Trac(k)ing and more-than-human ethnography: Notes on following bears and wolves in the Alps

This article introduces trac(k)ing as a methodological and analytical framework for more-than-human research, bringing into dialogue the practices of tracing and tracking. Based on archival and ethnographic research on human–large carnivore relations in the south-eastern Alps (Italy), it develops an epistemology of traces grounded in the tension between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence. It argues that tracking animals can be reinscribed within a broader act of tracing, in which knowledge emerges through situated, embodied, and technologically-mediated engagements with nonhumans. Moving beyond a purely biopolitical reading, trac(k)ing is conceptualised as an ecology of practices: an assemblage of practices and practitioners that combines sensory attunement, technical skills, local expertise, technologies, and scientific knowledge. Each practice of tracking is generated through relational encounters across human and nonhuman lifeworld, and enacts different ways of visualizing, representing and relating to nonhumans. Trac(k)ing thus calls for an ontological politics: a diplomacy between practices, practitioners and nonhumans that oppose epistemological and ontological reductionism. Drawing on ethnographic data, the article advances trac(k)ing as a method that unfolds human–nonhuman relations across networks, scales, and temporalities, and generates knowledge through three interrelated dimensions: reading landscapes, animating territories, and metamorphosis.