Bridging Methodologies for a More-than-Human Anthropology

Abstract (English)

In his recent book, Michael Dove (2024) argues that the rise of narrowly defined scientific disciplines has had at least two significant consequences, one of which is the stark separation between local knowledge—empirical, place-based understandings of ecosystems accumulated by ordinary people over centuries—and scientific knowledge. For centuries, to the chagrin of many anthropologists, tocal ecological knowledge has been dismissed by many as irrelevant to the “hard sciences.” However, ecologists, environmental scientists and others from this camp working with e.g. citizen science and participatory methods have in recent years been recognizing its value. They have come around to what anthropologists have been arguing for eons: namely, that communities whose livelihoods depend on understanding local ecosystems often possess profound insights into various ecological features (e.g., Johannes et al. 2008).
For the past two decades, our turns (ontological, geological) along with an increased focus on the Anthropocene—an epoch in which humans are recognized as a geological force—have been blurring the boundaries between humans and nonhumans (e.g., Chakrabarty 2021). Within this framework, multispecies and more-than-human approaches to studying society and the environment, which often use indigenous knowledge of the natural world as a point of departure, have gained prominence.
This panel seeks to foster theoretical reflections on how traditional expertise and scientific (or policy) knowledge of the planet and its environment can be meaningfully integrated. We seek to encourage papers that speak to considerations of this topic at the methodological, theoretical, or applied scale. How can anthropologists, in concert with other disciplinary practitioners, bring together diverse, complex data (e.g. ethnographic observation, archival work, biological or geographical data) without undermining the distinctiveness of each scientific discipline? How can ethnographic insights into local practices and knowledge systems be theoretically synthesized with data from the “harder” sciences? What might a disciplinarily integrated perspective on problem solving look like, and what form could this take? The broader aim of this panel is to investigate to what extent interdisciplinarity can fit within the dominant epistemic paradigms of the humanities, social sciences, and life and earth sciences. We question to what extent the pursuit of integration might require reconceptualizations of these disciplines to facilitate scientific excellence and or breakthroughs, and to enable solutions to pressing challenges that may or may not have been working out thus far.