240525 SE MM3 Multispecies studies (2024S)

This course aims to introduce students to multispecies studies, an interdisciplinary field that seeks to break the anthropocentrism of social sciences and humanities. That said, it is especially designed as a conversation between anthropological and sociological approaches, on the one hand, and a plethora of multispecies approaches, on the other hand.

While much of anthropology has included environment as a material and symbolic container of all social life, its accent has mostly been on the human (Anthropos) as the discipline’s founding subject. This included some modernist ideas about nature/culture binary, and a focus on nonhuman beings inasmuch as they were useful for people (as source of food, energy, etc) or as symbolically important for them (that is, as codes for distinctly human dramas). Multispecies studies departs from such understanding by looking at various life forms 1) in their own right 2) as interdependent with one another, including with humans. It also aims to understand how we can broaden some big “social questions” – such as inequality, exploitation, value, life and death matters – when situating them in an interspecies context.

A common misconception is that multispecies studies is just an ideological campaign for treating all living beings equally, in harmony with one another, and on the same plane of analysis (as in the so called “deep ecology”). To the contrary, multispecies studies ask us to proliferate, rather than reduce a number of relevant differences. As Anna Tsing would put it, a rock, a fox, a river and a hunter all act differently in the same meadow, yet they each decide – to a degree and in their own way – about life and death in that landscape. In other words, multispecies studies is not a call to petrify some distinct “cosmologies” (as in the so called ontological turn) but to look at various forms and ways of life as co-dependents, and sharing the same space of life and death matters. As Marylin Strathern would put it, there is more than one world, and yet less than many worlds. In that sense, multispecies studies are also a field that asks us to reflect on concrete, situated ethical matters involved in thriving and perishing of all life on the planet – even if they do not prescribe one universalist answer to those questions.

After exploring some of the basic tenets of the multispecies studies, and their diversity, the course will be structured around several themes designed to explore common topics between human and nonhuman worlds: reproduction, extinction, care, violence, domestication, wildness. We will explore, for example, how social reproduction crises of capitalism look from a multispecies a point of view, or how “social question” can be broadened. Again, the focus here is on multiplying conflicting between different life projects – not to put them on the same plain of the analysis. Some authors we will be coming back to most are: Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Thom van Dooren. Students will also explore case studies in presentations, and will engage in a critical review of a full-length monograph.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

1) Identify the main themes, concepts and debates in the diverse field of multispecies studies
2) Be able to connect anthropological concepts with broader multispecies settings
3) Have a foundation for deepening their knowledge of environmental anthropology and interspecies relations in the future.