Introduction: Ethnic Formation with Other-Than-Human Beings

Abstract

Abstract:Literature on ethnicity in Africa meets literature on multispecies ethnography to their mutual benefit. Multispecies ethnography considers people together with other-than-human beings, insisting the figure of the human is an interspecific one. We explore the ways in which multispecies ethnography needs history as part of a story about power and politics. But, the burden of the essay argues that historians of ethnicity need multispecies ethnographers’ embrace of a broader canvas of life, in motion at many scales. Historians of ethnicity need a greater awareness of change and continuity in the presence of other-than-human life forms, over time. Those same historians also might adopt the readiness of multispecies ethnographers to recognize other than the descent metaphor at the heart of thinking and making groups.

Visiting Hours: Spacetimes of Human–Animal Interaction in South African Elder Care

“…Their communities’ totems, economies, and materia medica all derive from these environs, where a relational constitution of human and nonhuman beings has been central to local vernacular ecologies and cosmologies. These communities often mobilized animals and nonhuman beings during periods of change and duress as part of a “multidirectional groupwork of public healing” (Schoenbrun and Johnson 2018: 324)—known regionally as ngoma —involving animal signs, substances, or sacrifices to aid life course transitions of death, reproduction, and initiation (gantsho 2018; Janzen 1992; Thornton 2017). As communicative and substantive beings, animals connect past and contemporary humans and nonhumans in and as totemic, environmental, and evolutionary relations.…”

Bodyland

“…It has no equivalent among common land claims in postwar Angola—including affirmations of land connection via ancestors, spirits, law, 10 ethnogenesis, independence, or nationalism (as in the much‐vaunted angolanidade ). Moreover, bodyland exceeds the capacious descent metaphor that is at the heart of knowing and constituting human‐land groups (Schoenbrun and Johnson 2018, 309; on Angola, see Soares de Oliveira 2016, 71). Bodyland relates to the corporealization of a situated human and nonhuman fusion born of, propelled by, and subjected to the honeybees.…”

“…If we accept, as Cusseque residents avow, that “human nature is an interspecies relationship” (Tsing 2012, 144), then we should also consider that the course of such relationships across time and place forms the human (Schoenbrun and Johnson 2018, 316–17). What kinds of human forms flourish or fail in this process—and why?…”

“…The village's history is a means to arrive at its present. In Cusseque, as in any human society, social power, human politics, and bodily formation are rooted in past events that include other‐than‐human agents and entities (Schoenbrun and Johnson 2018; Tsing 2013, 33). Therefore, I start by historically contextualizing the rise of Cusseque and the nonhuman and human conditions that propelled the settlers to turn to the honeybees for living in that place.…”