Animals

Abstract

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Rats claiming rights? More‐than‐human acts of denizenship in Amsterdam

“…Working from a different tradition, the anthropology of animals has been focused less on such normative models, and more on everyday human‐animal relations. Where early anthropological research on animals understood them mostly as symbols (Mullin, 1999; White and Candea, 2018), recent multispecies ethnography has sought to understand animals more agentively, drawing attention to their cognitive, emotional, and communicative capacities and emphasizing their active role in developing relationships with humans and places (e.g., Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010; Ogden, Hall, and Tanita, 2013; Porter and Gershon, 2018). This scholarship draws on new materialism and actor‐network theory and does not see agency as the unique property of human actors, or even as restricted to self‐directed, future‐oriented intentional action.…”

A sensory approach for multispecies anthropology

“…By recognising nonhuman agency, it tries to take anthropology beyond the constraints of anthropocentrism (Locke, 2018), and argues that species are always multiple, multiplying their forms and associations. These conceptual directions had earlier resulted in the development of a new genre of writing and mode of research-multispecies ethnography-taking beings and other-than-human selves as ethnographic subjects, intertwined and shaped by political, economic and cultural forces (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010;van Dooren et al, 2016;White and Candea, 2018). Multispecies ethnography proposes to develop epistemologically modified and ecologically sensitive research and writing that is 'attuned to life's emergence within a shifting assemblage of agentive beings' (Ogden et al, 2013, p. 6).…”

Embodiment of Ancestral Spirits, the Social Interface, and Ritual Ceremonies: Construction of the Shamanic Landscape among the Daur in North China

“…Ontological approaches in anthropology have revealed that the realm of sociality in many Indigenous societies in the world is not confined to the human domain but is extended beyond humanity to encompass animals, plants, spirits, and other entities. In the past several decades, great efforts have been made on studies of relational interactions between humans and animals in the Arctic, Amazonia, and North Asian regions (see White and Candea 2018). However, the relation between living humans and deceased ancestors has largely been neglected.…”