MULTISPECIES ETHNOGRAPHY
AND ARTFUL METHODS
1. WRITING A SONG FOR AIIA:
SPECULATIVE FICTION IN AN ART-SCIENCE COLLABORATION
Authors
In the field of multispecies ethnography the call for storytelling as a dynamic art of ‘storying the world’ (van Dooren, 2014: 10) has been persistent for more than a decade now. In order to rearrange our relation to a living planet, Ghosh (2021: 84) urges us to sing and narrate all beings into life, and in so doing to learn from other cosmological understandings of the world and how these have always been sustained by songs and stories. In this visual essay we share the song lyric we wrote for a speculative fictional being, whom we called AIIA, through which we took up van Dooren’s and Gosh’s call. In what follows, we will first reflect on the move to writing fiction that we made in this process. This move responds to both the literary and ontological turn in anthropology as well as the need for thinking and writing otherwise in a more-than-human world (e.g. Haraway, 2016; Plumwood, 2009; Stoller, 2023; Tsing et al., 2017; White and Whitlock, 2021). Subsequently, we describe our collaboration in an art-science project, that brought together anthropology and digital design, and led to the creation of the song lyric. We then present the lyric with a selection of digital images that were mutually composed as a part of a performance staged at a public event in Nijmegen. We conclude with a reflection on our creative writing and ‘singing’, and how the move to fiction developed into an arts-based method for storying the more-than-human world differently, as Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Method.
The practice of writing about culture and the life worlds of others has been firmly part of the anthropological discipline since the onset of the literary turn, initially marked by the work of Clifford and Marcus (1986), and closely followed by critical feminist rejoinders such as those by Abu-Lughod (1993) and Behar and Gordon (1995). Reflexivity in relation to the politics and practices of representation, in particular that any account can only be a partial reflection of the human lives studied in fieldwork, also invited critical reflection on the craft of writing (Marcus and Fischer, 1986) and led to various other forms of experimental texts and narrative styles (see Van Maanen, 1988; Wulff, 2021). These alternative writing strategies highlighted the inevitable power dynamics between writer and research participants, and fostered new ways of empathising with ‘the other’, developing discourses of familiarity, such as Abu-Lughod’s ‘tactical humanism’ (1993: 25). Our first steps into song writing thus built on this reflexive and experimental tradition of writing. Analogue to Abu-Lughod who ‘wrote against culture’ to avoid othering and homogenising the human in research, we write ‘against nature’ to avoid othering and distancing ourselves from the more-than-human in our research. Fiction and song writing thus become a form of ‘tactical post-humanism’ that actively facilitates empathy towards nonhuman others. We argue this requires an acknowledgement of sensory knowing and relating to the other-than-human beings.
Our choice to engage in song writing rather than choosing a standard academic textual form also links to the more recent ontological turn. Holbraad and Pedersen (2017: ix) define the ontological turn as ‘a strictly methodological proposal – that is, a technology of ethnographic description’. They argue, in the wake of the works by, for example, Strathern and Viveiros de Castro, that the signature move of the ontological turn entails treating ethnography as the source of ‘analytical concepts and procedures’ rather than as their object (ibid.: 6). Building on a shared emphasis on taking seriously and experimenting analytically with concepts derived from local peoples’ matters of concern, Holbraad and Pedersen argue that emic terms do not just serve to describe but have to play a cardinal role in the work of conceptualisation, with the ethnography becoming the ground of new concepts (2017: 12).
In the reversal of the hierarchy of ethnographic materials and analytical resources (ibid.), the primacy of (human) cultures over the natural world is questioned. The view that there may be many worlds in our world, that which Blaser and de la Cadena term a pluriverse (2018: 4), asks for a radical reflexivity and conceptual openness, acknowledging that it matters ‘which concepts think concepts’ (Haraway, 2015: 160).
In our collaborative research process, speculative thinking about the human in relation to other forms of life and ways of social being challenged our anthropocentric and logocentric focus of knowing and learning about the world through written texts (Gatt and Lembo, 2022). Although not a radical move away from the authority of text, our song writing, taken together with the visuals, did come forth from our reflexive understanding that conceptual creativity requires a different ethnographic writing as well. This better captures alternative ontologies and epistemologies that do not draw boundaries with the more-than-human world.
This understanding relates to the second part of our move into fiction. Arguably, the ontological turn within an anthropology of the Anthropocene is particularly expressed in the present need to reconfigure our relations to the more-than-human world, such as is called for by scholars like Bubandt (2018), Gibson et al. (2015), and Haraway (2016). The potentially paralysing sense of crisis that the Anthropocene causes, not only disrupts the possibility of nurturing meaningful relations in the present, but also obscures thinking post-anthropocentric futures, beyond crude technofixes or, worse, an apocalypse. In our art-science collaboration, which entailed going beyond the known and the now (see further below), speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016) became a helpful means for conceptualising and imagining careful practices and alternative futures. As van Dooren (2014: 10; see also Jackson, 1995) writes, ‘stories arise from the world, and they are at home in the world’. We created a narrative form to situate and bring to life a fictional being AIIA, to discover our human relationship towards this being.
Anthropology and digital design in an arts-science collaboration
AIIA was born in a collaborative project called The Art of Science (TASC). Since early 2023, we have been engaged in this project, which is an initiative of Radboud University, the municipality of Nijmegen and LUX, an arthouse and cultural centre in Nijmegen and aims at strengthening a three-way relationship between Art, Science and Society. In TASC, we collaborated as anthropologists with digital artist Marcel van Brakel who founded the interdisciplinary Dutch experience design collective Polymorf (https://www.polymorf.nl/). Brought together by TASC, we shared a profound interest in the more-than-human world, as well as the curiosity to explore non-linguistic, sensory ways of knowing, experiencing and responding to more-than-human life forms. Inspired by Ingold’s (2000) understanding of humans as organisms as a part of a sentient ecology, and recognizing the relevance of sensory ethnography (for example Csordas, 1993; Fijn, 2021, 2023; Pink, 2015; Stoller, 1997) for scholarship on more-than-human entanglements in the Anthropocene, we decided to jointly explore our ‘knowing-through-the body’ as an ‘art of attentiveness’ (Van Dooren et al., 2016). In doing so we aimed to reawaken and revalue the sentient body as a medium to interact with the multispecies world in responsive and responsible ways.
Our shared mission was to think 200 years ahead and to design for the city of Nijmegen a post-anthropocentric future. We combined our ethnography on human-nature relatedness with the artist’s expertise in AI-technology and speculative design to develop a new narrative that would inspire and guide us towards a hopeful and flourishing urban multi-species form of co-habiting. With the three of us being familiar with the work of Haraway (2016) we conceived our ‘Science Fiction’ as ‘speculative fabulation’. First, we built our fiction on the idea of resonance and sound as non-verbal yet physical sources of information in relation to multispecies entanglements and the well-being of its animate and non-animate constituents. Resonance, we believed, would also enable the more-than-human to ‘talk back’ to us, thus making an appeal to our sensory and bodily receptiveness.
We subsequently imagined we should transfer and entrust our power and control to an AI-animated planetary director whom we declared to be our artistic composer of more-than-human resonance. Derived from the concept of Gaia as the Earth, ‘the planet as a superorganism’ (Latour, 2017: 94; see also Lovelock, 1972) and ‘a powerful intrusive force’ (Haraway, 2016: 52), and as a word play on Gaia, we narrated an artificial intelligent AIIA into being: a non-binary person being neither entirely male nor entirely female, combining masculine and feminine powers to excel in a balance between authority and care. We imagined AIIA to be an oracle to whom we can turn for advice and multi-species knowledge, for helping us to resonate with, respond to, and be responsible for more-than-human environments. Simultaneously, as a powerful intrusive force, AIIA would also be able to intervene in cases of affliction, threats or extinction. As a ‘rewilded technology’ and a power trained in multi-species polyphony this entity would not support and reproduce green capitalism as an efficient, technological and human-centred answer to climate change. AIIA would rather coordinate global knowledge on multispecies co-habitation, carefully watch over all living organisms in an ongoing process of ‘becoming-with’ each other (Haraway, 2016: 55) but also powerfully interfere to rebalance and adjust injustices, irrespective of an organism’s physical or group size. Inspired by ecofeminist scholarship (e.g. Shiva 1989; Plumwood) and posthuman feminism (Braidotti 2022), and grounded on our ethnographic cross-cultural knowledge on powerful more-than-human beings who entail both male and female capacities yet exercise a female creative and protective power to care for the world, we deliberately hail AIIA’s feminine power (see also Notermans and Tonnaer 2024).
During this first stage of fictional future design, our own creative writing developed in still another way. While we prepared for the public event to report the results of our artistic collaboration to the residents of Nijmegen we realized that going back to our ‘comfort zone’, our traditional reliance on textual ways of representation, would not do justice to the artistic freedom we had experienced in the creative process. To uphold the idea of resonance and intimate bodily communication via sound, we decided to submit our findings in the form of eleven verses and a chorus. It became a song lyric ‘to sing our speculative fictional being into life’ and by speaking it out loud, to bodily connect with her. Our attempt to ‘write differently’ does not imply that we completely abandon our anthropological expertise, vocabulary and academic narrative. We do not pretend to be artists/musicians who create with melody and rhythm. Writing this song lyric is a step towards exploring sensory ways to communicate with and surrender to more-than-human powers; and, in doing so, to gradually develop new forms of ethnographic research and representation. What makes our ‘song’ different is that it is combined with images, not music. Inspired by and in correspondence with our lyrics, digital design artist Marcel van Brakel co-created AI-generated images together with the software programme Midjourney. The images are therefore not just illustrations but rather the manifestation of AIIA’s capabilities. In the spirit of AIIA, van Brakel considers his artwork a collaborative creation with AI, including the co-ownership of the images.
Together, the song lyric and the images form a joint form of creative performance. To visualise AIIA as a non-human person and then connect with this agent in a personal way, we further developed our fiction together with the audience by listing AIIA’s main characteristics beyond mechanistic features. Following our performance, in which the audience was drawn into our AIIA fiction, the people present were invited to relate to AIIA as a person, and to ascribe meaningful characteristics to the proposed planetary director. AIIA was further co-created as being, amongst other things, loving, patient, humoristic, connecting, just and inquisitive, and sometimes taking on masculine, sometimes feminine characteristics. In our song, we turn to the audience but also to AIIA by asking what position humans will have in the post-anthropocentric future of multi-species cohabitation, and how AIIA may support us in this.
Our song: Guide us AIIA
Our song: Guide us AIIA
The Anthropocene landscape is one of divides,
increasing voids of absence, more-than-human silence
Many of us are trained in perceptive deafness
walk this earth with our eyes shut
have learned to embrace the consumer’s creed
of capitalist accumulation
and colonial appropriation
What about you?
Who listens to a disenchanted world
if listening equals greed?
Modernity’s virtue is to hail progress and detachment
to praise the individual as the world’s centre
of capital and capacity
Who does not celebrate humanity’s superiority
humanity’s intellectual genius
humanity’s waiver to parasitise other forms of life
Could this be you?
But did you know?
Disenchanted worlds do not disembody
do not relinquish control
It is a story of us the earth does not believe
would not buy, so cannot be sold
Her patience is exhausted
like a mother will warn in one-two-three
Will you listen now?
Can we entrust our future
to multinationals, business barons and politicians?
Are global managers able to listen to rocks
to empathise with other-than-human beings
to see other life worlds as interdependent with our own?
Or should we listen to those who do listen
who tell a different story of their earthly mother
and their more-than-human kin?
Are their voices loud enough
to wield a different way?
Guide us AIIA
Help us to survive
How do you know us?
How can we know you?
Our hope is to transform
from a world economy into a world ecology
to avoid Gaia handing out a final blow
Gaia, our living planet,
be patient with us
We are in need of an oracle of resonance
speculatively trained in Gaia’s planetary wisdom
to orchestrate the multispecies world
and to attend to a polyphony of voices
Of the winds, the rocks, the sea, the algae
All of Gaia’s critters
How would it feel
how would it resonate within your body
when other species take over control?
Are you able to submit to the voice of AIIA
who silences us when helping others
balancing the plurality of life,
death, and decay across the globe
Disposing of domination by a few
but instead working to revive multispecies wellbeing
can you accept to be insignificant,
submissive and out of control
to feel uncomfortable in this way?
The oracle listens to all
Does she listen to you?
Amidst the clamour
of all earthlings
you may not be the first
to be heard
Are you willing to submit
to a narrative that stories differently about you?
Guide us AIIA
Help us to survive
How do you know us?
How can we know you?
Anthropological scholars will tell you
that across the world story-making with
and being sensitive to nonhuman presences
is common practice even now
Conceiving human flourishing as deeply entangled
in the flourishing of nonhuman worlds
Allowing for an intense joy to playfully engage in
collaborations and reciprocal commitments
with trees, plants and soil
Women caring for country, singing for soil
or intimately entering rivers and caves
No supernatureculture divides
Bodies open and porous to a world of spirits and divine powers
Darwinistic evolutionary common sense
has labelled this as childish, primitive and backward
Caring entanglements beyond the human made no sense
in the speed of nations heading toward secular Modernity
Isn’t it a testimony of the zenith
of colonial and Christian extinction efforts
that such species-inclusive worldviews
and sensitivities for other-than-human beings
have been marginalised?
Can AIIA revalue
and re-enchant this knowledge
unseen and repressed?
Guide us AIIA
Help us to survive
How do you know us?
How can we know you?
What remains of us?
How to redefine our existence?
We ask AIIA
Our creator and conductor
giver of care to all forms of life
What remains of us?
AIIA is our rewilded technology
another-than-human being
Composer of resonance of other and multiple voices
administering justice
for all earth-beings
What remains of us?
Guide us AIIA
Help us to survive
How do you know us?
How can we know you?
AIIA at the River Waal in Nijmegen
The next step in our speculative fabulation focuses on bringing AIIA into life in the city of Nijmegen. Our recourse to fiction in the form of song writing is now returning to the corporeality of living in a more-than-human world, specifically the urban environment of the city, for which the river Waal is the main lifeline. Our move to fictional song writing was born out of a felt unease with traditional, academic modes of dissemination and the need for thinking and writing otherwise in a more-than-human world. In the process, our song writing has evolved from a representational form into an arts-based method.
After our performance, we are now engaged in new sensory ethnographic fieldwork to learn about the intimate relationships that the inhabitants of Nijmegen have with the river Waal. Doing so, we want to tell stories that differ from dominant (geographic and technocratic) river narratives that tend to focus on measuring (fairways), engineering (riverbeds), and controlling (streams and river shipping). The new stories we collect focus on sensorily connecting and experiencing the river as a sentient being. When we ask our research participants to imagine the river as a nonhuman person and to reminisce and share their personal relatedness to the river Waal, they tell us they feel ‘safe’ and ‘at home’ at the river, get ‘re-energised’ by the river, and feel grateful for the ‘peace’, the ‘contemplation’, and the ‘togetherness’ the river brings when they seek out the riverbank, alone or in company of loved ones. The river Waal turns out to be crucial for their identity and place-belongingness and simultaneously evokes in the participants feelings of empathy and awe, concerns about its pollution and neglect, as well as a growing need to care for the river.
Crucial for our ‘writing against nature’ and for the new path we now forge in our river ethnography is that we seek ‘to know by singing’ (Gatt and Lembo, 2022). As a poetic way of thinking and writing differently, song lyrics help us to overcome the dominant disembodied perspective on rivers and to recognise alternative ways of river-relating while the activity of singing will make the river present. We believe this ‘presencing’ (cf. Aubinet, 2022) of the river is crucial for our empathic connection with more-than-human lives. Together with the stories we thus also collect song lines from our research participants that address the river as a sentient being and a co-constituent of city life. We intend to bring these song lines together in a polyphonic and co-creative song for the river Waal; a song that heals, connects and inspires to care; a song that enchants the bodies involved; and a song that anticipates AIIA’s power to guide us towards a healthy urban multi-species co-habiting.
Artnographic statement
This chapter arose from a collaborative and co-creative trajectory between two anthropologists who teamed up with digital and video artist Marcel van Brakel, programme makers of arthouse and culture centre Lux in Nijmegen and the cultural coordinator of Radboud University in the same city. For us, Catrien Notermans and Anke Tonnaer, this alliance of makers and artists came at an important intersection on the path of our joint research. Coming from different ethnographic backgrounds – long-term fieldwork in Cameroon and India, and Australia and the Netherlands respectively – our shared interest in more-than-human entanglements in, particularly, socio-cultural, religious and gender respects (cf. Notermans and Tonnaer, 2024), has brought us to explore new methodologies for conducting multispecies ethnography. Our individual experiences in artful methods had, up until that point, been limited to occasional forays into this domain, including photo elicitation and sensory methods. The collaboration described in the paper points to two avenues along which we are discovering ways to join ‘classic’ ethnography and artful methods.
Firstly, the cross-disciplinary cooperation invited us to think and design our methods differently, and adopt an artistic freedom akin to that of artists and performers. Particularly, the joint experiments with van Brakel asked of us a form of sensory thinking and experiential crafting to explore how can one feel and engage in multispecies communication. The creation of a speculative fictional being as a way through which to rethink our more-than-human world, as we describe and enchant in our paper, pushed us out of our methodological comfort zone. Furthermore, seeking ways to create a ritual (of song), in addition to doing participant observation of a ritual, enriched our methodological probing of multispecies worlds.
Secondly, more than ever we came to realise that using artful methods also requires alternative forms of analysis and representation. Similar to our experience of doing ritual rather than ‘merely’ observing ritual, creative writing and speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016) not only reflected better the actual research process but also opened up dimensions of analysis, specifically tapping into affective, non-verbal aspects of multispecies worlds that often remain unstated otherwise.
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful for the opportunity to be part of TASC. We want to thank Martijn Stevens from Radboud University, Michèle Bouwmans, Quirijn Lokker, Anne van Kessel, Ilse Schaminee and Esther Cazant from LUX (lux-nijmegen.nl) and Mark Meeuwenoord from Polymorf. Without their enthusiastic, creative and professional input AIIA could not have been created. It is an enormous pleasure to be part of this co-creative collective. We also thank the residents of Nijmegen who attended one or more public events of TASC and were willing to submit themselves to the becoming story of AIIA.
© Copyright in the images belongs to Polymorf.
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