Ethnography Beyond the Human: The ‘Other-than-Human’ in Ethnographic Work

Recent calls for ‘other-than-human’ ethnographies draw attention to dimensions of life that have allegedly been overlooked or marginalised in anthropological writings. We take such critique as an opportunity to reconsider selected ethnographic accounts asking: What was the role of animals and plants in these accounts, and what ‘hidden stories’ may be discerned in texts and images? What might an informed and careful reading teach us about relations of ethnographic production beyond the human, and about the disciplinary conventions shaping how these relations could (or could not) be conveyed? Juxtaposing older ethnographic texts with state of the art ethnographic insight from the same region, we show that ethnographic attention to the ‘other-than-human’ is not new, but its mode of expression has been thwarted: Shifting theoretical concerns, and human exceptionalism, have shaped ethnographic writing and rendered such modes of knowing less significant than they might have been.