Presentation Slides: INTRODUCTION On my first day of fieldwork, I climbed a steep hill where my collaborator, Roger, reported a group of javelinas lived on his property. As I crested the hill, I noticed shapes obscured in the shade of the Ashe juniper trees. Unsure at first, I was met by a musky smell followed…
Tag: multispecies
A Rat’s Journey There and Back Again
In early August of this year, my partner and I took a much needed vacation to South Padre Island. While visiting, we decided to go snorkeling in Laguna Madre, one of only six hypersaline lagoons in the world. We saw many small fish, lots of large black drums, maybe a barracuda, and tons of hermit…
Qualifying Exam Essay: Javelinas in SPAAAACE and Time
I have passed my qualifying exams and so am making my essays available on my blog. The other essays can be found: Attending to Animals in Anthropology and Power and Politics Within and Beyond the Human. Question: How have different disciplines placed javelinas in cultural, ecological, historical, archaeological, and other frameworks within and beyond Texas?…
Qualifying Exam Essay: Power and Politics Within and Beyond the Human
I have passed my qualifying exams and so am making my essays available on my blog. The other essays can be found: Attending to Animals in Anthropology and Javelinas in SPAAAACE and Time. Question: In Society against the State (1989), Pierre Clastres argues that a serious failing of Western philosophy and social theory is an inability to…
Qualifying Exam Essay: Attending to Animals in Anthropology
I have passed my qualifying exams and so am making my essays available on my blog. The other essays can be found: Power and Politics Within and Beyond the Human and Javelinas in SPAAAACE and Time. Question: In a recent essay, Laura Ogden argues “that the biological species is a limited lens for understanding the…
Fieldwork Diary July 8-9, 2021
I am conducting research across Texas on Human and javelina relations. I am interested in how humans and other animals negotiate space at sites of encounter. During this trip out to one of my fieldsites in the Texas Hill Country, I wanted to document the quality of javelina bedding sites (which you can see in…
Qualifying Exams Reading List: Javelinas and Texas through Space and Time
Altrichter, Mariana. “The sustainability of subsistence hunting of peccaries in the Argentine Chaco.” Biological Conservation 126, no. 3 (2005): 351-362. Bement, Leland C. Hunter-gatherer mortuary practices during the Central Texas Archaic. University of Texas Press, 1994. Bleicher, Sonny S., and Michael L. Rosenzweig. “Too much of a good thing? A landscape-of-fear analysis for collared peccaries (Pecari tajacu) reveals…
Qualifying Exams Reading List: Power and Politics Within and Beyond the Human
Adamson, Joni. “Indigenous Literatures, Multinaturalism, and Avatar: The emergence of Indigenous cosmopolitics.” American Literary History 24, no. 1 (2012): 143-162. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998. Appadurai, Arjun. “Putting hierarchy in its place.” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1988): 36-49. Atkinson, Will. Bourdieu and After: A Guide to Relational Phenomenology. Routledge, 2019. Bennett,…
Qualifying Exams Reading List: Multispecies Connections
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World. Vintage, 2012. Archambault, Julie Soleil. “Taking love seriously in human-plant relations in Mozambique: Toward an anthropology of affective encounters.” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 2 (2016): 244-271. Barla, Josef, and Christoph Hubatschke. “Technoecologies of Borders: Thinking with Borders as Multispecies Matters of Care.” Australian Feminist Studies 32,…
Making a Multispecies Community: A Personal Journey
Since the start of the pandemic, my partner and I have worked to transform our San Antonio, TX backyard to a wildlife-friendly space. It began with a small garden pond just outside of our dining room picture window. The pond has been a hit! We have mosquito fish that are friendly and keep the mosquito…
