Between humans and non-human animals: anthropological research into ontologies and (inter) relationality

It is widely acknowledged that in recent decades, follwing the confluence of new anthropological ways of doing and thinking (embodied, for example, in what is known as the "animal turn" and the "ontological turn" of Social Science and Humanities, though also in both humanist and post-humanist research), an innovative academic interest in animals’ lives is emerging.

Out of a kind of theoretical intersectionality, multiple approaches are emerging, such as “animal studies”, “human-animal studies”, "anthrozoology", "zooanthropology” and "multi-specific ethnographies". At present, there is growing interest in Anthropology in the study of the relations between humans and non-human animals, and this is reflected in an exponential rise in the number of books and articles dealing with animals’ status and roles, human conceptions of animality and their spatial and temporal dynamics, etc.

In this session, female Americanist and Africanist anthropologists will be discussing the way in which animals form part of the lives of humans; the way in which humans form part of the lives of animals; how humans and non-human animals are linked in different, increasingly fragile environments, bearing in mind specific social and political dynamics; and the way in which ethnographies based on the relations between humans and non-human animals perceive ontological pluralism and help to destabilise the naturalist ontologies that dominate the thinking that we know as "Euroamerican" or "Western".