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Over time, the role of nature in anthropology has evolved from being a mere backdrop for social and cultural diversity to being viewed as an integral part of the ontological entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. This transformation of the role of nature offers important insight into the relationships between diverse anthropological traditions. By highlighting natural-cultural worlds alongside these traditions, Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies explores the potential for creating more sophisticated conjunctions of anthropological knowledge and practice.
“The collection mixes cultural anthropology with science and technology studies, so topics range from African hunter-gatherers to nuclear physics, and several chapters are philosophically tied to phenomenology. Mostly written by experts in the field, the essays are thoughtful, original, and insightful, but a couple of standouts by Marilyn Strathern and Heather Anne Swanson are brilliant and important new contributions….Recommended.” • Choice
“Through its rich ethnographic cases and deep analytical efforts, [this book] helps us understand the current co-ordinates of anthropological research in the aftermath of what Pickering calls the twenty-first-century breakdown of social constructivist consensus. This collection is certainly a useful and welcome publication that should be read by all those convinced that the relationships between humans and nonhumans are among the most important issues of today.” • JRAI
“The editors of this volume offer a notion of nature that is both cosmopolitan and provincial. Combining ethnography and philosophy, this collection takes on complexity as a tool for empirical analysis across themes, places, and histories.” • Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis
“The intersection between anthropology and STS has been one of the most fertile grounds for experimentation among critical social and cultural theorists over recent decades. Showcasing some of its most influential contributors, as well as a number of shooting stars, this volume takes this discussion to a new level of sophistication by returning to the ‘ground zero’ of anthropological (auto) critique: the nature-culture binary and its negotiation within diverse cultural and academic traditions.” • Morten Axel Pedersen, University of Copenhagen
“This volume offers an indispensable exploration of debates on ontological multiplicity and difference, folded elegantly into case studies that dance between science studies and anthropology in Japanese as well as Euro-American registers.” • Amiria Salmond, University of Auckland
Casper Bruun Jensen is honorary lecturer at Leicester University. He is the author of Ontologies for Developing Things (Sense, 2010) and Monitoring Movements in Development Aid (with Brit Ross Winthereik) (2013, MIT) and the editor of Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology with Kjetil Rödje (Berghahn, 2009) and Infrastructures and Social Complexity with Penny Harvey and Atsuro Morita (Routledge, 2016).
Introduction: Minor Traditions, Shizen Equivocations, and Sophisticated Conjunctions
Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita
Chapter 1. Naturalism and the Invention of Identity
Marilyn Strathern
Chapter 2. Between Two Truths: Time in Physics and Fiji
Naoki Kasuga
Chapter 3. Natures of Naturalism: Reaching Bedrock in Climate Science
Martin Skrydstrup
Chapter 4. Raw Data: Making Relations Matter
Antonia Walford
Chapter 5. Methods for Multispecies Anthropology: Thinking with Salmon Otoliths and Scales
Heather Anne Swanson
Chapter 6. A Theory of ‘Animal Borders’: Thoughts and Practices toward Non-human Animals among the G|ui Hunter-Gatherers
Kazuyoshi Sugawara
Chapter 7. Delta Ontologies: Infrastructural Transformations in the Chao Phraya Delta, Thailand
Atsuro Morita and Casper Bruun Jensen
Chapter 8. The Ontological Turn: Taking Different Worlds Seriously
Andrew Pickering