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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Ethnography of entanglements: Reflections from more-than-human ways of knowing

presenters

    Mathew A Varghese

    Nationality: India

    Residence: India

    Presence:Online

Keywords:

Conflict, Entanglements, Multispecies, Transgression, Unintended

Abstract:

The paper stretches the idea of values into understandings from the more than human entanglements of contemporary times. It builds on the entwinements and entanglements from particular field contexts in south west of India but moves to comparative cases. The presentations of human/ non-human relationships as conflictual and their hyperreal versions in media enter into dialogues with situations elsewhere. The multispecies entanglements that get overlooked in these instances present ethnographic possibilities to re-value and reflect reconfiguring relationships and nature of spaces studies. The entanglements that are overlooked and that which emerges could be heterogenous. But the elephants entering into conflict with humans, dealing with invasives or viruses that invoke immunological response, are all variants of extreme anthropocentrism. They miss out the more complex engulfment of microorganisms, co-evolutions with other species, or mutual implications and invadability. The paper stresses the need of ethnography to move out of dominant designs, disconnected identities, or boundaries to what is out of design, unintended and transgressive. Thereby it explores the possibilities of a more political, less anthropocentric, and rhizomatic networked perspectives.