Multispecies Studies

The Etruscan Underworld god is represented in some painted tombs with a wolf skin on his head. Why was the wolf chosen to represent a god? This is the question I will try to answer, starting from a biological approach, by examining the wolf behaviour in nature.
I will consider myths and rites of the Mediterranean area and archaeological findings related to the wolf. The aim is to establish the process that led in the Etrusco-Italic world, to the development of an elusive underworld god, linked to the cities foundation rituals, iconographically represented with a bare wolf on his head.

Nonhuman bodies in many sizes and diverse social roles are central to Israel's control mechanism in the Occupied West Bank. Delving into the agricultural record of the Israeli Civil Administration, I ask how the Israeli system of control operates through animal bodies. What does a bureaucratic record so invested in monitoring animals' production, treatment, disease, and death tell about the potential disruption of power? Through a political ecology of human-animal entanglement, I argue that nonhuman bodies both reproduce human colonial relations and allow their constant interruption. Nonhumans challenge the power regime through their unpredictable mobility as well as in their role as both objects of a political economy and subjects of potential agricultural diseases, ecological risks, or public health threats. Breaking from contemporary multispecies scholarly literature's focus on endangered species and relations of care, I place nonhuman bodies as actors of international-interspecies relations in colonial conditions and point to nonhumans, which are here to stay in the climate change era. By doing so, I reflect on the continuous significance of nonhuman bodies to the operation of power in the "borderlands" of Israel/Palestine and beyond.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction stands at the juncture of international law and animal law and promises to open a path to understanding and resolving the global problems that challenge the core of animal law. As corporations have relocated and the animal industry (agriculture, medical research, entertainment, etc.) has dispersed its production facilities across the territories of multiple states, regulatory gaps and fears of a race to the bottom have become a pressing issue of global policy. This book provides enough background to allow readers to understand why extraterritorial jurisdiction must respond to these developments, counters objections that readers might raise, and describes how to improve animal law in tandem. The heart of the work is a fully-fledged catalogue of options for extraterritorial jurisdiction, which states can employ to strengthen their animal laws. The book offers top-down perspectives drawn from general international law and trade law, and complements them by a bottom-up up view from the perspective of animal law. The approach connects the law of jurisdiction to substantive law and opens up deeper questions about moral directionality, state and corporate duties owed animals, and the comparative advantages of constitutional, criminal, and administrative animal law. To ensure that extraterritorial animal law does not become complicit in oppressing ethnic and cultural minorities, the book offers critical interdisciplinary perspectives, informed by posthumanist and postcolonialist discourse. Readers will further learn when and how extraterritorial jurisdiction violates international law, and the consequences of exercising it illegally under international law. This work answers questions about how and why extraterritorial jurisdiction can overcome the steepest hurdles for animal law and help move us toward a just global interspecies community.

When an image is erased, what is lost and what remains? On September 6, 2019, Australian graphic artist Lucienne Rickard started a twelve-month duration performance called Extinction Studies. Each day, with pencil on a single piece of paper, she draws a recently extinct species, only to erase it as soon as its image is complete. The performance takes place at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), a location saturated with histories of local mass extinction events. Two rooms away from Rickard’s performance, another exhibition shows the bones, skins and some of the last known images of the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus). The juxtaposition of these two exhibitions draws out the relationship between extinction and the act of erasing. This paper examines the affective nature of erasure and extinction. Rickard’s care for each line she draws and erases, reinforces the physical and emotional investment that twenty-first-century extinction events compel. The difference between the two exhibitions is one of scale and time. Where the permanent thylacine exhibition performs the long durée of erasure and ‘extinction afterlives’ of a single species thought lost since 1936, Extinction Studies simultaneously shows the fast-paced acts of erasure of many species thought lost since the turn of the twenty-first-century.

Conference publication/Tagungsband:
What happens when wolves return to areas that humans inhabit and define as cultural landscapes? Since the 1990s, wolves have been settling again in middle and central Europe. Manifold societal discussions and negotiations accompany their return. As wolf numbers increase, dynamics accelerate. How can different scientific fields contribute to a better understanding of the diverse processes that encounters with wolves entail?

Paper presented at the "Anthrozoology as International Practice" Student Conference in Animal Studies, University of Exeter.

While research on other animal species and their forms of communication continues to yield fascinating insights into animal languages, other animals are still widely perceived as ‘voiceless others’ who are not heard because they cannot speak. This paper explores possible ways of overcoming this linguistic bias that keeps humans from responding to other animals as articulate, sentient individuals. To this aim, intercultural communication theory can be mapped onto interspecies encounters to identify strategies that might help us overcome species differences and anthropocentric notions of ‘animal otherness.’ I argue that we can draw on examples of multispecies dialogue in practice to see how mutual trust and attentiveness facilitate understanding across species boundaries and make interspecies communication possible.

Recording available on the AIP Conference's Youtube channel.

Este trabalho é parte de uma reflexão acerca dos cuidados humanos nos processos de adoecimento, envelhecimento e morte de animais de estimação. Em uma pesquisa empírica realizada a partir do universo de um hospital veterinário, constatou-se que há hoje uma configuração social de afeto que coloca aos indivíduos humanos como amar seus animais, numa espécie de modelo a ser seguido sobre cuidados e consumos. Enquanto isso, aos indivíduos animais, agora inseridos num - sempre controverso - processo de antropomorfização, cabe uma vida cada vez mais controlada e organizada a partir do modelo de civilidade humano. Nessa organização familiar multiespecífica, há espaço para afetos e desafetos, e emoções ambivalentes, tais como em uma família exclusivamente humana.

This work is part of a discussion about human care in cases of illness, aging and death of pets. In an empirical research carried out from the universe of a veterinary hospital, it was noted that today there is a social configuration of affection that imposes on human individuals how to love your pets, with some kind of model to be followed about care and consumption. Meanwhile, those animals, now entered a-always controversial-anthropormofization process, have a life one increasingly controlled and organized from the model of human civilization. In this multispecies family organization, there's place for affections and disaffections, and ambivalent emotions, such as in a family exclusively human.

Desert landscapes have played an extraordinary role in the project of settler colonialism in the United States. As Traci Brynne Voyles argues in Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country, deserts are sites where settler colonialism has superseded its logical extremes. If this colonial violence aims to destroy and replace Indigenous peoples and environments with colonial modes of inhabitance by stealing land, settler colonialism has gone a step further in the deserts of the US Southwest by rendering these landscapes barren "wastelands. " Voyles calls the socioecological project of converting lively and productive Indigenous lands into undesirable and dead places "wastelanding. " Viewed as desolate, lifeless, and worthless places, desert wastelands extend the settlercolonial project by obscuring present Indigenous inhabitance, justifying state-sanctioned extractivist practices, and naturalizing the presence of the settler state. Voyles explains that the desert has become the sine qua non of US settler colonialism: "[T]he settler state has grounded itself in the desert Southwest, making the desert central to how we understand our history and ourselves" (18). Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan) observes that Indigenous places, in particular, are conceptualized by the settler state as barren, deserted regions: "Indigenous places are oft en imagined as isolated empty places, disposable, or usable places subordinate to national need. Indigenous peoples are not isolated, in a past, outside of capital, or without capitalist relations: we are central to them" (25). 1 Acknowledging their centrality to the capitalist settlercolonial project and directly opposing the colonial denigration of the Southwest, Indigenous desert dwellers have long resisted their erasure. Leslie Marmon Silko, in particular, has used literature to defy, critique, and dismantle historical and ongoing forms of settler colonialism, espe-136 SAIL · fall-winter 2019 · Vol. 31, Nos. 3-4 cially in Storyteller, Ceremony, and Almanac of the Dead. By exposing the structures and operations of colonization, globalization, militarization, and technology throughout her oeuvre, Silko replaces dominant claims to power with Indigenous, decolonial claims to place.

The objective of this report is to present the project C1461 "Mobile Laboratory of Action and Thought in Biomimetic Arts" (2021-2022), registered at the South Headquarters of the University of Costa Rica. The purpose of the project is to create a space for the development of artistic and scientific exploration and production tools that combines sound and electronic arts, with engineering, architecture, archeology and biomimetics.
The project intends to weave links between different areas, as well as with other universities and scientific, artistic and cultural instances, with the purpose of studying pre-existing methodologies, and proposing transversal dialogues that promote technological design with a thought located in the context of the Brunca Region. of Costa Rica, taking into consideration the biodiversity and interculturality of the area.

This article operates on three levels. First, it maps out a curious ethnographical terrain: that of the booming exotic animal trade the third most, third most important black market in the world. It then places the multispecies activities related to such a traffic (supply, demand, ”production“, circulation, representations, coevolutionary dynamics) in an open anthropological framework that questions some of our current relationships with wild animals. Here, the non-human ”other“ proves not only central to our current cosmological elaboration, but vital to the entire future of an animal company now on the brink of extinction. Finally, and based on an inquiry carried out in the world’s leading laboratory for forensic animal medicine, I question the status and value of evidence-producing
regimes that rely on the attribution of a series of identities, rights, duties and prohibitions to animal remains. Interestingly, and while traditional Asian medical and gastronomic frameworks ascribe certain properties (powers, healing, spells) to lifeless animal parts, for Western legal medicine and international law, life also stems from the dead. It is therefore into the space of our contemporary humanimal metempsychoses – where one form of life can disappear to reveal another, in a mediative logic that is at once spectral, demiurgic and anthropogenic – that this article takes us.

The recent efflorescence of fictional writings and artistic works examined under the rubrics of Blue Humanities (Mentz 2009), Critical Ocean Studies (DeLoughrey 2019), Hydro-Criticism (Winkiel 2019), or New Thalassology (Horden and Purcell 2006), testify a recent cultural shift from the land to the sea. In this article, the hydrosphere is analysed in two female Afrofuturist works – Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2010) – to address the global capitalist order and to imagine an aquafuturist multispecies aesthetics that springs from the countermemory of the Middle Passage and its undersea myths.

Standard genealogies of knowledge posit the circulation of modernity in one direction, from the West to “the rest.” This history reveals the waves of influence flowing the opposite way, from nonstate people to the state. The essay introduces a new method for the history of knowledge that traces the travel of narratives, packets of media containing messages. Masks long viewed as objects of collection are seen here anew as subjects of recollection, mnemonic devices that archive the global propagation of knowledge. One set of masks is reunited with the narratives they encode: stories employed as a survival strategy by the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, a network of peoples who utilized the anthropologist Franz Boas as a host body to enter and alter the world that came to colonize them. The efforts of the Indigenous intellectual George Hunt to disseminate the masks—and, with the masks, his family message of transformation—directly shaped the concept of culture. Using the masks as teaching tools, Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw thinkers civilized Boas into a new modernity, shifting him from categorization to communication, from signs to messages, and from a Self/Other perception to a global consciousness of Host–Guest relations. The masks recollect a profound yet long suppressed Indigenous influence on modern thought.

How should humans live with animals and other forms of life? Could responses to this question improve the health and wellbeing of the biosphere? This paper argues that design researchers ought to engage nonhuman lifeforms as collaborators: informants and co-designers, or clients and users. Inspired by recent design challenges involving birds, bats and trees, this paper positions emancipatory multispecies cohabitation as a goal that can alleviate ongoing biodiversity losses and human-wildlife conflicts, in cities and beyond. It opens an interdisciplinary conversation by translating emerging scholarship in ethics, politics, and aesthetics to a narrative about desirable more-than-human cultures. This discussion has significant implications and can help to inform regulation, instrumentation, and pedagogies of future design.

This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. It illuminates the multi-layered, polyvocal ways in which artistic expressions render ecological connections, drawing on scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous artists from all walks of life, including film, literature, performance, and other forms of multimedia to expand existing conversations. Both local and global in its focus, the volume includes essays from multiethnic and Indigenous communities across the world, visiting topics such as Navajo opera, Sami film production history, south Indian tribal documentary, Maori art installations, Native American and First Nations science-fiction literature and film, Amazonian poetry, and many others. Highlighting trans-Indigenous sensibilities that speak to worldwide crises of environmental politics and action against marginalization, the collection alerts readers to movements of community resilience and resistance, cosmological thinking about inter- and intra-generational multi-species relations, and understandings of indigenous aesthetics and material ecologies. It engages with emerging environmental concepts such as multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and trans-indigeneity, as well as with new areas of ecocritical research such as material ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and media studies. In its breadth and scope, this book promises new directions for ecocritical thought and environmental humanities practice, providing thought-provoking insight into what it means to be human in a locally situated, globally networked, and cosmologically complex world.

Archaeology is a field of research that relies largely on the remains of past
humans and nonhuman animals and the traces of their interactions within
a range of material conditions. In archaeology, as in sociocultural anthropology,
the dominant analytical perspective on human–animal relations is
ontologically anthropocentric: the study of the human use of nonhuman animals
for the benefit of human beings, and scholarly inquiry that is largely for
the sake of elucidating what nonhuman animals can tell us about the human
condition. This review outlines the historical trajectory of Anglo-American
archaeology’s encounters with animal remains, and human–animal interactions,
within this framework and considers recent attempts to move beyond
anthropocentrism.

Anthropologists have mediated between discriminated communities and outsiders, helping to influence public opinion through advocacy work. But can anthropological advocacy be applied to the case of violence against nonhumans? Ethical inquiries in anthropology also engage with the manifold ways through which human and nonhuman lives are entangled and emplaced within wider ecological relationships, converging in the so-called multispecies ethnography, but failing to account for exploitation. Reflecting on this omission, this article discusses the applicability of engaged anthropology to the range of issues from the use of nonhumans in medical experimentation and food production industry, to habitat destruction, and in broader contexts involving violence against nonhumans. Concluding that the existing forms of anthropological engagement are inadequate in dealing with the massive scale of nonhuman abuse, this article will suggest directions for a radical anthropology that engages with deep ecology, animal rights, animal welfare, and ecological justice.

One way of understanding calls for “multispecies justice” is to interpret them as utopian demands for a desirable future in which the structural anthropocentrism of conventional forms of morality, including environmental ethics, has been thoroughly abolished. I hope to clarify what kind of utopia multispecies justice might specifically entail. Mobilizing a conceptual framework developed by the science fiction author Octavia Butler, three potential plotlines for the utopia of multispecies justice are identified: the What-If, the If-Only and the If-This-Goes-On. Each of these engages the various tasks of utopianism in interestingly different ways. The key argument is that multispecies justice primarily raises a challenging What-If question: as a critical interrogation of how we should process and experience the world (and our place within it), its power derives from the “educated hope” to disrupt and reassemble outdated frameworks for making sense of the nature/culture divide.

What constitutes a pet or a pest, or defines something wild or domesticated? Humans create categories to order life in an ongoing attempt to establish places of belonging. The knowledge and motives behind such classifications direct our ways of caring for and about other beings with whom we share our worlds, from culling for conservation to rehabilitation for research animals. But the categories and the types of care we assign are very often tenuous and troubled in nature. The articles in this volume explore some of the intricacy, ambiguity, and even irony in our perceptions and approaches to “multispecies” relations.

I consider the interspecies political implications of Vienna, Austria's urban-dwelling European hamsters (Cricetus cricetus). In July 2020, the International Union for Conservation of Nature updated the status of the European hamster on its Red List of Threatened Species to 'critically endangered, ' warning that the species is likely to go extinct in the next 30 years. While anthropogenic factors are largely responsible for the current state of the species, the adaptability of these synanthropic hamsters has also led to a unique trajectory in their hope for survival; they have been successful as a liminal species inhabiting urban environments where they have also received prominent attention and protection. I look to the former disregard for their presence as laying the groundwork for closer contemporary ties between humans and hamsters in the city of Vienna. Through Val Plumwood's intentional recognition stance, I propose that the interactions between humans and hamsters in Vienna exemplify the recognition of hamster agency and their political claim on space. The story of the Viennese hamsters also pushes against conventional narratives that often fail to account for the dependence of liminal animals on humans, and it emphasises a call toward not just protecting the abstract category of species, but also the unique relationships between hamsters, humans, and the urban environment of the city.

This article is an effort to dwell with the kinds of writing and thinking practices that we have been developing in our research, especially over the past seven years. This is an approach grounded in an attentiveness to the evolving ways of life (or e ¯ thea; singular: ethos) of diverse forms of human and nonhuman life and in an effort to explore and perhaps restory the relationships that constitute and nourish them. Our aim is to develop " lively ethographies " : a mode of knowing, engaging, and storytelling that recognizes the meaningful lives of others and that, in so doing, enlivens our capacity to respond to them by singing up their character or ethos. Most of our work in this area has focused on extinction, but this approach might readily be taken up in a range of other contexts. This article alternates between two types of writing. One is expository and lays out an analysis of ethos, liveliness, storytelling, " response-ability, " and becoming witness. The second is performative, offering short ethographic vignettes that enact some of the qualities and approaches we have discussed. Here each of these vignettes is taken from our recent work in Hawai'i, a deeply gen-erative and often fraught field site that has inspired much of our thinking.

Paper presented at the HASI Annual Conference, Tel Aviv University, 1-3 June 2021

While research in the emergent field of 'multispecies studies' is diverse, it shares a central aim of expanding our ways of looking at and making sense of the world, inviting in the more-than-human in myriad shapes. In fieldwork, this calls for new or adapted methodologies, such as multispecies ethnography, which seek to include other-than-human animals whose perspectives traditionally get eclipsed or distorted by human-centred methods. However, ethnographers who actively incorporate multispecies methodologies in their research recognise difficulties of doing so. Anthropocentrism and human bias are deeply ingrained in ethnographic research and hardly allow for an unmediated participation of other animals. A key challenge here is that traditional ethnographic methods rely heavily on language, and multispecies ethnographers thus often point towards the lack of linguistic capacity in other animals as an obstacle to engaging them as active participants in their work. Drawing on examples of this rhetoric, I argue that it is less a deficiency on the animals' side but rather a narrow conception of language as human language that hampers our thinking about alternative, more inclusive ways of doing research. Based on this, I explore how attentiveness and respect towards our animal others may foster understanding between 'us' and 'them' through interspecies dialogue.

Throughout the Amazon, notions of ownership and mastership shape the use of natural resources among many Indigenous communities. These ideas are reflected in the figure of game masters (i.e. spiritual beings who own the animals), which are widespread among Indigenous peoples across the Amazon Basin. In this paper, we explore the diverse biocultural manifestations of this socio-cosmology, focusing on the game masters' dynamic roles, histories and functions. Our review highlights the breadth and depth of ideas, practices, and rituals used to regulate humans' relations with these non-human agencies. It illustrates how the relations established between Indigenous communities and animals reflect both reciprocity and other asymmetrical types of dependency. This complex and sophisticated socio-cosmology underpins Indigenous understandings of sustainability in the world's largest tropical rainforest.

This article discusses closed-loop systems, namely Cradle to Cradle and circular economy, in the context of sustainable education. These circular models, at least ideally, promise absolute decoupling of resource consumption from the economy. This article presents student assignments applying these models to Hennes & Mauritz, a clothing retail company, and insect food producer, Protix. While the discussion of circular economy revolves around the economic benefits of closed-loop systems, it rarely addresses posthumanism. Posthumanism is related to postqualitative theory, inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that nature has become intertwined with technology and culture. In the cases discussed, combining both techno-and organic materials produces 'monstrous hybrids'. It appears that fully circular solutions are rare as absolute decoupling is limited by thermodynamic (im)possibilities. This realization still has to be developed in environmental education. Within this posthumanist inquiry, the larger lesson from the case studies is the necessity of teaching about degrowth in production, consumption and corporate strategy. In pedagogical terms, this article aims to generate a more critical discussion within the environmental education community about how postqualitative inquiry can provide different and distinct perspectives from qualitative inquiry in the context of the circular economy.

Writing from the frontlines of an “African Anthropocene”, the author and ecologist Mia Couto derives a poetics of the planet from the geohistories and cosmovisions of Mozambique. Grounded in this immiserated and precarious state, his fiction presents compelling if confounding mediations on the planetary condition as it takes shape in the global margins and responds to it by “re-enchanting the world”. Bringing into focus the uneven distribution of vulnerability across the globe, while appealing to international and interspecies response-ability by evoking commonality-in-relation, it activates enchantment as an enlivening force with which to redistribute agency and recompose a world rent and depleted by war and extraction. (Forthcoming in Feb 2021)

This article suggests delving into the practice and work of Jana Winderen in order to reflect on the art involving non-human living beings as protagonists. This artist has focused her work mainly on living beings to whom we are deaf, feeling a special predilection for the tiny marine creatures whose lives are deeply affected by the action of humans. In dialogue with Ursula Le Guin, Donna Haraway, Thom van Dooren, Vinciane Despret and Rosi Braidotti, we ask if it is possible to approach these other living beings and their worlds in ways that are not predominantly anthropocentric and if artistic practices can play a role in the trying resistances and feeling possibilities which make this world inhabitable for humans and non-humans.

How to write out a pandemic? This calls for writing with those interruptions and precarities that often elicit a rush of stories, starting in contaminating and indeterminate encounters at the interface of feminist technoscience and multispecies ethnography (Tsing 2015, 20, 37). What other forms might writing take and whose genres of response might cipher this pandemic’s onslaught of forces?

For Mongols their dogs are the most intimate and loveable animals. Dogs also have an important symbolic significance for their owners. Therefore, beating or killing dogs is considered a sin. As a dog's feeding bowl is considered to be a 'circle of abundance' , (hishgiin hüree), it is forbidden to step over it. However, dogs are also believed to be a source of pollution and danger. Hence they are kept out of the Mongolian tent (ger) and treated as inferiors. Their feeding bowls see only leftovers. In this article, I examine the reasons for this apparently contradictory treatment of dogs in Mongolia by appealing to traditional cosmology.

What might happen to co-existing communities that are more-than-human, if corporate extractivism continues to be allowed to wreck life, affecting a large multiplicity of ecosystems and modes of living? For Amanda Piña, who has been observing these effects on the Apu Wamani mountain-being located near Santiago de Chile, close to where she grew up and where part of her family still lives, this is a distinctly troubling question. Through highland ritual dances, her aim is to channel the power of coming together towards active modes of co-survivance.
Breathing with her entrails glittering on the tongue that greets us, Piña as incarnated mountain-being conjures dances as a catalog of movements-with-the-other which are part of the complex being which is (with) the Apu mountain.
Traditional ritual dances, unlike what their name seems to suggest, don’t remain static. Rather, each body that dances it transforms the dance, and so the dance continues to grow like a living being. These dances constitute a body-based knowledge that understands ‘humans’ as having been artificially separated from ‘nature’, and recognizes symbiotic relations to other earth-beings, maintaining an invested relationality with the whole of the cosmos. As practices of reciprocity that retain an awareness of our radical interdependence, and where the artistic is spiritual, social, functional and worldly, intertwined with all spheres of life. Facing the current multiple socioecological crises, we urgently need artistic practices that invite us (as Climatic Dances does) to take another look at how, in certain modes of existing, thinking, and moving with others, alternative ways of creating knowledge might surface.


Imayna Caceres about Climatic Dances by Amanda Piña / nadaproductions
https://tqw.at/multispecies-dance-movements-through-endangered-worlds/

Something is missing in Urban Theory, and researchers and practitioners keep searching for something to fill the gap. And while it is impossible to reduce conceptual and methodological challenges of urban research to one problem, there is feature common to diverse urban perspectives: the sharp analytical orientation to humans–as objects of power, agents of change, authors of city and architectural plans and so on. But cities, of course, are not just spaces of human habitation and the urban is not just an agonistic field where humans (planners, engineers, managers, capitalists, activists, subalterns) create materially distinctive landscapes—aspirational, apocalyptic, or otherwise. If humans are the common thread to otherwise wildly different urban analytics, isn’t it possible that the missing piece to the urban puzzle is not actually human? A more–than–human perspective offers us tools for thinking about urban ontologies, which productively revise fictions of an aspirational/apocalyptic urban dyad (Prakash 2008) without denying that cities are also a distinctive category of analysis.

In this essay I seek to retrace the movement of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis var. assamica) from the forest to the plantation, and from Assam across the Indian Ocean to East Africa and the Kenyan highlands. As the plant has moved it has been altered to suit demands for higher productivity, as well as to suit soil and climatic conditions in new locations. One of the more significant results of such plant breeding efforts in Kenya is the release of the tea clone TRFK 306/1, popularly known as “purple tea”. Purple tea is a new variety of the plant that Singphos and other indigenous communi- ties cultivated in the Assam forest and adjoining areas of highland Burma and Yunnan, China. My aim here is to explore the interaction of people and plants, and to think about what happens when plants travel. Such movements are usually in the form of travelling seed. How do plants thrive when they land up in a foreign setting, and what is gained and lost in the migration?

I propose exploring these cemeteries as particular ecosystems and/or as multispecies ecumenes. I suggest positioning discussion of this subject within the framework of the longue durée of ecological-necrological and multispecies relations, while also historicizing the idea of cemeteries as inviolable sites of eternal rest. The eco-necro
approach will reveal that the neglected former German cemeteries in fact bear closer resemblance to the current spaces of natural or green cemeteries, which I believe will prove in the future to offer beneficial solution to dealing with human remains (in comparison, for example,
to their chemical treatment in alkaline hydrolysis, a process also known more politely as biocremation), than to the now fading conception of cemeteries as romantic gardens or landscaped parks.

El presente ensayo tiene como objetivo explorar las ecologías de saberes y conocimientos técnicos, teóricos, metodológicos, experimentales y procesuales tejidos entre las artes electrónicas, el radio arte y las ciencias ambientales. Para cumplir con este propósito se consideran obras de tres proyectos latinoamericanos: el colectivo Interspecifics (Emmanuel Anguiano, Leslie García, Paloma López y Felipe Rebolledo), el colectivo Electrobiota (Gabriela Munguía y Guadalupe Chávez), y el Laboratorio de Ecologías Invisibles (Gabriela Munguía).
Interspecifics, Electrobiota y Ecologías Invisibles logran captar el cambio de la escucha de un ser-en-el-mundo en tránsito a ser-mundo mediante el proceso de censar la materialidad vibrante, energética, de entidades biológicas y/o geológicas con el propósito de escuchar redes cognocentes e inteligencias no-humanas. Sus trabajos proponen pensar la posibilidad de una ontología relacional sonoro-matérica, que para este ensayo evidencia un tecno-animismo interespecies mediado por epistemes sónicas.

The present thesis aims to investigate, from a philosophical standpoint, the political life of other-than-human animals in the context of the Anthropocene. Amid several configurations, errancy, confinement, experimentation and extinction are privileged as actual conceptual situations, the analysis and problematization of which require a combined approach between philosophy and other discourses, such as ethology, biology, anthropology, history and literature. The first step consists of an exploration of the animal’s place in the polis taking as a starting point a confrontation between classic and contemporary ideas regarding politics; following that, an analysis of the zoo viewed as a model of human politics, to which are offered, as alternatives, possible features of an animal politics taking as a starting point the several meanings of the concept of play; the third section examines multispecies experiments in the realm of the arts, especially literature, and in the realm of scientific practices, noting different modes of worlding respective to each; lastly, we proceed to the elaboration of a notion of extinction, not so much as a fact but as a event in the face of which the imaginative cultivation of grief narratives and experiences of continuity is necessary. So reasoning, we conclude that, although accosted on all sides, other- than-human animals live and offer cosmopolitical possibilities in the face of which humanity, understood as ontological exception, proves itself to be an apolitical power.

In recent years, the topic of plant intelligence has been making the science pages of news publications with increasing regularity. Consider, for instance, November's BBC article detailing a host of expert opinions on topics such as plant cognition and the "wood wide web" that facilitates communication between trees, last year's New Scientist article on  plant thinking, sensing, and learning, which draws analogies between human brains and plant root networks (Ananthaswamy 2014), or Michael Pollan's 2013 piece in the New Yorker concerning the emerging field of "plant neurobiology" (Pollan 2013). Journalistic publications such as these are helping to bring cutting-edge scientific advancements to a broader audience, and serving to revolutionize public understandings of botanical life-ways in the  process. As is becoming increasingly apparent, plants communicate and interact with one another and with other kinds of beings in sophisticated and unexpected ways. But how, one might ask, does this relate to the social sciences and the traditionally humanistic field of anthropology?

Humans and elephants have historically shared the forested mountain ranges of Zomia, a geography defined by the regular movement of people and an ecology shaped by the movement of its elephant population. This paper will examine how elephant pathways facilitated human mobility in the highlands defining the Indo-Myanmar border. It will analyze the more-than-human agency that emerges when following elephant trails and the varying role this forest infrastructure might have played in the social and political history of the region via two historical examples. First, the migration of a Lisu community in Upper Myanmar who utilized elephant paths to navigate their passage. Second, how the British empire exploited a network of elephant-human tracks to subjugate the peoples living in Mizoram, northeast India. In these regions the patterns of migration, history of colonization, and identities and practices of communities must be understood in relation to wild elephants

Entre as temporalidades de diferentes processos locais, este estudo etnográfico aprofunda-se em entender como esses diferentes ritmos relacionam-se e modulam as atividades de pescadores e de outros habitantes (humanos e não-humanos) na vila do Pontal do Leste - Ilha do Cardoso, Cananeia - SP. Relações essas sempre em processo de co-constituição, co-respondencia, co-evolução entre humanos e não-humanos, nunca formados e preexistentes de antemão. As percepções desses processos são fundamentais para o entendimento do comportamento de alguns animais não-humanos e plantas, das condições de tempo, da geomorfologia insular e da ecologia eólico-hídrica local, resultando em caracterizações sensíveis, que serão desdobradas nessa etnografia. Portanto, nessa malha de relações composta por paisagens multiespécies, onde diversas linhas de movimentos são traçadas por seres e processos, o intuito deste estudo foi descrever como essas linhas encontram-se e contaminam-se. E, acima de tudo, como esses encontros são traduzidos pelos habitantes e visitantes da vila.

This  essay  considers  the  inverse  to  an  Anthropocene
characterized  as  an  era  of  human-induced  loss  of  species  and  life  forms  on  earth.  The  global  practice  of  burying  increasing amounts  and  kinds  of  waste  in  landfills  precipitates  the  mixing  of  wildly  heterogeneous  materials,  which  diverse  kinds  of  bacteria  avidly  metabolize.  As  they  relentlessly  feed  on
our  detritus,  bacteria  both  proliferate  and,  we  suggest,  diversify.  However,  this  is  not  a numbers game, nor is it one which is solely or even primarily about interconnectivity, net-working,  and  entanglement. The  ontological  provocation  of  the  human  waste-bacterial conjunction is the fact of our total dependence on life forms whose lifeworlds and trajectories  are  likely  to  remain  overwhelmingly  unknown  to  us.  If  this  offers  a  cautionary  note about  our  own  increasingly  hyperbolic  perturbations  of  the  Earth’s  constitutive  strata, perhaps its more profound prompting is about the force of the stratifications and destratifications proper to the planet itself.