4575 words
24/07/22 02:55 [ROT]
This thesis is about what I learnt about Listening from cows. When I started in March 2019, the goal was to study how cows communicate. Since then, I did lots of going to farms and hanging out with various farmers, herds and landscapes. Going to a place that is unfamiliar, or choosing to treat a place as unfamiliar, is the main tool for doing ‘ethnography,’ which is an academic discipline in itself. The greek roots of this word are ethnos, "folk, people, nation", and grapho, "I write". After my fieldwork came the time to write-up encounters I had with the people and critters of the farm. And that’s when I got stuck behind a question: “who am I writing this for?” I became very introspective about the power and privilege that comes with working in the way I do; standing in fields, sitting at a desk writing, occasionally speaking about what I’m working on and what I’ve learnt. In the Netherlands, where I live, cows are a serious subject and yet they are mute participants in heavy political discussions which affect the future of (international) food systems. This is a human-animal relationship that is fraught with tension and beauty, I wanted to approach it with sensitivity and so landed on a methodology to write with called auto-ethnography where I write about myself writing, which helped me to better articulate what I learnt from cows.
There is an emerging practice called ‘multispecies ethnography’ which delineates itself from ethnography because it sets its sights beyond the human subject in any environment. Its practitioners haven’t yet formulated an agreed upon way of going about de-centring the human from ethnographic study but several have found it important to work introspectively in the context of ‘multispecies’ encounters like the ones I had at farms.[^gillespie] A main motivation for this is to be humble about what we know of the worlds we are trying to describe. As someone that grew up in a suburb of London, I didn’t know much about agriculture and animals. What I did know though, being an intersection of multiple social categories like brown, working class and.. is that exploited bodies are the least understood, mainly because of the un-making, suppression or absence of conditions they are comfortable to speak into. And I’d never experienced cows speaking for themselves in any media except fictional cartoons. So, assuming that they can speak, I wanted to make sure my research didn’t take place at their expense, which connects with another important motive for multispecies ethnographers- which is an attempt to ‘de-centre’ the human being and allow more space for the concerns that nonhuman subjects of research might want to have exposed.[^hooks] However, to figure out what matters to cows, or other nonhumans at farms, I first have to learn to listen to them. So my auto-ethnography has a more meta goal than paying attention to the various ways in which I am entangled to nonhuman others.[^cowstudies] What I am doing is to study how I got better at Listening to them so that I could start figuring out which matters they might want to tell us about or work on with us. I want to tell a story of how my ability and understanding of Listening evolved because of them.
The question that ties together all the parts of my thesis is:
<aside> ❓ How did I learn to Listen at dairy farms?
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<aside> <img src="/icons/list_blue.svg" alt="/icons/list_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Chapters
methodology - decoloniality - ethnography/anthropology - embodied listening - autoethnography - positionality
assemblage - web - expression - intention - common world - semiotic repertoire - the relation and the inbetween - displacement of voice - agency of machines and materiality - thinging - confidence
feeling - missing - memory studies - emotions - becoming-with - entwinement - threads - inside of - body ontology - scale invariance - individualism - monism - holobionts -break ups - rhythm - timescapes - plants - choreographies - collaboration
ethics - queer phenomenology - mixture - human animal divide - the self in society - sedimentation - surrender - multimodality - discernment - storytelling - human exceptionalism - gestures- design
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Contents
[/gillespie]: See: Kirksey and Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography” and Gillespie, “For Multispecies Autoethnography” and Gillespie, “For a Politicized Multispecies Ethnography.”
[/hooks]: I am very influenced by bell hooks’ notions of taking up less space and speaking from/listening to the margins as a mode of de-centring, copied from “Choosing the margin as a space for radical oppenness”
Living as we did - on the edge - we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the centre as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and centre.
[/cowstudies]: Recent ethnographies with cows retain an anthropocentric focus. For instance: breeding cultures have been shown to shape human “professional identities” without delving into the impact their technologies have on cows’ bodies and lineages (Grasseni, Skilled Visions, p.48); what rural women from Rajasthan are expressing through sculpting cow-dung during Diwali is noted, but the role and motives for the cows who also perform in these ceremonies is left vague (Notermans, “Prayers of Cow Dung”). In each of these ethnographies, the responses of cows to human practices are not studied- my project seeks to contribute tools with which they can be captured and factored into any multispecies investigation.