Situating microbes

Abstract

Microbes are relational, and they foster multispecies relationality. In both mundane and profound ways, they connect, interlace, and affect bodies, and are affected by them in turn. This comes to the fore in two recent ethnographic volumes that interrogate microbial worlds: The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life, by Jamie Lorimer, and With Microbes, edited by Charlotte Brives, Matthaus Rest, and Salla Sariola. Both books show how microbes bring species into relation with one another and suggest modes of ethnographic engagement with them. To situate microbes, these volumes demonstrate, is not only to query the situatedness of knowledge production with regard to microbes, but it is also to place microbes within a geopolitical landscape that renders global inequality a motivating (and causal) factor in cultivating certain microbial relations. Microbes’ continuous state of relational becoming requires “withnessing” to situate and disentangle the microbial relations flooding the Anthropocene.