Sound and More-than-Human Sociality in Catherine Clover’s Oh! Ah ah pree trra trra

This article transposes questions about socially engaged sound practices into a more-than-human register, turning an ear to the sounds of interspecies encounters. It takes its impetus from a workshop aimed at forming a ‘cross-species choir’ by the artist Catherine Clover, in which participants tried to sing like, with and to birds in a London woodland. I describe how Clover’s speculative choir was informed by theoretical models drawn both from sound studies and from environmental humanities, as well as a down-to-earth, humorous sensitivity towards the limitations and absurdities of artistic practice. Where much theory associated with sound art and experimental music sees sound as what Ochoa Gautier has critiqued as an ontological suture for repairing the fractured relationship between humans and nature, Clover’s practice offers a more ambivalent and, I argue, therefore more generative means of conceptualising the role of sound within more-than-human social worlds. In particular, it uses sound to draw attention to the apprehension of humans by other creatures and to various dynamics of evasion, non-encounter and undecidability in our relationships with the more-than-human world. By amplifying this alternative way of understanding sound and listening, this article seeks to recast projects of social engagement through sound in more speculative and expansive terms.

Multispecies encounters in events.

Multispecies events, like Landsmót, the National Championships of the Icelandic horse, pose interesting practical and logistical challenges for event managers who must ensure that safety and nonhuman animal welfare are prioritized alongside other aspects of event design and management. This chapter uses Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical concepts of 'front stage', 'backstage' and 'offstage' to consider the types of interspecies encounters that can occur in different contexts around an event site. Drawing on data from ethnographic observations and interviews with horse breeders and event staff, the chapter discusses some of the issues that can arise in trying to manage those interactions in ways that recognize the different needs of human and nonhuman participants, whilst still delivering a successful and entertaining event.

Animals “Я” Us: Egomorphism in/for Science and Environmental Education

We argue for the notion of egomorphism as an inexorable discursive element in/for children’s interspecies encounters mediated by nature interpreters. We do so by examining the discourses of a public environmental educator in Canada and a dolphin trainer in a marine park in Portugal while mediating such pedagogical experiences. Our analytical work contributes to expanding the understanding of how human–nonhuman interactions can create opportunities in science and environmental education to disrupt the notion that humans are superior and therefore removed from other animals.

Deliberating Animals

In the final chapter, the author discusses how deliberation between human and non-human animals already takes place and how it can be improved, using a systemic perspective on deliberative democracy. The goal of this chapter is to bridge the distance between existing human/non-human animal dialogues at a micro-level, and human political systems. The author first discusses examples of dialogues between human and non-human animals in the animal studies literature. While these examples do justice to individual non-human animal agency, they do not challenge power relations and anthropocentrism at a macro-level. The second section of this chapter therefore turns the focus to deliberative theory. The author analyzes the relation between democratic inclusion and different forms of speech, focusing on non-human animal languages and the embodied and habitual character of political communication in order to incorporate non-human animal voices. In the third section, the author argues for taking into account the temporal, spatial, material, and relational dimensions of the interaction. Section four moves to translate these insights into existing democratic mechanisms by investigating the relevance of the systemic turn in deliberative democracy for incorporating non-human animal agency and interspecies encounters in existing democratic structures.

Animal Ethos

What are the moral challenges and consequences of animal research in academic laboratory settings? Animal Ethos considers how the inescapable needs of lab research necessitate interspecies encounters that, in turn, engender unexpected moral responses among a range of associated personnel. Whereas much has been written about the codified, bioethical rules and regulations that inform proper lab behavior and decorum, Animal Ethos, as an in-depth, ethnographic project, probes the equally rich—yet poorly understood—realm of ordinary or everyday morality, where serendipitous, creative, and unorthodox thought and action evidence concerted efforts to transform animal laboratories into moral, scientific worlds. The work is grounded in efforts to integrate theory within medical anthropology (and, more particularly, on suffering and moral worth), animal studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Contrary to established scholarship that focuses exclusively on single professions (such as the researcher or technician), Animal Ethos tracks across the spectrum of the lab labor hierarchy by considering the experiences of researchers, animal technicians, and lab veterinarians. In turn, it offers comparative insights on animal activists. When taken together, this range of parties illuminates the moral complexities of experimental lab research. The affective qualities of interspecies intimacy, animal death, and species preference are of special analytical concern, as reflected in the themes of intimacy, sacrifice, and exceptionalism that anchor this work.

Introduction

The moral entanglements of human-animal relations have complex histories, as evidenced in anthropology’s longstanding interest in the relevance of interspecies encounters in shaping social worlds. This chapter begins with a history of my ethnographic project. I then discuss the long-term anthropological engagement with moral systems and the disciplinary relevance of the term ethos, where quotidian thought and action are central anthropological concerns. Ethos offers a potent approach to the study of science, where regulatory ethical frameworks overshadow the everyday and ordinary. I clarify the book’s terminology, with an important distinction between ethics (codified bioethical principles) and the unscripted, personal moral responses that animals inspire in the humans who work with them. Different animals inspire different moral responses; mammalian species are especially affectively potent, and certain kinds of animals (rats, dogs, monkeys) enable me to track different sorts of moral responses among lab personnel. As a result, certain kinds of animals will figure as a means to foreground particular themes and sentiments. I situate this work within the context of animal studies and science and technology studies, and I track the history of animal welfare and activism, especially in the United States and United Kingdom. The chapter concludes with an overview of my study. I also explain the relevance of the book’s three overarching sections, “Intimacy,” “Sacrifice,” and “Exceptionalism.”

Posthumanism, Animism, and Sérgio Medeiros's Pluriverse Poetics

The works of Sérgio Medeiros are populated by a multitude of beings of diverse and often shifting orders and species. Drawing upon intersecting conceptual orientations of animal and multispecies studies, posthumanism, and ecocriticism, I survey a range of interspecies encounters and worldings in Medeiros’s writing, especially his collection of poems, O choro da aranha, etc. (2013). As Medeiros pointedly draws inspiration from diverse aesthetic and philosophical traditions—from Amerindian cosmogonies and verbal arts to Japanese Zen poetry and various strains of modernist avantgardism—I trace here as a unifying feature his engagement with animist imaginings and a post- or anti-anthropocentric unsettling of human/non-human binaries and boundaries.