Comparative Ethnographies of Crooked Beasts

This essay compares orcas off the coast of Gibraltar that have been mysteriously attacking boats and big cats in India that have been increasingly preying on humans. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on changing human-animal relations in India, the essay uses this comparison to make three connected arguments about how we understand and write about the climate crisis. The essay first makes a case for embracing the uncertainty that lurks within tales of human and nonhuman entanglements. Uncertainty, it argues, is not just the defining feature of our times but a critical mode through which knowledge of the climate crisis can be formulated. Taking uncertainty as a productive form of knowledge-making, the essay then considers how long-standing methods of ethnography and storytelling can be adapted to speak for a climate-changed world. The essay makes a case for informed musings as a modality of ethnographic knowledge. Finally, the essay extends traditional ethnography to include creative comparisons that bring planetary climate politics into view. As extreme events, intense heat, and crooked beasts dominate headlines across the world, the ethnographic method must be refined to provide thicker descriptions of what ails the planet.