ANT6066H: More-than-Human Ethnography

The aim of this graduate seminar is twofold: 1) to examine the potential and challenges of "more-than-human" approaches to ethnography; and 2) to explore what more-than-human ethnographies could offer to the social debates about the Anthropocene that demand a critical and fundamental rethinking of the position of the human in the world. More-than-human approaches to ethnography have received growing attention in the last two decades as a critical response to anthropocentric frameworks in documenting and analyzing culture and society. Based on the realization that human exceptionalism has contributed to abrasive resource extraction and industrialization, colonialism, planetary scale environmental degradation and a variety of injustices associated with the above, more-than-human ethnographies start from the premise that the human is inseparable from what is called "the environment." Various strategies have been experimented with in order to focus on the “entanglement” of various actors, including humans, and to examine how specific entanglements shape social relations and politics. In this seminar, we will read ethnographies that highlight the entangled relationship between humans and other beings — such as animals, plants, insects, fungi, microorganisms, land, water, wind, technological devices — that together shape the world.

0.50
St. George