a discussion (Beech, MacIntosh,
& MacLean, 2010; Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006). This is particularly
important when seeking to bring diverse individuals together in groups
and to give them a shared (albeit temporary) means of working together
productively.
The same research team that adapted the cinquain method to cultural
animation travelled to Japan in 2013 to conduct two further cultural ani-
mation events. In this case, the subject matter was entirely different and
addressed the problems that people had experienced during the 2011 tsu-
nami. The workshops were attended by academics, community members
and practitioners from local government, co-operatives and community
associations and focused on object making because objects appeared to
be important and symbolic to the participants who had experienced loss
in the aftermath of the natural disaster. Working together, participants
produced an artistic installation called the “Tree of life” (this concept was
selected because in Japanese mythology the tree is a symbol of endur-
ance and longevity) that was decorated with objects made during the
workshops and which had significance to participants’ lives both during
144 Ethnography after Humanism
the tsunami and beforehand. The objects were “hung” onto the bare
branches of the tree as physical emblems of these shared stories of survival
(Kelemen & Hamilton, 2015). In common with the ethnodramas that
we highlighted earlier in the chapter, after the workshops finished this
tree installation moved into new networks, embarking upon an interna-
tional journey beyond Japan where more participants engaged with it and
added their own crafts. It became useful as a “door opener” and a means
by which to structure and extend subsequent networking and workshop
activities (Kelemen & Hamilton, 2015). Finally, it was exhibited at a
major international summit in a UK university where it formed part of
a visual and audio display about the impact and significance of creative
methods (https://www.keele.ac.uk/casic/).
Cultural animation workshops are loosely structured, sociable and
often playful. By giving equal status to academic expertise and practical
skills, they seek to connect learning with action, a conscious strategy to
disassemble theory-practice hierarchies which has been cited as a possible
way to bridge the relevance gap between research and everyday life (Beech
et al., 2010; Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006). Workshops need not have
a formal output but many aim to work around the production of art
installations like the Tree of Life. Their main function is not aesthetic but
is rather to provide a medium through which participants can exchange
their ideas and thoughts: it is the coming together of academics and com-
munity members that matters here, along with the use of creative meth-
ods that facilitate this coming together. Through the making and craft
process, it is argued, participants are more able to examine sensitive and
serious issues (Kara, 2015) because, unlike formal interviews, the process
is relatively passive and ideas and comments arise more naturally while
attention is focused on the task in hand.
Workshops aim to tackle serious questions that relate to everyday life
such as what does poverty look and feel like? How do people with disabilities
cope at work? What is old age like if one lives alone? Given that animals
often take centre stage in the lives of those experiencing such social prob-
lems, we suggest that their inclusion in a cultural animation workshop
is likely to generate fruitful discussion although we acknowledge that
it still may not satisfy those who want animals to be present literally
in our research endeavours. We can, however, attempt to include them
7 Arts-Based Methods
145
a project would open up reflections and ideas for a further set of partici-
pants, just as a number of the examples we have examined have appeared
to do.
Advocates of cultural animation techniques claim that immersive
experiences produce lasting legacies as well as immediate impacts, in that
they raise and explore issues in collaboration. But however participatory
they may set out to be, there are certainly ethical issues to ponder before
designing such a venture for human and animal participants. It is by no
means clear whether animals would appreciate being involved in such
experimental practices, whether they have the same capacity for benefit-
ing from involvement or whether human participants would get the same
benefits from making or using puppets, for example, as they would with
living creatures. At the same time, we feel that if further work could
investigate the hows and whys of arts-based work like cultural anima-
tion, to iron out some of these practical and ethical uncertainties that are
inherent in such a new and innovative method, we are presented with
an exciting new opportunity to broker relationships with practitioners
and community members that will enable us to look at, investigate and
empathise with the human–animal tie more closely. However, it needs to
be abundantly clear that in discussing these possibilities we are not advo-
cating that animals simply be included ad hoc into various experimental
methods.
There may be extremely good grounds for not including them physi-
cally, despite an overall aim of including them in our research methods
so they are not sidelined or silenced. Their safety, comfort and willing-
ness have to be the primary consideration in any research purporting to
include them, and this may necessitate discussions with animal welfare
specialists and/or animal behaviourists. We think it important to include
animals more robustly in human–animal studies because their exclu-
sion contributes to their marginalisation—and thus poor treatment—in
human societies. But including them in ways which compromise their
safety or which set them up as “tools” to help human meaning-making
endeavours simply does the same and so considerable thought and effort
as well as planning needs to go into any work that does attempt to include
them. If this field is to move forward then research ethics committees
will need to rethink their approaches. As it currently stands (university)
7 Arts-Based Methods
147
reveal attachments to other species and things in ways that make us “think,
feel, and hesitate” to paraphrase Stengers. (p. 15)
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8
Hybrids of Method
The emerging field of multiple species research has yet to be firmly or per-
fectly defined, but in seeking to test out some ideas, the foregoing three
chapters explored the potential of several creative tools for approach-
ing the difficult problem of accessing and understanding the interac-
tions between humans and other species, looking at techniques that can
incorporate other agencies rather than ignoring them. In the previous
chapter, we considered how cutting-edge participatory methods could
develop further still, and suggested that the creativity and sociability of
art and craft-making could break down borderlines between academics,
animals and their human guardians. The question we explore in this cur-
rent chapter returns to a more formal academic context and asks whether
collaboration between differently skilled researchers and the use of mul-
tiple research methods, including ethnography, can provide another basis
for new insights.
We frame this discussion with the concept of interdisciplinarity or,
as we term it, hybridisation. We look at two distinct styles of work that
emerge in bringing methods together: firstly, by focusing on the pos-
sibility of teamwork (differently skilled academics each bringing their
As Klein puts it: “All interdisciplinary activities are rooted in the ideas of
unity and synthesis, evoking a common epistemology of convergence”
(1990, p. 11), and this arises, in her view, from a significant change in
the way that knowledge is currently being conceived of, arising from
“hybrids” of teaching and learning, holistic perspectives emerging from
the “blurring and mixing of genres and labels” and a sense of epistemo-
logical “crisis” in the way that truth itself is understood. This is a working
definition which, we feel, has something to offer by way of clarity and
supports the blurring of species distinctions in entanglements which has
been central in our argument thus far (Haraway, 1991).
One of the biggest questions we are keen to answer in our work is how
we can bring animals into research more easily, and more specifically, how
ethnography can adapt to this agenda by engaging in new or different
approaches. Following Klein, we regard this as a broad issue touching
on more knowledges and methods than we as social scientists can eas-
ily access. In other words, as a project, it exceeds our own disciplines.
Hence, we feel a clear need to draw on the ideas of others, beyond our
own disciplines, and to venture into the literatures of (among others)
media and cultural studies, geography, management and organisation,
veterinary and natural sciences, as well as sociology. To a degree this is
common to all “animal studies” which can be defined loosely as a field as
opposed to a discipline precisely because it crosses numerous disciplines.
But as we made clear at the outset of this book, while there is wonderful
cross-pollination of theories and concepts in animal studies, attendant
methodological innovations are lacking. We have addressed this so far
in advocating experimentation with visual and filmed data, sensory and
motion-based methods and other techniques which have the ability to
cross-cut different ways of knowing the world. We suggest that a degree
of overlap is desirable epistemologically as well as practically, between
usually distinct subject areas and between the methods that are typically
used in each. Following Klein’s principle of “hybrids” of research, we see
156 Ethnography after Humanism
a large part of it, but also comes down to the question of what constitutes
a problem worth solving—a problem that is worthy of the combined
efforts of differently qualified academics and practitioners and the time,
cost and perceived benefits of such activities. The question of what con-
stitutes a worthwhile research focus is bound up inextricably with the
interplay of power in and through societies and, in turn, the value that
we—as academics—place upon problems that affect species other than
“us”. When learning about research methods, for example, it is common
for students to be prompted to consider the quality of the research ques-
tion: Is there a clear rationale for the question? Why does it matter? Why
is it of interest and to whom? Similarly, such questions are often asked
of established academics through, for example, their institutional ethics
committees. When those affected by the issue in question are not human,
however, such questions are shot through with species (and usually specie-
sist) politics. For researchers of many disciplines, animal problems are
often only addressed when they become human problems, affecting the
quality of food consumption, for example, or preventing humans from
acquiring some other form of benefit from other species. If questions are
deemed unworthy enough to ask, it is hardly surprising that a lack of
empirical research work (and methodological innovation) follows.
the tools to investigate the human facets of animal problems such as the
attitudes and motivations of animal keepers, policymakers, businesses in
their relations with other species.
Many veterinary researchers openly profess an interest in working
with social scientists to close these “gaps” (Whay & Main, 2009). Such
intergeneric hybrids of method—if conducted well—provide a means
to forge important connections and to generate new knowledges with
practical application: a meeting of the ideal and the pragmatic. One
example of this is identifying and preventing links between domestic
violence and animal abuse. Increasingly, the area is seeing disciplinary
and methodological hybridity as forensic veterinary professionals work
with social scientists to consider, for example, how veterinary knowledge
about deliberate animal injuries can be used to devise or complement
cross-reporting schemes for violence (i.e. human service professionals
reporting violence to animal welfare professionals and vice versa) (for dis-
cussion, see Animal Sentience special edition on “Breaking the Silence:
The veterinarian’s duty to report” 2016/076). Aside from the adminis-
trative difficulties inherent in such projects, however, there are paradig-
matic obstacles too. While we are oversimplifying, we can boil this down
to the problem of combining quantitative with qualitative approaches.
There are, very often, major differences in epistemological and ontologi-
cal sensibility attached to these very different styles of work; a profound
philosophical tension between accepting and challenging that truth and
knowledge are the same.
Veterinary researchers, for example, examine the health and welfare of
whole populations of animals (e.g. see Whay & Main, 2009) by focus-
ing on metrics such as “body condition scoring”, “locomotion scoring”
or data from mass-scale observations. In developing their findings, they
draw upon mathematical estimates of the risks and benefits of particular
actions to develop models and predictions. Their research is usually vali-
dated by a range of mathematical evaluation criteria such as computer-
assisted sensitivity testing, statistics and frequency counts. We briefly
examined an example of this in our discussion of beastly places (in Chap. 5)
when we considered the contribution of animal-mounted cameras and
the large data sets they provide on bodily movement and disease. The
positivist science traditions that inform such approaches rest upon a core
160 Ethnography after Humanism
assumption that the real world can be discovered, tested and measured;
that reality can be presented via mathematically informed methods that
use sizeable and “valid” samples of data. Indeed, these precepts are impor-
tant for researchers to establish testable findings that can be applied to
future cases and problems.
With its interest in process and meanings, however, qualitative research
including ethnography does not rely upon experimental examination in
terms of “quantity, amount, intensity, or frequency” and instead stresses
“how social experience is created and given meaning” (Denzin & Lincoln,
2011, p. 13). Qualitative work privileges semiotics, discourse analysis,
survey research, focus groups and interviews, and now a selection of cre-
ative tools such as visual, sensory and arts-based methods. While some of
these techniques are new, most draw upon long histories with their own
distinctive literatures and, of course, they are informed by a wide range of
theoretical approaches from the positivist and humanistic to posthuman,
postmodern and constructivist. While qualitative research can crosscut a
number of disciplines there is usually a core appreciation from the out-
set—albeit superficial in some cases—of the tangled and interwoven poli-
tics of method, epistemology and ontology; that is, research, knowledge
and sense-making. This political sensitivity is not a usual component of
the quantitative approach.
Of course, the tendency towards small-scale data sets in qualitative
research carries its own set of problems. There are questions of access
and sample size, persuasiveness and impact, and—as we have already
acknowledged—small data sets become even smaller if we exclude certain
species on the basis of their biological differences and inability to answer
questions. Savage and Burrows (2007) have gone as far as to argue that
there is a “crisis of empirical sociology” stemming from the realisation
that other sectors (particularly private enterprises like veterinary prac-
tices) have access to significantly more information, which can be used
to generate greater impacts upon everyday working practices. They claim
that qualitative researchers should respond to this crisis by reimagining
their methods and, indeed, their “worlds” of research—a call echoed by
many scholars over the last decade or so (e.g. Law & Urry, 2004, p. 390).
We suggest that if we are to develop collaborations and hybrids of
our own, specifically aimed at multi-species research, we should attend
8 Hybrids of Method
161
to “sell” the idea of change to farmers. The aim was to stimulate a genuine
impact on the well-being of the cattle involved, although the final results
were inconclusive. In reflecting on this, Main et al. conclude that more
and different data was needed to identify better ways of talking to and
understanding farmers.
Experimental studies like this one, in which different methods are
treated as complementary rather than oppositional, allow us to think of
qualitative and quantitative methods as being on a continuum (Gray &
Densten, 1998), for viewing methods as polar opposites is often a false
dualism and entrenches unhelpful borderlines between them. In reading
the conclusions of Main et al. (2012), we regard their openness to new
data as an ideal basis for intergeneric work with ethnographers, trained
in evaluating the meanings and processes of daily life. This is only one
example and there are doubtless many more cases where ethnographers
could add value by drawing upon in-depth qualitative approaches to tar-
get practical problems. As Richens et al. (2016) have claimed within a
context of dairy cattle vaccination, for example: “There is limited research
investigating the motivators and barriers to vaccinating dairy cattle.
Veterinary surgeons have been identified as important sources of infor-
mation for farmers making vaccination and disease control decisions, as
well as being farmers’ preferred vaccine suppliers” (p. 1). As they point
out, however, vets’ perceptions of their own role and communication
style can be “at odds with farmers’ reported preferences” (p. 2).
Richens et al. (2016) have sought to tackle this particular research
problem by adopting qualitative methods, albeit within highly structured
sampling frames (rather than ethnographic or naturalistic modes of data
collection). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 dairy
farmers from across Britain and the data set was subsequently analysed
using thematic analysis. Richens et al. conclude that farmers perceive vets
to have an important role in facilitating decision making in all aspects of
vaccination but that what was missing from their findings was a qualita-
tive view of the attitudes of vets towards vaccination and their perceptions
of their professional relationship to farmers. In short, the survey only told
them one what side of the interaction (the farmers) thought of the other
(the vets) but revealed next to nothing about the “interface” itself. We
would also add to this that the animal’s perspective was missing entirely,
8 Hybrids of Method
163
although the a priori assumption that vaccination is good for the cow is
most certainly taken as read. And this raises a different, perhaps insur-
mountable, set of problems. Working across methodologically paradig-
matic boundaries might well necessitate working across ideological ones
as well. For some, this will be unpalatable. Working within a framework
that sees animal welfare as a way to increase productivity by and from
their bodies for human consumption will not easily, if ever, mix with the
more emancipatory view of many animal studies scholars.
We draw on research examples like these, because while shot through
with problems, they are nevertheless heartening in some respects. They
demonstrate an interest in the benefits of hybridisation in our research,
with greater acknowledgement that (very often) the root problem requires
greater understanding of the human–animal or human–human nexus. As
Lowe et al. (2013) argue:
There is clearly some way to go in bridging the paradigm gap between dif-
ferent disciplinary approaches and “selling” the idea of ethnography as a
viable addition to such projects. We are in no position to offer any quick
fixes. But if ethnographers can build and nurture relationships with those
who focus on practical animal issues, dilemmas and questions and whose
training gives them a wholly different viewpoint and methodological
approach from their own, there are clear opportunities to understand the
animal–human interface in radical new ways. Teams of researchers could
set research questions together, for example, followed by a phase of more
specialist considerations with quantitative and ethnographic approaches
being used independently before coming together to discuss findings
and to share ideas. Navigating the ethical, political, epistemological and
methodological terrain involved in such a plan will prove difficult as it
requires us to challenge allegiances and boundaries. After all, we all come
to research as creatures with belief systems that we hold dear. Of course,
164 Ethnography after Humanism
we realise that we are advocating that people from different sides of the
fence “get together” and work through the issues openly and we acknowl-
edge that this is difficult both as an intellectual exercise and in its “real
world consequences” (e.g. in getting grants, publishing academic articles,
etc.). We argue, however, that the passion that often goes with intellec-
tual curiosity will go a long way to offset some of the problems, as will the
potential benefits to animals (as well as humans).
While mindful of the human politics of knowledge, the kinds of social
worlds we want to make more real, we think that hybrid methods—rest-
ing upon strong and positive communication between differing disci-
plines—could make a real impact on our everyday lives with animals. We
have already argued that ethnographers need a degree of theoretical and
methodological heterodoxy if they are to be pragmatic in their investiga-
tions of human–animal relations, to get involved with veterinary projects
on lameness and disease prevention, for example. Without seeking to
take a combative stance on this, we think this necessitates softening some
epistemological/paradigmatic allegiances in the name of pragmatism,
and scholars within the field of the STS and actor network theory have
already made inspirational headway in doing precisely this.
the old order, the old power games and discourses by silencing animals or
relegating them to the “natural order” of things.
By emphasising the networking of people, animals and things—its
embrace of multiplicity of meanings, and its disavowal of static, struc-
tural entities in social life—posthumanism offers new hope to bring
other-than-human life under the purview of ethnography. Pure binary
constructions have been problematised and the line between social and
natural and between human and animal has become permeable. Social
scientists (including ethnographers) no longer have to restrict themselves
to the narrowly defined study of society/culture which was always pre-
sumed to be exclusively human. Instead, they are free(r) to contemplate
studying entanglements of the human with nature, or with other spe-
cies—with “naturecultures” as Haraway has labelled it (Haraway, 2008).
It represents a whole new world of posthuman study, a world that poten-
tially embraces the concept of hybridity.
As Lestel points out, disciplines and their foci change, shift and evolve:
“The profound renewal of ethology itself ” (2006, p. 148) spearheaded by
the pioneering work of Jane Goodall is based on a transformation of ethol-
ogy into ethnology; it became accepted and understood that the societies
of animals studied were far more complex than expected and that an eth-
nographic approach was crucial to their understanding (p. 149). Kirksey
and Helmreich (2010) similarly point to the importance of ethnography
as central in opening up new ways of seeing the world:
with entanglements that are the basis of our reality, not pure distinctions
(Haraway, 1991).
One of the great strengths and limitations of posthumanism is that
it paradoxically both resists and embraces method. It encourages us to
ask questions that are difficult to answer, research topics and issues that
currently have few (or no) methods to bring into play. Given its posi-
tioning—beyond the postmodern critique of an external, knowable real-
ity—there is a rejection of pure distinction between theory and method,
between finding out “the facts” and accurately writing those “facts” into
accounts. The “radical egalitarianism” (Chagani, 2014) which reconceives
the human, social, technical, material as on an equal footing, or entangled,
necessitates an awareness of the role(s) that methods play in constituting
the social world as opposed to reporting on it. There is an assumption of
praxis that underpins the theoretical decentring of the human. This is its
strength. But it is also its limitation, in that it limits the ability of those
working within posthuman frameworks to attend to structural politics
at a local level, and more worryingly perhaps given our argument in this
chapter, to build bridges with positivists working on living problems that
work from a humanist prerogative to exercise power to do good. This may,
effectively, wreck a posthumanist–veterinary collaboration before it even
begins for the questioning of human centrality and power is at the heart
of the posthumanist project. This may not be especially problematic for
those posthumanists working with human–object entanglements such as
robots, cyborgs and so on, but it certainly is a significant obstacle for those
of us concerned to investigate human–animal entanglements because the
aim is to acknowledge, accept and try to move beyond our limitations
as human researchers embedded within human culture and society and
to use methods to create the world we want to live in (Law, 2004). As
Ferrando (2012, p. 10) points out: “Posthumanism is decentralized and
does not employ representative democratic practices: no specific type of
human can symbolically represent humanity as a whole, just as no spe-
cies can hold any epistemological primacy”. It is a way of destabilising
and deconstructing the “ontological hygiene” of humanism, the ways
we, as humans, feel we know our world and what makes sense within
these worlds (Graham, 2002). This view presents a serious problem if
the objective is to forge new connections with those who assume human
8 Hybrids of Method
169
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9
People Writing for Animals
of certain versions of reality, but we also feel that our enquiry into this
complexity needs to be practical: How can we use our implicit human
power to author less reductive accounts of human–animal entangle-
ments, to challenge old hegemonies and to adapt our style of writing to
a more inclusive approach?
Voices and Stories
Academic writing—in general—is often criticised because it is dull (Kara,
2015), convoluted (Jones & Leavy, 2014), alienating (Gergen & Gergen,
2012) and/or that it speaks to limited and elite audiences rather than to
wide and diverse ones. Ethnographers have long been attuned to these
critiques and have used their words creatively in the hope of encouraging
marginalised voices to be heard through polyvocal narratives and tales
(Fraser & MacDougall, 2016; Van Maanen, 1988). Ethnographic writ-
ing, then, has rarely been viewed by those conducting it as a vehicle for
passing on “pure information”. Most have, quite rightly, seen it as creative
method-in-practice (Law, 2004) with the power to reveal as well as create
whole worlds of meaning.
While, as Benjamin (1968) states: “The value of information does not
survive the moment in which it was new”, by contrast, an ethnographic
narrative is different: “A story is different. It does not expend itself. It
preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even
after a long time” (p. 90). Ethnography’s impact as an inscription device
lies in the concentrated strength of its storytelling. In other words, ethno-
graphic narratives and stories carry the potential for long-lasting effects
upon the listener/reader by exceeding the limits of information and out-
living the moment of transmission. The art of writing in thickly descriptive
(Geertz, 1973) ways helps produce accounts whose effects last. But there
is a moral question here too, for, as Taussig (2006) helpfully points out,
we also owe an ethical debt to our participants to see and present their
words and stories in useful context rather than as data sources gleaned
for our use.
This ethical debt involves treating speech, ideas and stories with
respect. It is a mistake to view the words and stories of our participants
176 Ethnography after Humanism
as raw data without attending to the way that stories help constitute the
very lives we seek to describe and inevitably produce through writing. As
McGranahan puts it, this is to “miss the power of stories and storytell-
ers even as we tell them. We tell stories to get to the point, to make our
points. We miss that the stories are the point. They are the getting, and
they are the there” (McGranahan, 2015, p. 1). For those of us interested
in questioning implicit hierarchies between humans and other species
through an emancipatory or posthuman form of ethnography, however,
this ethical concern is hard to apply. It is hard because animals do not
tell stories. Yet it is more than this. The traditional silence of animals in
ethnographic work can be tracked to bigger questions of species hierar-
chy, hierarchies that writing (no matter how descriptive or nuanced) have
done very little to address.
Animals, through a lack of “voice” have been marginalised and their
ethnographic muteness perpetuated by a preoccupation with human sto-
ries (about humans). Doing posthumanist research, however, necessitates
interrogating the links that connect the personal with the political and
seeking to understand the effects of social problems in ways that provide
opportunities for multiple species to participate in research. The aim is
to grapple with different forms of agency to disrupt assumed power rela-
tions; to find creative means of revealing and elaborating the social status
of these very different agents and the ways their agentic properties relate
to bigger cultural and social wholes.
If we are keen to go beyond reductive information transfer and produce
posthumanist writing that actually makes a difference to the treatment
and inclusion of animals as social actors, we must acknowledge our limi-
tations as humans and seek to do writing differently. But how? We need
to find a comfortable way to live with our uncertainties about humanist
authorial power and, at the same time, develop techniques of writing to
acknowledge that animals may have their own stories to tell (even if they
do not have the physical or cognitive capacity to tell them). Since animals
do not write or tell, however, the best (in fact, the only) means we have at
our disposal is to use our humanity to tell stories about and for them: sto-
ries that destabilise reductive assumptions about their object status, their
lack of social importance, and bring them into the ethnographic account.
9 People Writing for Animals
177
through knowledge production and creation and not ask “whose side are
we on?” (Becker, 1967). Similarly, we think it difficult, if not impossible,
to acknowledge the ways inequalities are embedded in social structures
and institutions without wanting to challenge and dismantle them. As
such we are each, in our own—often different—ways, involved in “public
sociology” (Burawoy, 2005) in that we orient towards a particular view of
“democratic socialism” and that we see ourselves as allies of social move-
ments designed to bolster civil society (Burawoy, 2005, pp. 319–325).
The difference for us is that our scholarship advocates for nonhumans,
meaning it may be seen by some as doubly suspect.
Peggs (2013) points out that although human–animal relations are
entirely suited to sociology, there remain questions as to whether ani-
mals are a proper focus for sociologists. It can be seen as academic “dirty
work” (Wilkie, 2015) precisely because “by breaching anthropocentric
norms, animal scholars, nonhuman animals and animal-related issues are
out of place in the social sciences” (p. 225). This gives scholars in the
field a marginalised, if not tainted, status. Scholarship that then aims
to advocate openly on behalf of other animals risks becoming doubly
tainted: questionable both in terms of its bias and focus. As Peggs (2013)
points out, even though advocacy scholarship has become more accept-
able within sociology, this does not necessarily extend to the sociology of
human–animal relations. It makes it difficult, then, to call for a means to
write for animals in our ethnographic work.
Advocacy writing for other animals, then, is often in a double if not
triple bind. It may be considered suspect in terms of content (other
animals), bias (political engagement), as well as threatening taken-for-
granted assumptions about human superiority. In many ways, this echoes
the struggles of (early) feminist, black/feminist, and other critical schol-
arship fields in that they consistently had to resist their own intellectual
marginalisation from a perception that they threatened the status quo
(both inside and outside of the academy). In the human–animal studies
field, some have made robust defences of their “scientific right” to con-
duct nonanimal focused work; others have been more modest in argu-
ing that animals are tangential to their focus on humans, while others
have revelled in their marginalised and deviant status which offers them
180 Ethnography after Humanism
in the example given). They have also called into question the very prin-
ciple of thinking through binaries. Adopting and adapting these critiques
to the study of human–animal lives offers a way for posthuman scholars
to move beyond established positivist tropes in the production of knowl-
edge, and the writing techniques deployed in their ethnographies.
Key to any attempts to produce knowledge about human–animal rela-
tions in ways that do not simply reinscribe mainstream binaries is ensur-
ing that multi-species research is interdisciplinary (or as we described
in Chap. 8, hybrid forms of research). Again, we can learn from femi-
nist scholars about the importance of this. Mary Maynard (1997, p. 2)
argued, when considering the aloofness of women’s studies to science,
that we ignore the “other side” at our peril. As we argued in Chap. 8, not
only do the biological and environmental sciences have much to tell us
about other species, but they are often the authoritative and dominant
voice vis-à-vis other animals. While these voices are often used on the
behalf of other animals, they have also been (and continue to be) used
against other species as is the case, for example, when environmental sci-
entists become enrolled in calls to “cull” certain animal populations, or
when biological scientists use animal bodies to advance our understand-
ing of them. Ignoring these disciplines because their concerns are so dif-
ferent from our own is problematic. While it is tempting to silo oneself
off from the “other side” in order to advance criticisms of its internal
paradigms, this is not always desirable in human–animal studies where
knowledge about other animals is paramount. If we refuse to engage with
scientific studies and understandings of other animals, we run the risk of
restricting our understanding of other animals. Adopting this position
also excuses those voices from any critique or accountability, potentially
allowing them to “maintain their position and evade responsibility for
their own actions” (Lorde, in Crowley & Himmelweit, 1992, p. 47).
Posthuman ethnographic methods encourage us to move beyond
universal, essential and biologically reductionist ideas of “the animal”.
As Maynard (1997) argued when considering the suitability of feminist
extensions of traditional masculinist theories “once essential and uni-
versal man dissolves, so does his hidden companion, woman” (p. 339).
We can borrow and paraphrase this idea, “once essential and universal
human dissolves, so too does their hidden companion, animal”. Just as
182 Ethnography after Humanism
the rejection of the universal category “woman” was a watershed for femi-
nism so too should the rejection of the universal category “animal” be for
human–animal studies. Because ethnography attends to the particular,
the local, the emergent, it allows us to avoid reductive simplifications
like animal-as-category and instead see the myriad roles individual and
specific animals play in our lives, organisations and social and political
arenas. Posthuman methods, based on ethnographic principles of evoca-
tive, rich and thickly descriptive writing, can fruitfully tell stories about
the roles humans play in animal lives, as well as the impacts humans
might have on animals. A posthumanist methodology starts from the
assumption of entanglement, disavowing “pure” categories of human and
animal, or social and natural, in order to recognise that we share com-
mon worlds that are collectively made, and that we impact one another
intersubjectively (Stacey, 1988).
Posthuman and multi-species ethnographers must hold ideological
investment in what/who they study “because in ethnographic studies the
researcher herself is the primary medium, the ‘instrument’ of research,
this method draws on … resources of empathy, connection and con-
cern” (Stacey, 1988, p. 22). It is this sense of empathy and connection
that often drives ethnographers towards activism/advocacy in their meth-
ods of writing (Garfinkel, 1967) and new methods of storytelling that
include rather than erase other species. Our argument, then, is that—for
the scholar advocate at least—writing which deliberately cultivates close-
ness and empathy between researcher and researched is to be embraced,
not held with suspicion precisely because of that closeness.
Take, for example, the work of Jan and Steve Alger whose ethnogra-
phy of a cat shelter “Whiskers” (2003) made use of emotive, first-person
reportage to stress how important the cats were to their story, not as
“data” but as fellow beings. Taking this stance enabled Alger and Alger
to gain acceptance by the human workers in the Whiskers community
so they could conduct participant observation alongside them. In their
own words:
We knew the kitten would not live until morning without medical
attention. So, I said “Let’s take her to the emergency clinic on our
own.” Steve agreed saying “We have to try to save her.” Alice and her
9 People Writing for Animals
183
boyfriend had placed a small cloth over the kitten for warmth and they
agreed also. So, we took off with the kitten … I kept my hands on the
kitten to keep her warm and watched for signs of life. Every so often
she made a little movement or sound. I didn’t dare pick her up as she
was so incredibly fragile. It was almost as if there was nothing inside the
fur. She was completely limp. It seemed to take forever to get to the
hospital. We finally got there and Steve ran inside with the kitten while
I closed the car. He told the receptionists we had a dying kitten and
they scooped her up and brought her to the doctor while we filled out
forms. After a while the doctor [vet] emerged and told us they had to
put a catheter directly into the bone to deliver fluid immediately to the
kitten who was 10% dehydrated which was consistent with death
[meaning, life threatening]. They also had to get her warm as her tem-
perature had dropped to 93 degrees (a cat’s normal temperature would
be about 101 degrees [Farenheit]). With that preparation, the doctor
took us in to see her and she was a sight. Lying on a heating pad and
surrounded with rubber gloves that had been filled with warm water
she was trying to hold her little head up. They estimated her age as
4–6 weeks. She had goop in her eyes from medication and was as weak
as a dishrag. The doctor said the next two hours would be critical and
we should call back at that time. But we felt so elated to see that tiny
kitten alive such cautions meant nothing to us. We were just glad we
had taken the chance. (pp. 43–45)
The sight of a suffering animal, the locking of eyes between human and
nonhuman, inaugurates a bond demanding from the person a life of
responsibility. That event is uniquely intimate because it occurs between
two singular beings—because based on the locking of eyes, the human’s
knowledge is not of all animals in general, but of this animal, at this
moment. The moment is uniquely intimate, too, because it expands ordi-
nary understandings of the self and its possible social relations. (p. 434)
In this excerpt, Naisargi Dave reflects upon how sights of the field
prompt a commitment to activism on behalf of other animals. In describ-
ing this episode in her written account, she is seeking to make this “exotic
encounter” more accessible to readers while at the same time drawing
attention to the plight of animals in India. In other words, there is a move
here from seeing and feeling, to writing and advocating. A similar move
is noted in the ethnographic work of Gillespie (2016) whose work in the
USA with dairy cows suggests that openness to the experience of other
animals—witnessing—can be an important ethnographic research tool
in and of itself, one that relies on the ethnographer engaging politically
with the “subject’s embodied experience” (p. 2). She explains how what
she saw—or bore witness to—while doing openly activist-ethnography
led to her reflecting on emotions in fieldwork:
While our focus is not animal minds per se—and we would even call into
question Churchill’s focus on the mind while trying to negate Cartesian
dualisms of mind/body—we can borrow from this idea and extend it
186 Ethnography after Humanism
by arguing that allowing empathy for other beings, and writing accounts
that stress the shared embodiment of our lives, can give ethnographers a
different way to depict other animals. In 1990, Shapiro attempted pre-
cisely this in an autoethnographic experiment with his dog, Sabaka. In
reflecting on the way he holds himself throughout a shared game, Shapiro
writes: “It is an empathic posture in which I sense the bodily attitude,
stance, and incipient moves of the other. This kinesthetic empathy is a
possible investigatory posture” (p. 193). He argues that we need to remain
open to the experiences—the embodied experiences—of other animals:
“Invitations to move and bodily sensibility are the basis of meaning in
Sabaka’s experience. For him, meaning does not occur in or consist of a
semantic field of, say, differences, similarities, and associations. Rather,
meaning occurs in the contexts of possible moves; of possible ways of liv-
ing and maintaining space and, as the last reflection suggests, of forms of
relationship with others.”
The point Shapiro is making is that Sabaka does not rely upon lan-
guage for interaction. Meaning appears to consist of and become known
through a bodily experience of game-playing. For Shapiro, autoethnog-
raphy captures this well for it points to the “complex, intimate, and
wonderful choreographies of that world”—language becomes a vehicle
for describing empathy, play and shared space (p. 194). This has further
potential as a way of writing for animals. Taking key aspects of previous
work on feminist epistemology, embodiment and empathy, then, may
offer a new way for ethnographers to develop research projects open to
seeing, embodying space with and writing about other animals in their
own right, not simply as an extension of human culture. This helps those
of us who use our scholarship to advocate for other animals. But allowing
oneself to be open to the experience of other animals is not always easy,
intellectually or emotionally.
Intellectually, it is difficult because we are socialised into a human-
ist worldview which eschews (and, rightly questions) anthropomor-
phism. Our care to avoid humanising animals, however, can make us
reticent to commit our opinions to paper. It suggests such differences
between humans and all other species that we feel we cannot, indeed
dare not, assume we can know anything about them. And emotionally
it is difficult as witnessing other animals, unless your research proj-
9 People Writing for Animals
187
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10
Conclusion: Beyond Humanism and into
the Field?
In this book, we have argued that social scientists interested in the rela-
tional ties that connect humans and animals must attempt to include
other species in their work. We have noted that capturing animals’ per-
spectives can, and probably will, be difficult and sometimes impossible,
but that this should not be taken as reason enough to simply omit them.
To omit other creatures from social science is to silence them. We have
argued against this silencing on theoretical, political and methodological
grounds while remaining mindful that our project is shot through with
indeterminacy and risk—the equivalent of being on a trapeze without a
safety net (Barthes, quoted in Wood, 2016). We have considered what a
posthuman or multi-species methodology might be and discussed how
ethnography and its adaptations, particularly creative and arts-based
techniques, help us adopt a less reductive, humanist positioning that bet-
ter accounts for animal perspectives or “voices” in our research. We are
cautiously optimistic about the potential of our project.
The optimism is strengthened by posthumanism’s acknowledgement
that other species matter and need to be included in research that purports
to be about them. According to Helena Pedersen (2011), for example,
that we need to think, and keep thinking, about how methods work (or
do not work) for us, for, as Haraway puts it:
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what
stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots,
what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe description,
what ties tie ties.
(Haraway, 2016, p. 12)
In considering what knots knot knots, we have located our argument within
a broadly posthumanist, critical, framework that points to the problems
inherent in a binary worldview for those who want to include animals
in social science research. We have emphasised that reductive, human-
ist claims that differentiate between the species and, indeed, between
academic disciplines, have limiting consequences for our research into
social spaces. We have (often implicitly) drawn on (eco-) feminism, actor
network theory (and STS approaches) to deconstruct both binary and
hierarchical paradigms in order to decentre the human and, at a seem-
ingly basic level, make space for other animals (seemingly basic because
the ramifications of this are, in fact, considerable). We have also tack-
led another binary that pervades research—and is, arguably, more pro-
nounced in traditional ethnographic fieldwork—the idea that emotions
are inimical to rationality. One extension of this is the suspicion and deri-
sion directed at research that has an overt political and/or advocacy/activ-
ist agenda.
We have challenged the view that research needs to be neutral, value-
free and objective if it is to be taken seriously: charges that—interestingly
enough, when aimed specifically at activist-research—are often reiterated
by those who otherwise eschew and/or problematise positivism (Kirsch,
2010). We have stressed that research itself is a political act, one that cre-
ates social worlds at the same time as studying them and that taking the
side of the “underdog” (Becker, 1967) (usually animals) is an extension
of ethnography’s basic liberal ethos, something that has been important
within this community of researchers for many decades. Taking this stance
has led us to question not only what ethnography can become, but also who
research is for. We have proposed that advocacy has a valuable part to play
196 Ethnography after Humanism
meanings, the messy hybrids, “contact zones” (Haraway, 2008, p. 9) and
spaces where humans and animals collide. Our aim is to continue to
develop, as Haraway puts it, “ethnographies of connection, which employ
ethnographic techniques to examine life as it happens at the intersections
of multiple beings and things” and to do so without rendering the ani-
mals involved further invisible. We have narrated just a few of the stories
that contact zones “ignite” (Haraway, 2008, p. 11).
biases which often (maybe always) impact on the observations and narra-
tives attached to them. Mose Brown and Dreby (2013) see this as a jug-
gling of bias and something that is central to ethnography’s uniqueness.
They ask how researchers can possibly consider the Otherness of their
research subjects/participants if they have not interrogated what makes
them appear so different in the first instance. One can only do this, they
argue, if there is a degree of understanding about the perspective with
which the researcher approaches the field and there is a need for the very
“language of reflexivity to evolve” if ethnographers are to consider how
“social roles shape methods” (p. 9). There is sometimes a need, then,
to venture into the deeply personal, confessional (Van Maanen, 1988)
and—at times—emotive spaces between self, domestic and intimate life
and methods to approach the field.
There is considerable reward to be gained by softening the supposed
boundaries between ethnography as work and as a part of life. We advo-
cate close attention to the emotions of fieldwork and do not seek to shut
these away. By suggesting ethnographers experiment with approaches
such as cultural animation, art and advocacy, for example, we are also
setting up the case for reflexive, participatory and “bottom up” forms of
public engagement to rethink the very notion of academic expertise—
what counts as legitimate ethnography—and the tethering of knowledge
to limited institutional locations and actors. The kinds of alternatives
we have outlined in this book offer much promise for those wishing to
resist traditional distinctions; distinctions that are often upheld within
the academy through the use of traditional methods into “appropriate”
topics and techniques of analysis. Challenging and resisting established
hierarchical and binary definitions through the use of unconventional
methods thus becomes an end in itself as well as (hopefully) leading to
the improvement of animal lives.
Our work is necessarily speculative and tentative as we seek to chal-
lenge and sometimes dismantle existing paradigms to make room for
such creativity. And, at many points throughout the writing process, we
have had to stop and consider if what we are suggesting is at all feasible.
A positive reading of this is that we are actively embracing complexity by
pushing boundaries and, indeed, pushing ourselves to think about our
own discomfort and concerns that what we are suggesting is beyond the
10 Conclusion: Beyond Humanism and into the Field?
199
To craft a negative space in critical animal studies would mean, for instance,
questioning the taken-for-granted validity of the encounter between
humans and animals as the central unit of analysis, and explore what impact
200 Ethnography after Humanism
on their behalf by challenging the way they are viewed but achieving
that without considering the importance of animals to humans seems an
impossible task unless we adopt a laissez-faire approach. While we are
swayed by that argument, we do not believe that simply leaving them
be will change their status and position at the current time. That, ironi-
cally, in order to get to the point where we realise we might well need
to “leave them be”, we need to have more intrinsic respect for them as
opposed to concerns about them when they matter to us. And so, we
remain in a humanist trap—we need to make them visible in research
that has anthropocentric concerns, in order to understand that we should
not only look at them anthropocentrically. It may just be that at the time
we are writing, we have to live with the contradictions inherent to our
own species and thus to our argument—no matter how uncomfortable
they may leave us. Perhaps this book—and other work calling for more
animal inclusive methods—can be a starting point for a discussion about
these issues.
A second, and related, problem is that we may never see animal lib-
eration under current forms of social organisation. Our belief is that by
making animals more visible, and by understanding how hegemonic
institutions and discourses work to silence, marginalise and oppress
them, we can make their lives better. But, this may not be the case. We
may simply be adding our voices to those who have advocated change
within a system when it is a change of the system that is needed. From
our perspective, we do not actually think these are mutually exclusive
endeavours and we think it is possible to use scholarship in the name of
advocacy so long as you accept that—as with all attempts to effect social
change—your outcomes may be slow and modest. Again, there are very
different perspectives on this within the academic community and it is
certainly something we have not been able to agree on as colleagues, or
to resolve with complete comfort in our own minds. We highlight this
point with a hope that readers will also start to consider some of the more
“unanswerable” questions raised by both our narrow call for methodolog-
ical inclusion of animals in our scholarship, and our broader call that as
methodological innovators we need to ask questions that are uncomfort-
able, difficult, and impossible to resolve.
202 Ethnography after Humanism
In conclusion, and with these two points now out in the open, let us
return to the main difficulty that we have encountered in seeking out
new directions in posthuman methods. Including animals as social actors
is politically, epistemologically and methodologically exciting within the
social sciences as it forces us to rethink our disciplinary restrictions and
underpinnings. The results of this rethinking are not restricted to any one
discipline, or to any one way of knowing because, as Lestel (2006) points
out, such an approach “sets out to integrate the analysis and understand-
ing of our knowledge of the living world, its organisation as well as its
application, in an approach to the interactive relational system that links
humans and non-humans”. This confers all living beings with the status
of “relational beings, that is, agents interacting on the phenomenon of
‘culture’ that was hitherto reserved for human beings” (p. 235).
If, as Foucault argues, the demarcation of the modern human being is
best envisaged within settings where power is practised, why not (at the
very least) extend the ethnographic gaze to those specific scenarios where
we find humans and other species? Why not the zoo, the veterinary sur-
gery, the slaughterhouse or the farm? While often overlooked, all these
contexts provide us with the grounds to trouble the ontological purity of
the categories human and “other-than-human”, even if (as yet) we have
fairly few practical field methods to “get to the bottom” of these social
settings and their multiple meanings. To do this, and do it well, we have
argued for the need to challenge the legacy of our own discipline, one
which has traditionally prioritised the human through reliance upon lan-
guage and text and by seeing fundamental and irreconcilable differences
between “cultured” humans and objectified animals.
Documenting some of the ways in which attitudes towards animals as
objects and/or subjects are changing is important and stands in stark con-
trast to the paradigms that have dominated Western thought for hundreds
of years. Labouring under post-Enlightenment confines, social scientists
of many disciplines have been (for the most part) content to believe in—
and be a part of—the construction of the social realm as distinct from
the natural. Coupled to this has been the traditional assumption that the
human was the social and that our legitimate focus should only and ever
be on society and its human players. For example, when anthropolo-
gist Clifford Geertz (1973) raised the profile of chickens within Balinese
10 Conclusion: Beyond Humanism and into the Field?
203
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Index
ethnographic H
authority, 59, 82 health
fieldnotes, 27, 45, 72, 94, 135 of animals, 102, 103, 125, 158,
film, 91, 99, 116, 123, 155 159, 161
writing, 28, 29, 38, 43, 45, 174, and emotions/wellbeing, 36
175, 188, 196 hermeneutics, 71
hyper-humanism, 43
F
facts, 12, 31, 42, 45, 56, 60, 62, 81, I
91, 114, 123–5, 168, 177, images, 8, 62, 90–4, 96–8, 100, 104,
185 105, 123, 135, 143
farming, 4, 64, 94, 105, 162 imperialism, 196. See also
feminism, 10, 17, 29, 44, 63, 100, postcolonialism
166, 182 interdisciplinarity
fields of enquiry, 6 and funding, 76, 79
fieldwork, 1, 5, 9, 13–16, 25, 30, and hybrids of research, 17, 155
32, 33, 35–9, 43, 44, 52, 59, interpretation, 4, 13, 30, 38–41, 64,
69, 71, 72, 81, 83, 99, 113, 71, 79, 93, 97, 98, 101, 106,
118, 120–2, 124, 127, 154, 114, 115, 122, 137, 138, 183,
184, 187, 195, 198, 203 203
food(s), 56, 61, 64, 65, 94, 100,
105, 118, 145, 158, 165, 167,
169, 174 J
jargon, 77
journals, 61, 62, 78, 79, 91, 136,
G 164
Geertz, Clifford, 35, 38, 44, 55, 56,
175, 202, 203
gender K
and animals, 11, 25, 166, 203 knowledge, 4, 7, 8, 10, 13, 15, 17,
and emotion, 25 18, 24, 31, 35, 42, 44, 45, 51,
and feminism, 166, 180 52, 59–61, 63, 64, 70–3,
geographic literature, 9, 155 77–9, 81, 82, 89, 100, 120,
good data vs. bad data, 78, 82, 125, 122, 127, 133, 134, 141, 154,
180 155, 159, 160, 164–169,
good methods vs. bad methods, 178–81, 184, 187, 188,
177 198–200, 202, 203
208 Index
L N
labels (resistance of ), 26 narrative, 32, 39, 40, 43, 70, 71, 75,
Law, John, 12, 41, 52, 53, 61, 65, 91, 116, 119, 122, 124, 135,
132, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 173, 175, 177, 198
173, 175 netnography, 72
learning, 2, 11, 24, 30, 104, 123,
124, 134, 136, 140, 144, 147,
148, 155, 158 O
listening objectivity (myth of ), 134, 185
to animals, 51–66 ocular, 100
and voice, 51–66, 116 online exhibitions, 96, 145
organisations, 4, 5, 18, 24, 30, 32,
33, 58, 64, 70, 74, 76, 93,
M 102, 114, 115, 136, 141, 155,
media, 71, 72, 91, 104, 111, 116, 182, 200–2
125, 136, 155
methods
arts based, 16, 83, 131–48, 160 P
auditory, 116, 117, 122, 131 participatory action research, 140
ethnographic participant people, 1, 3, 27, 28, 30–3, 36, 41,
observation, 119, 156 44, 46, 56, 58, 59, 76, 81, 93,
hybrids of, 83, 153–69 94, 96–9, 112, 113, 116, 121,
mixed, 17, 83, 154, 156 122, 126, 132–4, 137, 139,
as modest, 65, 101 143, 144, 164, 167, 173–88,
participatory, 16, 71, 91, 132, 196. See also personhood
153 personhood, 3
as resistance, 79–83 photo elicitation, 93
visual, 16, 72, 89–106, 111, 115 photography, 94, 95, 97, 156
walking and movement as, 123, Photovoice, 92
125 poetry, 40, 94, 131, 141, 143, 145,
writing as, 17, 28, 29, 34, 35, 38, 194
43, 45, 62, 70, 83, 126, 134, postcolonialism, 11, 29, 44, 174
141, 173–88, 196, posthumanism, 11, 15, 17, 24, 29,
198 42–6, 52, 55, 59, 63, 64, 78,
Mol, Annemarie, 12, 41, 44, 45, 80, 82, 117, 137, 147, 166–8,
54, 164 185, 193, 194, 200
monsters and monstrosity, 120, 121 Powdermaker, Hortense, 32, 33, 44
Index
209
power, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 15, 23, 29, 30, space, 4, 8, 24, 37, 45, 71–3, 94, 99,
32, 33, 36–8, 41, 43, 45, 51, 100, 102, 105, 111, 116, 121–4,
52, 55, 57–66, 74, 82, 89, 90, 127, 132, 141, 145, 166, 169,
98, 101, 122, 132, 158, 165, 184–6, 194, 195, 197–9, 200
167–9, 173, 175, 176, 178, species
180, 184, 194, 196, 197, 202, difference, 2–4, 135, 203
203 politics, 64, 158, 160, 161
public sociology, 98, 179 statistics, 159
storytelling, 40, 175, 177, 178, 182
Q
qualitative methods, 162 T
questionnaires, 2, 72 technology
for analysis of data, 27, 28, 52, 71,
72, 91, 98, 105, 135, 160, 162
R of data collection, 103
race, 11, 55, 112 ethical dilemmas of, 163
radical/radix, 40, 43, 57, 77, 80, 83, theatre, 136–41, 145
102, 103, 113, 119, 120, 122, theory
147, 156, 157, 163, 166, 180, importance of, 10
194, 200, 203 and philosophy of methods, 134
reflective writing, 79 posthuman, 10, 11, 15, 17, 24,
researcher, 3, 9, 10, 14–18, 27–9, 46, 57
33, 34, 40, 44, 53, 54, 57, 58, transcription, 61, 94, 125
63, 70–3, 75–80, 91, 93, translation, 33, 183
96–8, 102, 105, 111, 113–16,
119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127,
132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 142, U
145, 148, 153, 154, 157–61, unexpected discoveries, 29
163, 165, 168, 177, 178, 182, unlearning, 8
185, 195, 197, 198
V
S Van Maanen, John, 38–40, 71, 75,
sociology of science and technology 133, 175, 198
(STS), 41, 43, 44, 61, 154, victorian anthropology, 34
164, 166, 195 vignettes, 1, 34, 116, 137, 177
210 Index
W
welfare, 65, 104, 145, 146, 159, 161, Y
163 young people, 173
Western culture, 33
Willis, Paul, 33, 36–8, 44, 58, 113, 118
writing Z
for advocacy, 177–80, 188 zoos, 4, 26, 101, 185, 202