Multispecies Ethnography

Multispecies Ethnography brings creatures previously relegated to the margins of Anthropology into the foreground of study.

“The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” an article by Oxford anthropologist Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, pioneered new methodological and theoretical approaches for studying how people interact with other creatures. It goes beyond considering them simply as part of the landscape, as food for humans or as symbols. The multispecies approach brings into focus the entanglement of people's live with over living creatures ranging from animals to plants, fungi to microbes.

The School of Museum Ethnography and Museum Ethnography and Multispecies Ethnography

Across the units that make up the school there are members of staff working at the forefront of this field.

Current work ranges from examining the links between human infrastructure and mosquito habits to exploring multispecies justice and whose lives matter in a multispecies world.

At 6:00 a.m., a young man arrives at the Buguruni ward office in southeast Dar es Salaam. He is one of 64 local residents known as “Community-Owned Resource Persons,” or CORPs, who are paid a modest sum to find mosquito breeding habitats for the city's Urban Malaria Control Programme... Read More

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Inalienable Worlds Inter-species Relations, Perspectives and ‘Doublethink’ in a Catalonian Chimpanzee Sanctuary Lys Alcayna-Stevens

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Urban mosquitoes, situational publics, and the pursuit of interspecies separation in Dar es Salaam ANN H. KELLY, JAVIER LEZAUN

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‌THINKING IN FORESTS Lys Alcayna-Stevens

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Rethinking Human–Nonhuman Primate Contact and Pathogenic Disease Spillover, Victor Narat, Lys Alcayna-Stevens, Stephanie Rupp & Tamara Giles-Vernick

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The Work of Repair: Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa (Thinking from Elsewhere) by Thomas Cousins (Author)

Urban animals, human livelihoods and health in the global south: a trans-species approach

Many of the urban poor in the global south rely on animals for their livelihoods. Yet complex relations between animals, informal livelihoods and health have received scant systematic theoretical and applied attention in the social sciences.

Divination: spiders, crabs and other technologies of choice

From African spider divination to wider theories of the future and decisions making

Decision making is a human universal. Technologies are often deployed to help people as they make up their minds to action.

Multispecies Justice Exhibition

Global markets are expanding, undermining the conditions of life on earth. As the privileged few create cosmopolitan refuges in growing deserts, other peoples and creatures are living with slow violence and ongoing war.

Javier Lezaun, Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society

Uses multispecies approaches to understand key issues related to medical anthropology and the ecology of disease. His work in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania followed people and mosquito larvae through the urban built environment highlighting links between human infrastructure and mosquito habitats.

Academic Profile

Eben Kirksey, Professor of Anthropology

Studies the interactions of bats, coronaviruses, monkeys, and people at Thai Buddhist temples in the context “getting lucky” with viral exposures. He is also interested in issues related to social justice, rights of nature, transformative justice, climate change, and interspecies care. The Promise of Multispecies Justice, Edited by Eben and Sophie Chaoasks asks whose lives matter in multispecies worlds?

Academic Profile

Lys Alcayna-Stevens, Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology

Conducted one of the earliest attempts at an ethnographic study of non-humans in a Catalonian chimpanzee sanctuary. As part of this research on post-human anthropologies, she also challenged anthropological assumptions about the ways in which Europeans and Americans perceive and relate to nature and to non-human beings, resulting in a special issue on ‘Euroamerican naturalisms.’

Her extensive work in the field of Multispecies Ethnography since then has included work to develop approaches to human-animal relations and to ‘Anthropologies of Primatology.’

Academic Profile

Dr Thomas Cousins, Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa

Uses a trans-species approach to understand urban animals, human livelihoods, and health in the global south. He studies the microbiome and non-human relations in the context of the governance of life. His research in medical anthropology approaches questions about living with viruses and bacteria through projects that situate human health in lively landscapes. His most recent book, The Work of Repair: Amandla and Capacity in the Timber Plantations of South Africa, considers the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life―physical, relational, cosmological.

Academic Profile

David Zeitlyn, Professor of Social Anthropology

Studies spiders, crabs, and other technologies of future divination in the borderlands of Cameroon and Nigeria.

Academic Profile

David Pratten, Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa and Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography

The Man-Leopard Murders is an account of the cosmological and ontological uncertainty that proliferated in colonial Nigeria, as indigenous intellectuals and government officials tried to bring justice to a series of murder mysteries.

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Multispecies Ethnography

Current Research Themes at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography

Multispecies Ethnography brings creatures previously relegated to the margins of Anthropology into the foreground of study.

The School of Museum Ethnography and Museum Ethnography and Multispecies Ethnography