Interspecies Relations and Agrarian Worlds

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed burgeoning interest in interspecies relations and multispecies ethnography. This review explores what such perspectives bring to long-standing anthropological attention to agrarian worlds. Considering why so much recent scholarship only minimally engages with longer disciplinary traditions found within ecological and environmental anthropology and ethnobotany, the review examines continuities and discontinuities across these different modes of attending to interspecies relationships. From here, it explores how contemporary scholarship renews anthropological attention to questions of domestication, relatedness, agency, and personhood and how it charts new ground by engaging theories of biopolitics, biocapital, biosemiotics, and plant ontologies. While noting that recent work has distinctive theoretical preoccupations, the review concludes by suggesting that fruitful possibilities lie in working with, and across, established and emergent anthropologies of the agrarian.