Beyond Anthropomorphism
Attending to and Thinking with Other Species in Multispecies Research
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i2.2033Keywords:
Multispecies research, ethics, anthropomorphism, politics of citation, octopuses, Vancouver AquariumAbstract
Despite the growing richness of multispecies scholarship, questions about anthropomorphism – how to responsibly speak about other species as beings with their own lifeworlds and intentions without anthropomorphizing – continue to haunt multispecies research in Western academic settings. Here I argue that working to attend ethically to more-than-human others as beings with their own lifeworlds and decolonize Western epistemologies as a joint project can help multispecies researchers address the conditions that render charges of anthropomorphism sensible to begin with. I first introduce my study context at the Vancouver Aquarium and positionality as a settler scholar, reflecting on how these come together to generate tensions that shape the meaning of (and possibilities for) ethical multispecies research. I then explain how I have looked to Indigenous intellectuals for guidance before exploring submerged grammars of animacy that linger within the Vancouver Aquarium and Western epistemologies enfolded with this space. I engage Indigenous, feminist, and queer scholarship with more-than-human geographies and octopus science to explain how imagining ethical attention to more-than-human others as beings with their own lifeworlds from this space also entails imagining radically different relations between bodies and spaces than those permitted at the Aquarium.
References
AZA Aquatic Invertebrate Taxonomic Advisory Group (AITAG). 2014. Giant Pacific Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) Care Manual. Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Accessed February 6, 2019. https://www.speakcdn.com/assets/2332/giant_pacific_octopus_care_manual
_final_9514.pdf
Anderson, Roland, Jennifer Mather, Mathieu Monette, and Stephanie Zimsen. 2010. “Octopuses (Enteroctopus dofleini) Recognize Individual Humans.” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 13(3), 261–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888705.2010.483892.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Half-Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2011. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle 19(2), 121–158. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0121.
Bear, Christopher. 2011. “Being Angelica? Exploring individual animal geographies.” Area 43(3), 297-304. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01019.x .
Bear, Christopher, Katy Wilkinson, and Lewis Holloway. 2017. “Visualising human‐animal technology relations: fieldnotes, still photography and digital video on the robotic dairy farm.” Society & Animals 25(3), 225-256. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341405.
Belcourt, Billy-Ray. 2014. “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought.” Societies 5(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001.
Belcourt, Billy-Ray. 2016. “A Poltergeist Manifesto.” Feral Feminisms 6, 22–32. https://feralfeminisms.com/a-poltergeist-manifesto/.
Chen, Mel. 2012. “Chapter 6: Following Mercurial Affect.” In, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Matter, and Queer Affect, 189-221. Durham: Duke University Press.
Collard, Rosemary-Claire. 2012. “Cougar-Human Entanglements and the Biopolitical Un/Making of Safe Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 30(1), 23-42. https://doi.org/10.1068/d19110.
---. 2014. “Putting Animals Back Together, Taking Commodities Apart.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(1), 151-165. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2013.847750.
---. 2018. “Disaster Capitalism and the Quick, Quick, Slow Unravelling of Animal Life.” Antipode 50(4), 910-928. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12389.
Daston, Lorraine and Greg Mitman. 2005. “Introduction.” Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, edited by Lorraine Daston and Greg Mitman, 1-15. New York: Columbia University Press.
Davis, Susan G. 1997. Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Deloria Jr., Vine. 2001. American Indian Metaphysics. Power and place: Indian education in America.
Dews, Peter. 1959. “Some observations on an operant in the octopus.” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 2(1), 57–63. https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.1959.2-57.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2015. “Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, 90-105. Durham: Duke University Press.
Flusser, Vilèm. 2011. Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes. New York: Atropos Press.
Gibbs, Leah. 2019. “Animal geographies I: Hearing the cry and extending beyond.” Progress in Human Geography 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519863483.
Giraud, Eva and Gregory Hollin. 2016. “Care, Laboratory Beagles and Affective Utopia.” Theory, Culture & Society, 33(4), 27–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415619685.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2016. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hayward, Eva. 2010. “Fingereyes: Impressions of cup corals.” Cultural Anthropology 25(4), 577-599. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01070.x.
Hodgetts, Timothy and Jamie Lorimer. 2015. “Methodologies for animals’ geographies: Cultures, communication and genomics.” Cultural Geographies, 22(2), 285–295. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014525114.
Holland, Nicholas and Junyuan Chen. 2001. “Origin and early evolution of the vertebrates: New insights from advances in molecular biology, anatomy, and palaeontology.” BioEssays 23(2), 142–151. https://doi.org/10.1002/1521-1878(200102)23:2<142::AID- BIES1021>3.0.CO;2-5
Hovorka, Alice. 2017. “Animal geographies I: Globalizing and decolonizing.” Progress in Human Geography 38(2), 308-318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513479295.
Isaacs, Jenny and Ariel Otruba. 2019. “Guest Introduction: More-than-human contact zones.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2(4), 697–711. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619855369.
Kim, Claire Jean. 2012. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
King, Barbara J. 2013. How Animals Grieve. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black & Indigenous Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kröger, Björn, Jakob Vinther, and Dirk Fuchs. 2011. “Cephalopod origin and evolution: A congruent picture emerging from fossils, development and molecules.” BioEssays 33(8), 602–613. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201100001.
Lorimer, Jamie, Timothy Hodgetts, and Maan Barua. 2019. “Animals’ atmospheres.” Progress in Human Geography 43(1), 26-45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517731254.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2007. “On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept.” Cultural Studies 21(2–3), 240–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548.
Mawani, Renisa. 2003. “Imperial Legacies (Post)Colonial Identities: Law, Space and the Making of Stanley Park. of Stanley Park, 1859-2001.” Law Text Culture 7, 98–141.
Montgomery, Sy. 2015. The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness. New York: Atria Paperback.
Nelson, Ingrid L. 2017. “Interspecies care and aging in a gorilla 2.0 world.” Geoforum 79, 144-152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.007.
Ocean Wise. n.d. “Our People: Ruby Banwait.” Accessed October 19, 2018. https://ocean.org/stories/our-people-ruby/#ow40-octo-mom.
Parreñas, Juno Salazar. 2018. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Plumwood, Val. 1995. “Human vulnerability and the experience of being prey.” Quadrant 39(3), 29–34.
Plumwood, Val. 2003. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge.
Plumwood, Val. 2008. “Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death.” Environmental Values 17(3), 323–330. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327108X343103.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rose, Deborah Bird. 2013. “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive interactions in the sentient world.” Environmental Humanities 3(1), 93–109. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3611248.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sundberg, Juanita. 2014. “Decolonizing posthumanist geographies.” Cultural Geographies 21(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067.
TallBear, Kim. 2011. “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints.” Society for Cultural Anthropology. https://staging.culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints.
Taylor, Sunaura. 2017. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York: New Press.
Todd, Zoe. 2015. “Fish pluralities: Human-animal relations and sites of engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada.” Études/Inuit/Studies 38(1–2), 217–238. https://doi.org/10.7202/1028861ar.
Todd, Zoe. 2016a. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29(1), 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124.
Todd, Zoe. 2016b. “From fish lives to fish law: Learning to see Indigenous legal orders in Canada.” Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2016/from-fish-lives-to-fish-law- learning-to-see-indigenous-legal-orders-in-canada.html/.
Todd, Zoe. Twitter post, September 12, 2021, 8:08am, https://twitter.com/ZoeSTodd/status/1437070594231603208.
van Dooren, Thom. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.
Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2(1), 20–34.
Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3), 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2013. “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the (k)Nots of Relating.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(2), 208–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/d17411.
_final_9514.pdf
Anderson, Roland, Jennifer Mather, Mathieu Monette, and Stephanie Zimsen. 2010. “Octopuses (Enteroctopus dofleini) Recognize Individual Humans.” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 13(3), 261–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888705.2010.483892.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Half-Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2011. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle 19(2), 121–158. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0121.
Bear, Christopher. 2011. “Being Angelica? Exploring individual animal geographies.” Area 43(3), 297-304. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01019.x .
Bear, Christopher, Katy Wilkinson, and Lewis Holloway. 2017. “Visualising human‐animal technology relations: fieldnotes, still photography and digital video on the robotic dairy farm.” Society & Animals 25(3), 225-256. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341405.
Belcourt, Billy-Ray. 2014. “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought.” Societies 5(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001.
Belcourt, Billy-Ray. 2016. “A Poltergeist Manifesto.” Feral Feminisms 6, 22–32. https://feralfeminisms.com/a-poltergeist-manifesto/.
Chen, Mel. 2012. “Chapter 6: Following Mercurial Affect.” In, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Matter, and Queer Affect, 189-221. Durham: Duke University Press.
Collard, Rosemary-Claire. 2012. “Cougar-Human Entanglements and the Biopolitical Un/Making of Safe Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 30(1), 23-42. https://doi.org/10.1068/d19110.
---. 2014. “Putting Animals Back Together, Taking Commodities Apart.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(1), 151-165. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2013.847750.
---. 2018. “Disaster Capitalism and the Quick, Quick, Slow Unravelling of Animal Life.” Antipode 50(4), 910-928. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12389.
Daston, Lorraine and Greg Mitman. 2005. “Introduction.” Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, edited by Lorraine Daston and Greg Mitman, 1-15. New York: Columbia University Press.
Davis, Susan G. 1997. Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Deloria Jr., Vine. 2001. American Indian Metaphysics. Power and place: Indian education in America.
Dews, Peter. 1959. “Some observations on an operant in the octopus.” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 2(1), 57–63. https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.1959.2-57.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2015. “Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, 90-105. Durham: Duke University Press.
Flusser, Vilèm. 2011. Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes. New York: Atropos Press.
Gibbs, Leah. 2019. “Animal geographies I: Hearing the cry and extending beyond.” Progress in Human Geography 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519863483.
Giraud, Eva and Gregory Hollin. 2016. “Care, Laboratory Beagles and Affective Utopia.” Theory, Culture & Society, 33(4), 27–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415619685.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2016. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hayward, Eva. 2010. “Fingereyes: Impressions of cup corals.” Cultural Anthropology 25(4), 577-599. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01070.x.
Hodgetts, Timothy and Jamie Lorimer. 2015. “Methodologies for animals’ geographies: Cultures, communication and genomics.” Cultural Geographies, 22(2), 285–295. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014525114.
Holland, Nicholas and Junyuan Chen. 2001. “Origin and early evolution of the vertebrates: New insights from advances in molecular biology, anatomy, and palaeontology.” BioEssays 23(2), 142–151. https://doi.org/10.1002/1521-1878(200102)23:2<142::AID- BIES1021>3.0.CO;2-5
Hovorka, Alice. 2017. “Animal geographies I: Globalizing and decolonizing.” Progress in Human Geography 38(2), 308-318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513479295.
Isaacs, Jenny and Ariel Otruba. 2019. “Guest Introduction: More-than-human contact zones.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2(4), 697–711. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619855369.
Kim, Claire Jean. 2012. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
King, Barbara J. 2013. How Animals Grieve. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black & Indigenous Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kröger, Björn, Jakob Vinther, and Dirk Fuchs. 2011. “Cephalopod origin and evolution: A congruent picture emerging from fossils, development and molecules.” BioEssays 33(8), 602–613. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201100001.
Lorimer, Jamie, Timothy Hodgetts, and Maan Barua. 2019. “Animals’ atmospheres.” Progress in Human Geography 43(1), 26-45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517731254.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2007. “On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept.” Cultural Studies 21(2–3), 240–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548.
Mawani, Renisa. 2003. “Imperial Legacies (Post)Colonial Identities: Law, Space and the Making of Stanley Park. of Stanley Park, 1859-2001.” Law Text Culture 7, 98–141.
Montgomery, Sy. 2015. The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness. New York: Atria Paperback.
Nelson, Ingrid L. 2017. “Interspecies care and aging in a gorilla 2.0 world.” Geoforum 79, 144-152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.007.
Ocean Wise. n.d. “Our People: Ruby Banwait.” Accessed October 19, 2018. https://ocean.org/stories/our-people-ruby/#ow40-octo-mom.
Parreñas, Juno Salazar. 2018. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Plumwood, Val. 1995. “Human vulnerability and the experience of being prey.” Quadrant 39(3), 29–34.
Plumwood, Val. 2003. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge.
Plumwood, Val. 2008. “Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death.” Environmental Values 17(3), 323–330. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327108X343103.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rose, Deborah Bird. 2013. “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive interactions in the sentient world.” Environmental Humanities 3(1), 93–109. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3611248.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sundberg, Juanita. 2014. “Decolonizing posthumanist geographies.” Cultural Geographies 21(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067.
TallBear, Kim. 2011. “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints.” Society for Cultural Anthropology. https://staging.culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints.
Taylor, Sunaura. 2017. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York: New Press.
Todd, Zoe. 2015. “Fish pluralities: Human-animal relations and sites of engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada.” Études/Inuit/Studies 38(1–2), 217–238. https://doi.org/10.7202/1028861ar.
Todd, Zoe. 2016a. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29(1), 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124.
Todd, Zoe. 2016b. “From fish lives to fish law: Learning to see Indigenous legal orders in Canada.” Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2016/from-fish-lives-to-fish-law- learning-to-see-indigenous-legal-orders-in-canada.html/.
Todd, Zoe. Twitter post, September 12, 2021, 8:08am, https://twitter.com/ZoeSTodd/status/1437070594231603208.
van Dooren, Thom. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.
Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2(1), 20–34.
Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3), 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2013. “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the (k)Nots of Relating.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(2), 208–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/d17411.
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Published
2022-03-03
How to Cite
Holmberg, M. (2022). Beyond Anthropomorphism: Attending to and Thinking with Other Species in Multispecies Research. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 21(2), 172–187. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i2.2033
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Special Issue - Ethics of Multispecies Research
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