Multispecies Anthropology: Stories and Semiotics in More-Than-Human Worlds
We humans . . . are not the only ones who interpret the world.
— Eduardo Kohn (2011, 73)
INTRODUCTION
This essay engages with the burgeoning field of multispecies anthropology, a field which acknowledges and seeks to extrapolate on Anna Tsching’s suggestion that ‘human nature is an interspecies relationship’ (Anna Tsching n.d., cited in Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich 2014, 2). Multispecies anthropology positions itself as the ‘taking seriously’ (Archambault 2016; Kohn 2013, 10; van Dooren and Rose, p.2) of nonhumans as persons and co-creators of a shared world (Cruickshank 2005, cited in Ogden, Hall and Tanita 2013). By necessity, it thus seeks to ‘redefine what “the human” means individually and collectively’ (Heise 2020, 282), partly as an acknowledgement that ‘human life is inconceivable without its dependence on a wide variety of bacteria, microbes, plants, and animals’ (p. 282), and partly as a rejection of what Donna Haraway terms ‘the foolishness of human exceptionalism’ (Haraway 2008, 244). Too, multispecies anthropology concerns itself with finding new modes of understanding and operating in a world under the shadow of the Anthropocene (Rose 2010). These modes, it is claimed, must align themselves responsibly with ecological stewardship (Rose 2010), as well as recognise the ethical obligations of living alongside other thinking beings (Kohn 2013; van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster 2016). In these aims, scholars of multispecies anthropology seek collaboration with scientists, artists and other naturalists working with other-than-humans, manifesting a truly interdisciplinary field (Kirksey, Schuetze and Helmreich 2014; van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster 2016).
This paper engages with what it means to take nonhumans seriously and argues for the importance of doing so. I will first explore my own relationship with multispecies anthropology and attendant concerns, then go on to examine the history of the field and the colonial-institutional resistances to its work. The paper will then explore the ethnographic insights of Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose’s (2012) investigation into little penguins and storying, as well as Eduardo Kohn’s (2011) engagement with human and other-than-human shared semiotic worlds. Finally, this paper will look at the implications of multispecies ethnographic work upon the greater domain of anthropology, as well as looking toward the contributions multispecies anthropology makes to forging new modes of being in and relating to the world — modes which have the potential to see our way into a more harmonious and ecologically stable future.
THE PERSONAL STAKES OF MULTISPECIES ANTHROPOLOGY
I first enrolled in university at 29 with the intent of going into conservation biology, specialising in entomology. I was moved by the climate crisis, fearing for the future my young son would one day be left alone to grapple with. I wanted to help, to contribute meaningfully, and I had identified conservation and ecological understanding to be essential to that cause. For some years I had also been studying anthropology texts with increasingly passionate interest. Over a decade of personal studies into the fields of biology, philosophy and ethology, coupled with my own observations as an avid nature lover and watcher, as well as a lifelong companion of a multitude of nonhumans I’d shared a household with, had fostered an understanding that nonhuman beings were not just ecologically important but important on their own merits as thinking and feeling selves.
I hatched a plan for myself: I would complete the conservation biology degree, and then acquire an anthropology degree, and become an anthropologist of insects. I say anthropologist and not ethologist, as vital and pioneering as the field of ethology has been, because I had identified a trend in which natural scientists were often trained in reductionist approaches to the analysis of nonhuman behaviours, seeming to start from more-or-less the assumption that they were automatons (as Western science has typically preached), as well as frequently judging their capability for sentience, communication and culture against anthropocentric metrics (Crist 2000). I respected anthropology’s explicit rejection of the relativist approach as well as its contemporary drive to understand peoples and cultures on their own merits. I wanted to be trained to observe the way differences manifest, but observe them with a clear and open mind. I wanted to observe what I could without becoming entangled in what I viewed as the cognitive shackling of the “hard” science’s propensity for pre-prescribed dismissal of the capacity for nonhuman thought, cognitive intent and/or selfhood. My hope was that I may retrieve a knowledge that demonstrated the moral significance of nonhuman life, and that by imbuing people with a comprehension of non-mammalian selfhood, we might develop greater regard for the innumerable lives which fundamentally undergird life on this planet.
THE NEED FOR MULTISPECIES ANTHROPOLOGY:
A SHORT HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
Multispecies anthropology manifests the scholarship I sought to create in my pursuit of exploring and espousing a worldview I once felt isolated in experiencing. I state this plainly to underscore the importance of this work not simply for the field of anthropology, but for an increasing number of persons who are agitated by the philosophical disconnect observed in Western modes of world-perceiving and engagement with nonhumans and shared spaces. As Nicole Torres (2021, 125) writes, ‘I often grapple with the predicament of using the language of the academy while attempting to remain true to my spiritual practices and personal, lived experiences’. Multispecies anthropology engages authentically and rigorously in the conceptualisation of nonhumans as agentive beings (Ogden, Hall and Tanita 2013), exploring what it means to live in multispecies societies and what the fact of multispecies agency suggests for understanding human persons and their place in the world. In its openness to reconceptualisation, multispecies anthropology performs an ontological function, shearing open dialogic space for articulations of alternative, yet rigorous, understandings which run counter to the historically established narrative of nonhumans as intrinsically inferior and devoid of self-awareness (Crist 2000; Hall 2011). It makes space for those whose voices have been minimised and whose views have been condescended to during their pursuit of a decolonised scholarship which decenters humans, as well as the logics of hierarchical group ‘value-ordering’ (Hall 2011, 7). Multispecies scholarship, in its openness, extends its definition of the other-than-human beyond nonhuman animals to include not only all forms of life, plants and bacteria among them, but also occasionally extends to the abiotic (van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster 2016) and even the fantastic (Ogden, Hall and Tanita 2013).
In order to understand the task multispecies anthropology faces in ‘taking nonhumans seriously’, as well as to grasp the necessity for production of such research in the first place, it is important to first examine the cultural history that brings us to this moment. In Western modes of understanding, the belief that nonhumans are closer to automata than to persons can be traced back to the titanic influences of thinkers like Aristotle, who postulated nonhumans could not reason, and René Descartes, who specifically branded nonhumans as akin to machines (Foëx 2007, 750). Immanuel Kant assented that animals could suffer, but concluded they ‘lacked moral status’ (cited in Foëx 2007, 750). Scientific scholarship has often been swift and vigorous in its response to scientists and other naturalist scholars who attempt to ascribe cognitive meaning and intellectual intent to nonhumans, accusing them of anthropomorphism (Crist 2000; Kohn 2013) — which is to say, a lack of neutrality and objectivity, circumstances which “inevitably” cultivate false assumptions. Crist (2000, 13), examining the scientific establishment’s propensity for dismissing nonhuman subjectivity via rejecting any language that may contribute to a rendering of subjectivity, proposes this habit as a linguistic and logical fallacy, one that self-selectively disallows for the possibility of regarding nonhumans as ‘acting subjects’ as opposed to ‘natural objects’ (p. 9).
This observation is not Crist’s alone, and as Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich (2010) note, there has been a long (albeit little-celebrated) history of critical naturalist scholarship which engages with the notion of nonhumans as self-aware and meaning-making subjects. Anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s 18th century work on beavers, whom he observed both acquired and transmitted knowledge and whom he referred to as ‘clever mutes’, admonished his colleagues: ‘The present attitude of man toward the mutes is not such, in all respects, as befits his superior wisdom. We deny them all rights, and ravage their ranks with wanton and unmerciful cruelty’ (cited in Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 549). Kirksey and Helmreich also detail Gregory Bateson’s better-known anthropological work on human-dolphin communication, in which Bateson established dolphins’ proclivities for play and fantasy and whose demonstration of dolphin mental processes ‘broke down essentialised differences between human and nonhuman minds’ (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 550).
Laura Ogden, Billy Hall and Kimiko Tanita (2013, 281) further point to multispecies anthropology’s ‘historical roots in the animal liberation movement’, highlighting Peter Singer’s contributions in kickstarting philosophical engagement in the movement as well as, later, the contributions of Tom Regan and Mary Midgley, who gave shape to a robust dialogue on the status of animals as moral subjects (Foëx 2007; Heise 2020). Ogden, Hall and Tanita further highlight the work done in posthumanist theories, which question ‘the conceptual foundations for human agency, whether it is postulated at the level of the individual, the social class, or the species’ (p. 280). Kirksey, Schuetze and Helmreich (2014) pinpoint the formal origins of multispecies anthropology in the establishment of a series of conferences referred to as The Multispecies Salon, during which natural scientists, anthropologists and artists came together to see and discuss multispecies worlds differently. These preceding scholarships have laid the groundwork for a fundamental questioning of ‘the exceptionality of the human subject’ (p. 276; Haraway 2008). With multispecies scholarship, the discipline of anthropology takes up this mantle.
THE WORK OF ANTHROPOLOGY:
MULTISPECIES CONTEXTS
Anthropology as a discipline is no stranger to examining relationships between the lives of its interlocutors and the other-than-humans who shape them. Indeed, it would be difficult to engage at all with the plenitude of animist communities anthropologists take part in without some form of analytical engagement of the ties that bind humans to their nonhuman counterparts. An ethnographic approach toward learning to understand nonhumans as persons — as opposed to believed by animists to be persons — matures the anthropologist’s ability to engage respectfully with animist interlocutors as well as provides potential for situating oneself in a more veracious way of understanding. As Matthew Hall (2011, 12) notes, ‘pioneering [Western] scientific work in many ways echoes the recognition of the attributes of sentience and personhood that have long been pinpointed in Indian religious thought and Indigenous knowledge systems’. Coming to understand nature on a relational level finds us entering into a knowledge system familiar to vast communities across the world.
In addition to deepening our understandings of human cultures, multispecies anthropology makes a point of shifting the sole focus away from what humans think about their counterparts. It gives deep consideration to how other-than-humans may constitute meaning in their own worlds (further discussed below). Too, the work engages authentically with how other-than-humans co-author human lifeworlds beyond the common recognition of those humans whose lives are shaped. It does this in acknowledgement that human bodies, societies and cultures are, in the words of Ursula K. Heiste (2020, p.282) ‘in reality, assemblages of many species, ranging from the microbes inhabiting our gastro-intestinal tracts and disease-carrying viruses to food plants and animals, pets, and those plants and animals that figure in ritual and religious practices’.
It is important to note that contemporary scientific discoveries have deepened Western understandings of the capacity of other-than-humans to think and feel, as Hall (2011) notes in his ethnography exploring plant personhood. He presents a body of scientific evidence for plants demonstrating ‘sophisticated aspects of mentality such as reasoning and choice’ (p. 12), locating these cognitive performances in a plant’s morphology and physiology, as opposed to the movement-based demonstrations of cognition typically observed in animals. Hall calls attention to a plant’s ability to determine self from not-self, using their avoidance of self-pollination and intelligent navigation of various root-systems as illustrations. Additionally, he demonstrates the human-observed processes through which plants learn via previous experience and go on to apply their acquired knowledges to real-time decisions.
Hall reminds us that ‘it must be remembered that such evidence is at the cutting edge of science’ (p. 155). This is not only a caution that such understandings are still contested but also reminds us that it is only recently scholars have had the empirical evidence with which to challenge related institutional systems of knowing on their own grounds. He points out various examples of animist and Indigenous ways of understanding the world as ‘an ecology of selves’ (Kohn 2013, p.78), drawing attention to Maori understandings of plants as sharing geneaological descent (whakapapa) with humans and other beings (Hall 2011, 103). Hall also underscores the kinship ties between a number of First Nations people and local plants: ‘That tree, the grey mangrove, is my most senior paternal ancestor,’ explains Annie Isaac of the Wuyaliya clan in Yanyuwa country (cited in Hall 2011, 116).
Val Plumwood (2009, 6) notes that despite that Darwinian evolutionary theory acknowledges that all living beings are genealogical ancestors, ‘insights of continuity and kinship with other life forms . . . remain only superficially absorbed in the dominant culture, even by scientists’. In espousing the virtues of a multispecies scholarship which recognises a redefined and more veracious way of seeing and knowing other-than-humans, it is important to acknowledge the long-standing wisdom of animist, and many Indigenous, cultures whose communities have maintained deep understanding of the fundamental interrelatedness of species, as well as historical acknowledgments of other-than-human personhood. Multispecies ethnographies take an active stance in challenging the ‘Western imperial discourse’ (Torres 2021, 125) of the academy, engaging with ‘long histories of relational, agentic thinking from Indigenous peoples’ (van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster 2016, 2). Multispecies anthropology, too, provides another layer of discourse: it proffers close analysis of what this interrelatedness means for being — and beings — in the world today.
THE CASE FOR MULTISPECIES ETHNOGRAPHY:
INSIGHTS FROM THE FIELD
What does it mean to examine and acknowledge the ‘alterworlds of other beings’ (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010)? How does this engagement lead us to ‘redefine what “the human” means individually and collectively’ (Heise 2020, 282)? We will turn to an examination of van Dooren and Rose’s (2012) ethnographic work on a Little Penguin colony in Sydney Harbour in which they propose a theory for how nonhumans story places. Too, we will engage with Eduardo Kohn’s conceptualisation of nonhuman semiotic processes and the communicative exchanges which take place between humans and other-than-humans. In this way we will unpack how multispecies ethnographies provide novel and ‘thick’ accounts of ‘the distinctive experiental worlds, modes of being and biocultural attachments of other species’ (van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster 2016, 5) in order to ‘decolonize and more broadly challenge dominant assumptions about knowledge, expertise, and who is authorized to speak for Nature’ (p. 8).
van Dooren and Rose (2012, 3) ask, ‘What would it mean to take seriously the way in which some specific animals story their specific places?’ Their investigation takes them into history, in which they uncover the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexkull’s concept of the Umwelt — ‘the recursive perceptual life-world that characterizes organism and surrounds’, or more subjectively, how ‘the “life story” of an animal develops according to its own perceptions and actions’ (p.3). It is the word story van Dooren and Rose key in upon, suggesting that a story is ‘that which emerges out of an ability to engage with happenings in the world as sequential and meaningful events’ (p. 3). Further, they suggest that in the story-making through which nonhumans arrange sounds, smells or other experiences into qualia inscribed with meaning (for example, that a predator is near, or that one is not), nonhumans construct meaningful sequences which van Dooren and Rose define as narrative. They suggest that ‘the significance of narrative is in the meaning-making that connects the lives of living beings to the worlds they inhabit’ (p. 4). Noting that the ability to communicate one’s storied experience or valuation of the world is not a prerequisite of experiencing the world as storied, van Dooren and Rose propose that to accept nonhumans as narrative subjects is to set the grounds for required ethical engagement with nonhumans, as well as necessitates we acknowledge their ‘ethical claim on us in relation to place’ (p. 5).
Evidencing their proposition that nonhumans, and little penguins specifically, are ‘narrative subjects’, van Dooren and Rose point to the little penguin’s close relationship to place, and specifically, to their home place. ‘From a penguin’s perspective,’ van Dooren and Rose write, ‘one burrow is not just as good as any other’ (p. 8). They describe how little penguins are philopatric, a term that ‘literally means love of one’s home’ (p. 8), and in biology describes returning to breed in one’s place of birth. Little penguins show preference to not simply a general locale that exhibits certain specifications — or ‘habitat’ as biologists refer to such places — but to specific home-places in which they have experienced formative life events. Even in their home-place, van Dooren and Rose observe, a little penguin will not simply take a burrow that “does the job”, but will head to a specific burrow that is historied in their lives: a burrow that means something to them in context of their subjective life experiences.
The penguins, it is noted, will typically go to great lengths to return to their natal place to reproduce, but, van Dooren and Rose observe, as individuals with individualised experiences, this return is not always the case. While little penguins do typically prefer not only to breed at the site of their birth but to breed in the same burrow, little penguins are found to be less likely to breed in these areas if a past attempt has gone awry. Though van Dooren and Rose don’t specifically articulate how the little penguin’s narrative may come to be sequenced in event of a failed hatching and subsequent refusal to return, I propose their storying, in a human-interpreted narrativised language, may go something like this:
I tried to hatch a baby here once. Something bad happened. This place is not safe for babies. I will find a different, safer place to have a baby.
We see that trends in little penguin behaviour also highlight deviations in their behaviour (or variations), and that both these patterns and deviations indicate the existence of thought processes in which past experiences are factored into present decision-making. This sequencing of information, of contexts and histories, story their worlds. And not just their worlds, but their places: little penguins have birth-places and breeding-places, and often those places are the same. But birth-places may come to be not-breeding places (or sometimes, with human destruction, not-places), and other sites (a penguin’s breeding partner’s homeplace, perhaps) can come to be breeding-places. Too, as van Dooren and Rose note, these places become birth- and breeding- places for subsequent generations in generational storying events. ‘Stories are not just layered over penguins or places here,’ van Dooren and Rose write, ‘but are active participants in the production of both’ (p. 10).
In their concluding analysis, van Dooren and Rose note the danger in dismissing penguin’s narratively subjective experiences in the ‘mechanomorphic’ (p. 9) language of many scholars, noting that scientific descriptors such as ‘habitat’ and ‘site fidelity’ in fact tell us ‘practically nothing about how the imperative to be reunited with a place or partner is experienced by individuals and comes to animate their understandings, actions and relationships’ (p. 9). They join Crist (2000) in her criticism of academic language which purports to be neutral but that instead ‘simply obviates or negates animal mind’ (van Dooren and Rose 2012, 5). van Dooren and Rose suggest that taking nonhumans seriously and engaging ethically with a multispecies world ‘requires us to develop a language that is capable of prompting recognition of similarity and responsibility, between embodied, social creatures’ (p. 5). Multispecies scholarship places emphatic focus on doing the work of this language-making and dialogic space-making, as Eduardo Kohn’s exploration of a human hunter’s encounter with a monkey also makes clear in the following.
Kohn (2011, 1) enters his semiotic engagement with an anthropology beyond the human with the declaration that ‘how other kinds of beings see us matters’ and ‘that other kinds of beings see us changes things’. He uses the example of what a local warns him about the jaguars around Ávila: ‘If a jaguar sees you as a being capable of looking back — a self like himself, a you — he’ll leave you alone. But if he should come to see you as prey — an it — you may well become dead meat’ (p. 1). That we — humans and other-than-humans — see each other means that we affect each other, we shape each other’s worlds, in big ways and small. But, as Kohn observes, it is not only that we see each other that affects. He describes that nonhumans also represent the world, but in order for us to understand this, we must ‘discard our received ideas about what it means to represent something’ (p. 8). He explains that an expanded understanding of representation is difficult to grasp because ‘our social theory . . . conflates representation with language’ (p. 8), but that this is not in actuality the case. Representation, in Kohn’s understanding, is a semiotic phenomenon located in sign processes, in that semiotics is fundamentally ‘the creation and interpretation of signs’ (p. 9). A sign means something to she who interprets the sign: in Kohn’s example, the jaguar who sees the human looking back interprets the gaze as a sign that the gazing being is a you not an it, or more specifically, not-prey. More than that, the world is full of signification for all beings, in that all beings encounter indicators which carry meaning: crickets interpret the presence of a particular chemical as a sign an adversary is too strong and an indicator they should flee (Raffles 2010), flying foxes interpret the drifting scent of myrtaceous trees as a sign a meal is close (Rose 2010), humans interpret a cloud of black smoke in the sky as indicative of a nearby fire. We all interpret the world through signs, and as van Dooren and Rose would argue, sequences of interpretations informed by past and present experiences create narrative.
Kohn explicates how semiotic representation is an experiental phenomenon shared between forms of life — humans and nonhumans included — by sharing an anecdote in which a human hunter — Hilario — engages in the same semiotic thinking as a woolly monkey in order to trap and slaughter them. The young monkey is separated from their group after one of her relatives is killed during the hunt. Understanding that to be seen by — to be under the gaze of — the hunter is to die, the monkey hides high in the branches of an enormous tree. She understands, in her way, that the hunter is a subjective being — that they observe, that they make actions based upon their observations, and that she can influence those actions by shaping the observations the hunter makes (in this case, staying hidden from direct observation). The monkey has engaged in and manipulated the semiotic processes of the human in order to protect her life — the hunter signifies death, the hunter’s observation of her signifies danger, the tree signifies cover, her body’s stillness signifies stealth. In response, Hilario too enters into this shared semiotic realm of logic: he decides that, as the monkey is far out of reach, he can likely scare the monkey from her perch by felling a nearby palm tree and spooking her with the sound of its crash. He is correct: the monkey flees from her perch. Kohn notes that the reason this works is because ‘the palm crashing down stands for something to the monkey’ (p. 31). He explains that it, as a particular type of sign, ‘forced her to notice that something just happened, even though what just happened remained unclear’ (p. 32). The monkey ‘need not necessarily perceive the shaking perch to be a sign of anything’ (p. 32) — she need not respond — but she does because she interprets signs (sometimes, too, the lack of sign may constitute as a sign), in much the same register as a human interprets signs. She knows that a sign is connected to something else, ‘for which it stands’ (p. 33). In this case, Kohn observes, the sign of the palm falling is ‘connected to something dangerously different from her present sense of security. Maybe the branch she is perched on is going to break off . Maybe a jaguar is climbing up the tree . . . Something is about to happen, and she had better do something about it’ (p. 33). In this way, Kohn demonstrates the nonhuman ability to extrapolate information about ‘absent futures’ (p. 33), in which beings make questions between what is happening and what might potentially happen.
Kohn artfully articulates the semiotic processes involved in human, other-than-human and human-other interpretations, engagements and communications. Pasts, presents and futures are called up and represented in signs upon which all beings act. Not only are they acted upon, but they are often acted upon in communion, co-authoring each other’s narratives and worlds. In all these ways, it matters that we see others and they see us.
DISCUSSION
Coming to an understanding that not only do other-than-humans interpret and represent the world, but that they analyse situations and come to decisions based on possible futures, means something for what humans understand not just about other beings but about ourselves in the world. As Kohn explains: ‘the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans’ (p. 72). As feeling, experiencing, rationalising, narrativising subjects, other-than-humans live both in shared worlds and individuated worlds. Multispecies ethnographies, in taking other-than-humans seriously, demonstrate their capacity for both making meaning and co-authoring meaningful exchanges and communications. This brings into clarity van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster’s (2016, 16) statement that ‘ethics is at the core of multispecies accounts — not an addition, bolted onto the side’. Recognising these traits in other-than-human beings means recognising them as persons, and persons who share a world we shape. In this recognition, van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster ask, ‘what forms of responsibility are required?’ (p. 3).
I have avoided, in this essay, a close analysis of multispecies anthropology’s engagement and concern with the Anthropocene and the attendant work of striving for responsible ecological stewardship. Kathleen Rice (2019, 315) notes that ‘much anthropology today is driven by a sense of social justice’, and, overwhelmingly, the field literature acknowledges that the critical nature of performing multispecies work is tied to the ever-lowering pendulum swing of Anthropocenic catastrophe (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt 2019; van Dooren and Rose 2012; van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster 2016). As noted earlier, my concern over the looming environmental crisis led me to the discipline of anthropology and to multispecies scholarship in particular; it is an issue deeply near to me. The purpose of this shallow engagement was intentional: other-than-human persons deserve to be considered with respect not because of what they may or may not contribute to ecological stability, but because they are subjects who hold intrinsic value and who should be recognised as such. It is this recognition I wanted to remain the focus of the work.
However, I stand in union with Deborah Bird Rose (2011, 175) when she states that ‘relational ethics for living and dying in the Anthropocene urge us to assume ever greater mutuality and accountability as intra-dependent members of the suffering family of life on Earth’. Recognising other-than-human beings as subjects rather than objects, as beings who are not akin to machines but who lead richly storied lives and who engage with the world around them in processes imbued with deep meaning, is a vital step in extending ethical consideration to their lives and their communities. Acknowledging other-than-humans as subjects is to acknowledge they deserve not only consideration but rights.
CONCLUSION
This paper has explored the origins of multispecies anthropology as well as the challenges its scholars have faced in confronting the embedded colonial knowledge-systems of Western scientific thought. It has engaged with the history of thought- and language-policing that have historically neutralised discussion and recognition of other-than-humans as ‘acting subjects’ versus ‘natural objects’ (p. 9). It has explored how multispecies ethnographers have responded to this, illustrating their intentional applications of subjective language in the form of conceptualising what storying, narrativisation, semiotic communication and representation look like when we apply theory to other-than-humans. Too, this paper has made a case for the importance of considering the language with which we think and communicate about their worlds, and wondered at how shifting our language can shift our understandings of other-than-humans as persons. Finally, it has acknowledged the importance of the work in this era of the Anthropocene, in which achieving a collective understanding of other-than-humans as thinking, agentic beings becomes ever more imperative in the pursuit to halt not just species extinctions but mass extinction events.
Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt (2019, 187) write that ‘we need to reclaim, in a new register, anthropology’s heritage of daring to make big claims about humans and about the worlds that humans co-inhabit with others instead of being content to deconstruct such claims’. They caution, however, that we must do so ‘with all the circumspection that also is the trademark of anthropology’ (p. 187). Anthropologists are uniquely positioned in this strange moment in history to help bridge gaps of misunderstanding between groups of beings, to find ways of familiarising people with the lives, motivations and meanings of those whose lifeworlds seem unrecognisable, even alien. In this way, a multispecies anthropology lays the groundwork for rendering the subjective lives of other-than-humans intelligible, and in the process pushes us to reexamine what it means to be human and to relate as human, in this world co-authored by a multiplicity of subjective nonhuman persons.
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