The discussion of resistance, representation, and voices echoed in my mind today as I began to read Donna Haraway (2008)'s When Species Meet and the articles included in the 2010 special issue in Cultural Anthropology (Volume 25, Issue 4) on multispecies ethnography. Both of these texts consider the implications of moving non-humans from the margins of inquiry (as landscape, food, symbols, etc.) to the foreground as agents that live (and not merely exist - pace Giorgio Agamben [1998]'s distinction between zoe or "bare life" [that which is killable] and bios or biographical and political life) alongside and "become with" (Haraway 2008:244) humans. Particularly relevant for our discussion is the article in the Cultural Anthropology collection by S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich (2010:553) that grapples with the question, "How can or should or do anthropologists speak with and for nonhuman others?" They suggest that rather than simply ask, "Can the non-human speak?" (pace Spivak 1988), there needs to be a reflexive engagement with how boundaries between species are increasingly blurred and entangled (for example, in transgenic organisms such as OncoMouse, a mouse whose genome has been modified to include human breast cancer genes [Haraway 1997]) in a way that avoids the reification of human exceptionalism and anthropomorphism (554-556).
This question is also dealt with in debates in science studies about the agency (despite a lack of intentionality) of non-humans upon the practices of humans (particularly as developed in actor-network theory and its critiques - for example, Bruno Latour [1994]'s "On Technical Mediation," Michel Callon [1986]'s "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay," John Law [1986]'s "On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India," and Andrew Pickering [1993]'s "The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science").
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