On the Commonness of Skin: An Anthropology of Being in a More Than Human World

Abstract

The point of departure of multispecies ethnography is that animals are good to be with, a proposal that seeks to destabilize human primacy and reveal new orders of human-nonhuman relations and becomings. This chapter explores the possibilities and limitations of "good to live with". Close examination of how the undergirding theoretical principles informing multispecies ethnography have been operationalized reveals a somewhat romanticized research imaginary. This has manifested in the exploration of a limited and localized range of nonhuman life that does not include those animals who have become necroavailable to humans on an industrial scale. While there is pressure for multispecies ethnographers to take up animal rights agendas for the (meat and laboratory) animals that have the most to gain from decentering the human, there are quieter potentials that might be realized by multispecies ethnographers. These potentials might be attained if ethnographers recognized how the most unlikely of environments offer opportunity to trouble the ontological distinctions that they attempt to destabilize. These include those between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and other binaries that compartmentalize messily entangled human and nonhuman lives. This chapter rehearses the possibilities that come available for realizing the potentials of multispecies ethnography in the laboratory, as well those that dwell on the cuticle that envelopes plant, animal, and human beings. These potentials are explored in this chapter in two case studies that provide readers with the full gamut of possibilities and limitations occasioned and entailed by doing multispecies anthropology in the Anthropocene. Show more