2. EARTH SWIMMERS / ON CAPTURE:

In this chapter I have explored what it might be like to be a Yorkshire molecatcher, while at the same time treating Nigel as an alien anthropologist whose own research departs from a similarly ‘anthropological’ line of questioning: What could it possibly be like to be a mole? As a researcher who takes the beliefs and practices of his field informants seriously, Nigel conducts his mole-anthropology – to the best of his ability – from the perspective of the mole. This means assuming there is something it is like to be a mole (Nagel 1974), which in turn means finding appropriate methods, tools and practices for capturing this world; and these are, as I’ve shown, in many ways analogous to the mole’s own methods, tools and practices for capturing worms. I want to end by exploring some of the broader implications of ‘borrowing’ from the field in this way. 

Hunters in the UK often speak of the animals they track as their teachers, particularly when it comes to the arts of capture and escape, and many contemporary trap designs can be traced to the cunning entrapments of animals, insects and plants. ‘Tracking comes down to borrowing … the body of another animal which is a perspective shaping the world’, explains Morizot (2017: 112), while Nichols instructs his reader to ‘attend every lesson that the mole provides for you’, adding that ‘[i]f you can identify with this amazing subterranean world as a mole, then your success in their control will greatly improve’ (2017: 127/81, my emphasis). This respect for nonhuman teachers (albeit born of competition) is held by all my hunting informants, whose pleasure in their work seems intimately connected with the fact that they learn and become something new each day that they spend outside tracking animals. This creative borrowing takes place in both directions: for instance another hunter described a series of encounters with a ‘clever’ rat in his garden, who was learning from each of the traps he invented to catch it. Nichols similarly notes how ‘naive’ young moles make many mistakes, but those who survive to feel the first touch of frost ‘should have established enough knowledge to join the ranks of all the others that continue to manipulate man’s dominance of the land’ (2017: 98). Hunters learn from animals just as animals learn from each other and also from us, and animals are understood to learn and comprehend the world in equivalent or even superior ways to human beings. This kind of knowledge can’t be taught by other humans, instead it is borrowed through intimate and often challenging encounters between species in a way that aligns with the perspectivist paradigm of exchange and transformation: ‘The exchange model of action supposes that the subject’s “other” is another subject (not an object)’, writes Viveiros, ‘and subjectification is, of course, what perspectivism is all about’ (2004: 478). 

This exchange model extends to the conceptual work of anthropology – it is common practice to borrow concepts from ethnographic fieldwork and employ them in analysis and, generally speaking, this is how anthropological knowledge is made (see Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017). However, as Calzadilla and Marcus point out, formal and methodological borrowing has not been exploited to nearly the same degree. Despite anthropology losing its firm scientific ground in the 1980s, exploring the aesthetics of inquiry ‘would have required styles of thinking, rhetoric, and practice—keyed to the notion of experimentation––that proved unacceptable to the boundary keeping institutional and professional rules of order in the academy’ (2006: 96). As the current volume makes particularly clear, a recent turn towards multispecies anthropology demands a creative rethinking of the methods and tools we employ as ethnographers, and I hope that the examples of tracking, probing and reverse-capture offered here help to demonstrate both the creative potential and the theoretical productivity of borrowing these methods and tools from the field. By mimicking and practising the arts of attention that Nigel employs in his everyday work, an entirely new level of understanding opened up to me.

As Anna Tsing proposes, ‘collaborative foraging’ is ‘a model for knowledge-making, as well as an object of ethnographic inquiry … the style is also an argument, and much of the theory work emerges from the details’ (2017: np). Indeed, a particular affordance of tracking as a model for artistic multispecies research lies in the fact that animals themselves do not subscribe to human boundaries. In fact, they often exploit our human infrastructures (as in the example of the mole, for whom the barbed-wire fence becomes a dripline luring worms). Following their tracks therefore inevitably leads one to trespass (Tsing 2015: 137), and this trespass extends to a productive undermining not only of boundaries in the land, but also of the boundaries defining species difference as well as the disciplinary lines dividing theory and practice, anthropology and art. 

Here the behaviour of the animal tracker – abruptly halted by the apparent absence of tracks before them – is instructive. When a trail appears to end (that is, when legible traces of animal sign disappear, as they do when substrate suddenly changes, for instance from earth to rock, or when the weather obliterates an exposed section of tracks), a tracker does not give up. Instead, the work of ‘speculative’ tracking begins. This might involve ‘splattering’ one’s vision to scan for track-patterns in the distance, or ‘working the wheel’ by walking a circular path around the last good track to uncover an unexpected change in direction. It might involve attending to different sensory registers or, as a last resort, employing intuitive guesswork to predict what direction the animal went, based on the reasonable assumption that they must have gone somewhere, before acting accordingly and catching up with them some way further down the trail. My informants utilised this speculative approach when tracking and also when setting their traps, and it is this spirited approach to blindness (both one’s own and that of others) which, perhaps more than anything else, inspires self-transformation and potentialises the art of engaging invisible worlds (Suhrand Willerslev 2012, Morizot 2021). Morten Pedersen suggests that perspectivist anthropology should be interpreted as a version of Husserl’s method, which seeks to reveal and transform its own ‘natural attitude’ (or blind spots) through engagement with different points of view (in Šatkauskas 2022: 308). As Jacob Von Uexküll puts it, the absurdity of our own way of seeing is only revealed when the same objects are comprehended from other perspectives (2010: 42). In response, I offer Nigel’s anthropology of other animals as the fulfilment of a multispecies version of reverse anthropology, which (following Viveiros de Castro) aims to decolonise anthropology by taking its interlocutors seriously— ‘seriously enough, that is, to allow their manners of living to transform our manners of doing anthropology’ (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: 26). As a teacher of this multispecies method, Nigel offered me access to the invisible world of the mole, but, not only this, his mole anthropology led me to engage with anthropological theory in a practical way which in turn pushed my thought in new directions, offering tools and techniques for decentring myself while foregrounding the perception, agency and subjectivity of nonhuman others. This also led to new and surprising kinds of collaboration and new forms of aesthetic production, of which Earth Swimmers is one example. (6)

Nigel chose to be recognised as my collaborator in the credits of Earth Swimmers, but I followed his lead by excluding all footage in which he could be visually identified in the final edit. Nor are there any moles in our film – on Nigel’s suggestion, both he and the mole remain anonymous and mysterious, escaping the viewer’s objectifying gaze. Instead, Earth Swimmers attempts to ‘personify’ Nigel and the mole by capturing their mutual perspectives. According to Viveiros’ perspectivist maxim, ‘To know is to personify, to take on the point of view of that which must be known’ (2004: 468). Our visual edit attempts this by using point-of-view footage to grasp the way that Nigel’s hands and his tools interrogate the world of the mole. When his probe breaks the ground and Nigel digs in, the viewer ‘drops’ into a world of underground darkness, and sound takes over from sight. We will never know what the world sounds like to the mole, as Nigel and my other tracking friends acknowledge. Instead, this rendering of the mole’s vibratory umwelt is my own act of creative borrowing – an informed but imaginary leap into the mole’s perspective.

In Earth Swimmers, sound takes over when visual access breaks down, emplacing the viewer/listener within the mole’s own dark and wormy labyrinth. The film participates in relational chains that grow through echoic and masticatory listening; perspectives articulate across different scales which recursively encompass one another. Worms eating earth – the mole eating worms – Nigel feel-hearing with his probe for the mole – the montage of our film which captures Nigel’s world as a subject for the viewer’s consumption. Cut finally to the earth again, the ground which will in time reclaim each of these bodies, including the harddrive that hosts our film. This figure-ground reversal is not lost on my hunting collaborators, all of whom take a cyclical view of creation and decomposition: as mole catcher Jeff Nichols told me, ‘When it’s my turn to lay down, I’ll do it in the ground with the mole, with my friend’. A decentring of the human ‘I’ takes place through this cycle of predatory encompassments, or perhaps better, expersonations (Wagner, 2012): ‘the subject focused on by events is not the centre around which its own world turns’ (Stolze Lima, 1999: 403).