As Rex noted, I think the Anthropocene, as a concept, militates against multispecies perspectives, since it so keenly reinscribes an anthropocentric view—at a time when “posthumanists” accounts are revealing the Anthropos to be shot through with other forms of life that quite trouble our dreams of a freestanding human. But I do share the cheering reassurance in this issue that “the importance and relevance of anthropology rests on its traditional strengths”—empirical and analytic approaches that redeploy quite well in ethnographically accounting for nonhumans, as I’ve suggested in several of my posts this month. Just as importantly, the depiction of anthropology as “a discipline continually grappling with how to understanding the interactions of global, regional, and local variables” linked to climate change does little to preclude a principle attention to nonhumans. Perhaps the “thrown” quality of encountering anthropogenic landscapes will eventually achieve a shift in perspective similar to the interior recognition of manifold companion species in the form of the microfauna lining our guts.

Beyond Nature and Culture is an entirely different matter, and I’m drawn to it because Descola provides a useful template for the panoply of possible relations humans can have with nonhumans. Even though, it also shows how far beyond anthropology ethnographic accounts will have to extend in order to incorporate life forms broadly in our renderings of everyday life. At least you can see it from his pages, in the goal “to gain a better understanding of collective behavior” (113); with the addendum I’ll affix, that such collectives should include nonhuman forms of culture, along with copious squads of companions species.

Descola renders humanity in terms of four schemas: naturalism, totemism, analogism, and animism. Succinctly, “totemic and analogical collectives…contain a constitutive hybrid element” conflating the human and nonhuman—totemic groups “include men and women, parents and children, plants and animals, material entities and immaterial ones, all squeezed together in a complex and contradictory tissue of affects, interests, and obligations” (399). Contrastingly, analogical collectives, which can feature “a cascade of dependencies reaching all the way from plants and animals up to the summit of the pantheons,” “is a way of moderating the original disparity between the terms that it brings together through an illusion of equivalence in the obligations that fall to them when they engage in exchange” (401).

Offset against these are another set of paired terms. Animism: “unrestricted sociality that encompasses both humans and nonhumans in universal networks” (393); in contrast, naturalism, which though it “lays emphasis on the physical continuity between the world’s elements (all subjected to the laws of nature),” insists upon a “singularity ascribed to humans on account of their distinctive interiority,” sharply curtailing relations across this line. Such that, “some relations are deemed suitable for connections between humans, others for connections with nonhumans, but none has the power to schematize the principal interactions between all the world’s elements” (393, 395). Multispecies work, interestingly, vies against this ontology but arguably does so most powerfully by mobilizing the techniques and analytics of natural science.

Here Descola is highly useful for considering whether multispecies work can break through naturalism or “modern ontology,” in that he catalogues its resistance (in the guise of evolutionary psychologists and cognitive ethologists) to all arguments and indications of nonhuman cultures or language, simply by denying to animals the interiority of identity (178-185). His account of the “eruption of animal species into the domain of culture” (180) is rousing, though the scientific case (and cases) are advanced far beyond the few he samples. Still, he chides ethologists, who “do not, as yet seem to have taken full measure of this revolution,” yet laments that evidence of nonhuman cultures to date will not break “the defensive locks of naturalism” nor will they “cut naturalism down to size” (182).

This said, his tally offers an incisive view of where the breach opens for multispecies work: in eschewing that upon which naturalists double down—the “interior resources” of human subjectivity, the core of “anthropocentric prejudice” (184). As cultural analysis both extends to and draws from accounts of nonhumans, we have to leave behind an obsessive fixation on the subjective as the sole fulcrum for our analytical work.

Links for two articles recently popped up in my Twitter feed: “The Science of Puppy-Dog Eyes” (NYTimes, 4/21/14) and “The Guilty Looking Companion,” Scientific American (4/20/15), both treating the gazing behavior of dogs and its various effects on humans. The first, by Jan Hoffman, reported on a study published in Science (in a themed-column on evolution), titled, “Dogs hijack the human bonding pathway.” The second, by Julie Hecht, “The Guilty Looking Companion,” builds off an article in Behavioral Processes, on a tangled question: “Are owners’ reports of their dogs’ ‘guilty look’ influenced by the dogs’ action and evidence of the misdeed?” Both suggest a far more agential companion species than many people might’ve suspected, but more importantly they each complicate stock domestication narratives suggesting it was something we simply did to them. They also suggest opportunities for extending social analysis beyond the human.

As the title of the Science article suggests, dogs were possibly canny drivers of domestication: “dogs became domesticated in part by adapting to human means of communication: eye contact.” In particular, the speculation is that dogs cleverly “utilized a natural system meant for bonding a parent with his or her child.” Evolutionarily, “the challenge for dogs may simply have been to express a behavioral (and morphological) repertoire that mimicked the cues that elicit caregiving toward our own young. Indeed, these juvenile characteristics of dogs are known to carry a selective advantage with respect to human preferences.” So dogs wile their way into our good graces by coopting the cuteness channel we have for children. To complicate agency a bit further, this seems to all hinge on a bidirectional hormonal mechanism: people and dogs both develop heightened, pleasurable levels of oxytocin from protracted gazing into each other’s eyes. “These findings suggest not only an interspecific effect of oxytocin, but also the exciting possibility of a feedback loop,” since “shifts in oxytocin concentration in a dog might elicit similar changes in a human and vice-versa—just as when a mother bonds with her infant.” Domestication just got a good deal more interesting.

“The guilty looking companion” takes up the theme of sociality and how social bonds are respectively maintained in various species, but also how humans might be duped by our tendency to anthropomorphize dogs as possessing a subjective state approximating shame. The reparative behaviors of appeasement and reconciliation that maintain relationships, practiced by many species, when manifested by dogs, reads easily, to us, as “guilt.” But through a fascinating series of experiments, researchers countered that these canine gestures are just “cohesive displays,” which operate “to reduce conflict, diffuse tension, and reinforce social bonds.” Dogs are not responding to ameliorating a subjective sense of shame at transgressing rules; they are instead “incredibly sensitive to environmental and social cues.” If there’s furniture torn or overturned, the owner is looking for someone to chastise—better grovel or cringe. These behavior are very effective, according to surveys of dog owners, who withhold punishments in the wake of such displays. But Hecht concludes with a caution: “It might just be that we’re anthropomorphizing,” in reference to the viral spew of “dog shamming” photos. “Which, in this case, might not be good for us or our dogs.” Indeed, but what is even more valuable here is the perspective opened up onto thinking about parallel and converging forms of species sociality, beyond the question of who is domesticating who.

On that topic, another recently published science article pursues just these openings, though unfortunately it does not seem to be circulating widely at all. “Testing the myth: Tolerant dogs and aggressive wolves,” in Proceedings B (Royal Society Publishing) reports on findings that indicate “a steeper dominance hierarchy in dogs than in wolves.” While “tolerance” is supposed to be the character trait “selected for,” dogs appear far more aggressive and uncooperative with conspecifics than wolves. The problem with “all domestication theories” to date is that they’ve ignored “apparently contradictory behaviours…observed in dogs and wolf packs.” There’s an enormous amount to this piece, but it may come down to “face,” as Erving Goffman developed the concept. “Visual communication in dogs is somewhat impaired due to their reduced visual (facial as well as bodily) expressions,” which “might lead to an inability to control conflicts in close quarters.” Wolves are far more articulate in reading both gaze and facial features in conspecific communications. Range et al write, “Although dogs and wolves seem to use the same signals overall, it is possible that dogs do not use them as appropriately as wolves”—i.e., they haven’t refined the etiquette of conspecific communications quite as well, though they’re very good at circumventing our conspecific gaze signaling tendencies.

But that “wolves appear tolerant, attentive, and at the same time cooperative towards pack members” is in stark “contrast to the starting point of several recent domestication hypotheses.” Free-ranging dogs—constituting about 76-83% of the global dog population!!—not so much. So the questions swirl as to dogs’ cognitive and emotional processes underlying their intraspecific sociality and how that variously aligns with ours, in the deep past and today.

But the challenges here are manifold. First, cultural analysis largely remains predicated upon countering notions of the natural, as in this recent piece by Port and Mol in JRAI, which seeks “to interfere with the naturalization of ‘eating’ by comparing two modes of engaging with fruits in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.” Such accounts seem animated by a drive to disallow evolution as a reference frame for modern humans. Second, evolutionary narratives, particularly from behavioral psychologists, represent that which we often struggle against—biologically reductionist accounts of social dynamics. For that matter, the biological sciences are faring so much better than the social sciences or humanities that it seems defeatist to incorporate such modes of thinking into our accounts of the world.

But this all may be changing quickly, partly because how we understand culture is shifting, most clearly from within anthropology. Greg Downey summarizes this nicely: “Whereas anthropologists may have once thought that culture and technology buffered our species from evolutionary processes, repealing the laws of natural selection, we now are much more ambivalent.” This new found uncertainty about the buffers between culture and evolution arises partly because cultural accounts are identifying and detailing the way rapid change in our environment—in this case, endocrine disrupting chemicals affecting human reproductive dynamics—is creating new selective pressures; or, arguably, how the Anthropocene blurs the very distinction between “natural” and “artificial” forms of selection. Examples here include the recent surge of interest in epigenetics and how this provides a powerful purchase on the social reproduction of biological problems, as in Elizabeth Roberts’ current bio-ethnography in Mexico City.

Another driver within anthropology is the emergence of multispecies accounts, which increasingly feature an attention to evolutionary threats to our species, particularly in the form of mutating and adapting viruses. Recent ethnographic examples include accounts of viruses by Natalie Porter, Lyle Fearnley, Alex Nading, and Austin Zeiderman, potentially along with work on HIV, SARS, and Ebola. But more fundamentally, the multispecies turn at the beginning included calls to incorporate components of evolutionary theory in cultural analysis. Agustín Fuentes made this case in a Culture at Large forum with Dorion Sagan, in relation to a core dimension of evolutionary theory: niche construction, something very much like “place-making” and the subject of Downey’s discussion, as well. Fuentes stated, “I’d like to convince you that, as anthropologists, we should think about niche construction, the building, destroying and altering of niches in external and internal senses, in our bodies and ecologies,  and how this perspective, combined with a true multispecies-ness impacts our senses of selves .” But Fuentes’ stance was informed as much by how evolution is being reconsidered by natural scientists; in the process, its collective and cooperative dimensions come to the foreground—that which we cultural anthropologists know a lot about. Fuentes noted that “Many biologists, geneticists and others” are recognizing that “nearly all major events in the history of life can be seen not as primarily a conflictual Hobbesian moment, ‘nature red tooth and claw,’ but rather an epic of enormous cooperation and symbiosis in the evolution of life again, and again and again.” Mauricio Meloni recounts this major intellectual shift (“How biology became social, and what it means for social theory,” in Sociological Review, 2014) by which a “prosocial view of evolution” (along with accounts of “the social brain” and “the socialized gene”) are on the rise in the natural sciences. But more broadly, Standard Evolutionary Theory is facing a fundamental reconfiguration of how we understand intergenerational dynamics.

A primary outcome is the recognition that culture “is an evolutionary player,” in the words of Kevin Laland. That is, culture drives and shapes so many aspects of evolution that it can destabilize reductivist assertions about human biology. The dialectic possibilities involve thinking about the key concept of phenotypic plasticity and how that vacillates along a continuum of fixity and fluidity, particularly as influenced by domestication (whether the version practiced by humans or not). And this gets back to a point the Fuentes stressed: “The mutual mutability of form and function in becoming human with other humans and nonhuman others is a central tenet in human evolution and should be recognized as a locus for the anthropological gaze …one where we can influence scientific practice in fields outside our own.” The way to challenge and change the way evolution operates in public discourse as an explanatory frame—see evolutionary psychology and economics—won’t improve until we fashion a more cultural account of how it operates.

Working on race, I initially began reading science journals as a way to keep up with claims and counterclaims in the polemics over its social construction. But as my focus shifted from people to plants (still keyed in on race), and as I developed an ethnographic project on biodiversity research, I began reading the journal articles to better understand what these plant scientists are up to. Along the way, the items in these reports (concepts, techniques, analytics) shifted, in my view, from socially constructed artifacts to crucial means for comprehending the very subjects that interest my ethnographic subjects. Now my approach to cultural analysis is changing.

Looking at the TOC highlights this shift. There were so many articles—beside the one I was looking for!—that I wanted to read. Why? Before answering that question, here’s a glimpse of what I encountered.

“Competing neighbors: light perception and root function”; “Testing the risk of predation hypothesis: the influence of recolonizing wolves on habitat use by moose”; “Can transgenerational plasticity contribute to the invasion success of annual plant species?”; “To breed or not to breed: past reproductive status and environmental cues drive current breeding decisions in a long-lived amphibian.” Then there was the section on plant-microbe-animal interactions, which featured “Thermal tolerance affects mutualist attendance in an ant–plant protection mutualism”; “Generalist birds govern the seed dispersal of a parasitic plant with strong recruitment constraints.” This was followed by a section titled, Community Ecology,” with such articles as “Partitioning the non-consumptive effects of predators on prey with complex life histories”; “Woody plant phylogenetic diversity mediates bottom–up control of arthropod biomass in species-rich forests”; “The effect of habitat structure on prey mortality depends on predator and prey microhabitat use”; “Niche-habitat mechanisms and biotic interactions explain the coexistence and abundance of congeneric sandgrouse species”; “Habitat fragmentation, tree diversity, and plant invasion interact to structure forest caterpillar communities.”

The first one, “competing neighbors,” involves an effort to analyze forms of plant sociality while raising the issue of anthromporphizing in the very title. But “recolonizing wolves” and “forest caterpillar communities” quickly destabilizes the assumption that the principle association for such terms should be or is humans. But how can the question, “To breed or not to breed?”, ever be regarded at a neutral remove from the recurrent forms eugenics or the immense agential complexities of domestication? Mulling that, I recognized that plant-microbe-animal interactions are crucially important to pursuing multispecies ethnography; so I need to learn something more about how these work, regardless of the species involved. That means reading about “microhabitat use,” “niche-habitat mechanisms,” and “bottom–up control of arthropod biomass.” Then topics such as “seed dispersal” and “plant invasion interactions” caught my attention, because many of the plant scientists I study are concerned with this aspect of species dynamism. Finally, though, I was perplexed at the recognition of a primary fodder of ethnographic work—“complex life histories”—turning up in a discussion of prey mortality. Oh my, where do I start?

Before proceeding further I had to settle on a typology of my interests in life sciences journals and research projects. There are articles here that 1) I need to read to keep up with the plant science, whether pertaining to the species my researchers are studying or the questions they’re trying to answer; 2) toss up interesting challenging objects to think about; 3) illustrate concern with “naturalizing” or “biologizing” social hierarchies or concepts; 4) open the possibility of analyzing culture/sociality across species lines; and 5) are the kinds of things I need to consider if I’m doing multispecies work in cultural anthropology on biodiversity. Taken in concert, these suggest a dual role for cultural analysis in the life science—maintaining an attention to the socially interested (or “loaded”) aspects of scientific objects while also learning (through gleaning and rearticulating) new means of looking at and developing interesting accounts of the world.

But in response to the question about the theoretical foundations for all of this, I’m quite ready to go beyond anthropologist and primatologists like Raymond Corbey and Frans de Waal who’ve been making this case for years. I’m more interested in how nonhuman cultures are being documented and analyzed by natural scientists, because their work opens up new spaces for theorizing culture “beyond the human.”

Start with this recent article in Nature: “Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds.” This is such an important, fascinating report because it 1) expands the scope of “cultural species” beyond the primates; 2) shifts the analysis of cultural transmission across diverse taxa from the lab to the wild; 3) underscores the value of the model of sociality formulated by Gabriel de Tarde explicitly to encompass nonhumans, centered succinctly on innovation and imitation.

As always, it matters what species you start with, and for birds, the great tit (Parus major) is it: “known to be highly innovative, opportunistic foragers and to use social information in a wide range of contexts,” this “makes them excellent models for a large-scale empirical investigation of the social processes associated with cultural transmission.” The premise is simple: researches caught and trained two birds to slide open a puzzle book door—left or right—in order to get at live mealworms. Both methods worked equally well, but each bird learned only one technique. Released back into their populations, the birds carried these techniques which then spread as “traditions.” Strikingly, birds that discovered both ways of opening the door preferred to use the behavior that was locally established, conforming to the local foraging practice. So not only does this involve social learning but also aligning with arbitrary, conventional behavior: culture.

Further, as reported in Science Digest, first author of the article, Dr Lucy Aplin of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, commented, “Even when a great tit already has experience of using one method, if it moves to a new area which favours the alternative solution this bird is likely to adopt the method preferred by its new group. It is as if its own personal experience is being over-written by the majority behaviour.” Again, very succinctly, culture; not just in the plasticity of behavior but the powerful dynamics of belonging and group formation.

There’s much more to consider about the study, particularly the distinctive role of technology in revealing nonhuman culture, and the burgeoning impact of “life histories” approaches in the natural sciences. But for now it’s important to see this work as part of a wave of recent studies, to take stock of these advances. Not to rehearse the case for nonhuman cultures and their importance in advancing multispecies perspective, but just to review the last few months of impressive findings.

Birds are surprisingly prominent in these questions, as in the discussion of bird “song cultures,” reported in “Overtone-based pitch selection in hermit thrush song: Unexpected convergence with scale construction in human music.” Researchers claim their “data provide the most rigorous empirical evidence to date of a bird song that makes use of the same mathematical principles that underlie Western and many non-Western musical scales, demonstrating surprising convergence between human and animal ‘song cultures.’” Another bird—monk parakeets, which have a similar fission–fusion structure to great tits—were featured in a study of vocalization and group formation dynamics. These are both species where groups repeatedly split into separate subgroups, to merge again latter. Parakeets, and parrots generally rely upon learned vocalization to negotiate the dissolution and reformation of groups. This article (“The Socioecology of Monk Parakeets”) concludes by comparatively orienting these cultural dynamic to primates, generally, to heighten attention to cross-species parallels with humans. It’s an impressive array of correspondences:

“Both parrots and primates have similar relative brain volumes, are long-lived, have extended developmental periods, live in complex social groups, and show evidence of advanced cognition. Parrots also share additional characteristics with humans, which display the highest social and cognitive complexity of any species. Parrots are among the few taxa that display vocal learning, which is a defining characteristic of humans but is not widespread in nonhuman primates. The structure of socially learned parrot vocalizations often varies regionally, and social factors are known to have a strong influence on vocal learning. Because vocal learning is fundamentally a socially driven phenomenon, deeper understanding of why parrots learn calls from certain individuals could provide insight not only into factors that affect vocal learning in parrots, but also into the evolution of vocal learning and social complexity. The high fission–fusion dynamics likely present in many parrot species may also more closely resemble the high fission–fusion dynamics of human groups and may provide insight into the selection processes that drive sociality in our own species.”

This list makes me rethink Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of Western naming practices for domesticates, when he deployed the semiotic square in The Savage Mind to delineate the play of symbolic comparison/contrasts with birds, dogs, horses, and cattle, via metaphor and metonymy (1966: 204-210). In this play, “birds are given human Christian names…because they can be permitted to resemble men for the very reason they are so different.” This assumption certainly distorts the resemblances and commonalities highlighted in this list.

Following on the theme of learned vocalization (regionally varied, socially informed), cetaceans come to mind. Not just because some of the best evidence for culture in cetaceans includes songs and vocal practices linked to foraging techniques, but because their cultures are becoming the focus on conservation strategies. As The Dodo reports:

“The Convention on Migratory Species (CMS ), a United Nations backed treaty that aims to protect wildlife and habitats around the globe, has agreed at its latest meeting that whale and dolphin culture should be taken into consideration when the conservation of these amazing creatures is discussed in future.”

The assessments of this report are incisive:

REPORT OF THE CMS SCIENTIFIC COUNCIL WORKSHOP ON THE CONSERVATION IMPLICATIONS OF CETACEAN CULTURE “One aspect of social complexity which may have particular significance for conservation efforts is culture. Since culture may influence how a particular social group, or cultural unit responds to specific anthropogenic threats, or conservation measures, it is important that for groups exhibiting culture this aspect of their lifecycle be taken into consideration when evaluating conservation management options.”

We come full circle here in regards to recent discussion of the Anthropocene, as cetacean culture is envisioned as a resource against “specific anthropogenic threats,” to be tapped by conservation efforts.

The importance of recognizing culture here is that it exactly mitigates against a reduction of conservation to a means of preserving genetic diversity principally: “Current international and domestic efforts to conserve biodiversity focus almost exclusively on maintaining genotypic diversity, whereas sociality and behavioural diversity may also constitute an important aspect of the viability of individuals, social groups, populations and species.”

Here we have culture of nonhumans as means of expanding the scope of conservation from a matter of counting and managing numbers, to considering what we recognize with humans when we invoke the concept: a milieu, the viability of which depends on the volume and strength of social interactions—not “bare life”!

In the decades since the idea of nonhuman cultures was broached, the notion has taken hold through recognitions that they also learn and transmit social knowledge. As Andrew Whiten and Kevin Laland et al explain, the presence of social learning as well as “traditions and other culturally related phenomena” among nonhumans has “proved to be far more widespread across the animal kingdom than imagined a half-century ago and more complex in their manifestations” (2011: 938). That’s partly because the list of such creatures is sprawling: numerous vertebrates—horses and hyenas, bats and crows, dolphins and dogs, all kinds of cats and rodents, and of course, our closest cousins, the primates—and the most globally dominant invertebrate genera: ants and termites, bees and wasps, and even some spiders. But this also reflects shifting sensibilities among researchers, that what we observe other species doing is not a matter of anthropocentric projection but rather a fairly accurate perception of homologous activities.

Thinking this way requires a simple, mobile analytic that applies widely across species and foundationally to humans, as well. Gabriel de Tarde’s work, which has seen a recent surge of new interest, is useful because he equates the social with two basic capacities: innovation and imitation. These are also the two prominent units of analysis for considering nonhuman forms of culture today (Lehmann et al, 2010). Mimesis, that long running concern in cultural analysis, is directly applicable as a trans-species dynamic; the question is largely, what are the mediums through which imitation both operates and is socially transmitted? The answer is ready at hand: researchers working with nonhumans tend to focus on vocalizations (as communicative systems) and foraging (behavioral interactions with a larger environment).

There is increasing evidence that these are learned and passed on within certain species. Many cetaceans (like dolphins and whales) as well as birds develop “local” dialects—patterned forms of vocalization that help groups cohere and reproduce, and that are not inherited nor transmitted biologically. These calls or sounds are acquired by conspecifics and play a role in where and how groups forage. Their vocalizations convey patterns of information acquired from and applied to environmental settings. Presumably, such communication also involves an interpretive dimensions, both by interpreting environmental contexts and conspecifics interactions with that same context. But as this brings us close to meaning, does this perspective, in focusing so keenly on modes of communication, rely upon or risk inscribing an anthropocentric definition of culture?

The answer will depend on how all of this works vis-à-vis biology, that long-running foil for articulating the social and our well-ensconced domain for identifying the real. What matters here is the realization that culture—which we’ve largely equated with the generation of symbolic thought and the operation of meaning, in a mentalist-bound sensibility—may be far more deeply entangled with biology than the “mind” imagined. Think of the various “turns” today in—ontological, affect, non-representational: none of them open up the biological in the way that culture potentially can when viewed in this trans-specific frame. But the capacity for doing so is where cultural anthropologists may get squeamish. Underlying all this research on the culture of nonhumans is an evolutionary notion of culture, one that “recognizes and exploits parallels between biological and cultural change,” a “rigorous science of culture” that draws upon evolutionary biology yet is directed at “the specific and unique processes of culture” (Whiten and Laland 2011:939). But wait, isn’t “culture” that which separated humans from determinate forms of biology and that freed us from strictures of natural selection? Maybe not. But if not, the gain from this line of thought is a much more plastic—that is, less deterministic sense—version of either biology or evolution.

The possibilities and options for thinking and deploying culture across species lines are just too many and too generative to foreclose by maintaining the uniqueness of humanity through retention of culture as a singular possession. What do recognitions of nonhuman cultures allow us to think? Many things, in tandem. First, it presents a means of regarding nonhumans as part of a continuum we share with them, of greater and lesser degrees of enculturation. Second, this is an opportunity to think comparatively about the capacity of culture both to respond to and to alter ecologies and biologies. In breaching the “golden barrier” that construes culture as a unique possession of humans, we can begin to think more broadly about the power and pervasiveness of culture—that force or condition that has altered the globe, as seen in the emergence of the Anthropocene. Together, these reasons generatively combine to give social theorists a means and cause to reconsider culture, as something more than that befuddling medium through which ideology operates.

The gain for cultural analysis is that we begin to get at something that has bedeviled social theorists for decades: how do you succinctly define culture? Culture generates adaptive behaviors that have the power to transform environments (“niche construction” or place-making), but that also can funnel the flow of genes in a species through mating rituals and kinship dynamics. In this formulation, we also gain a view of culture that is not formed principally by an anthropocentric attachment to meaning. In this view, Laland explains, “Animal culture is much more than a window onto humanity: it is an evolutionary player”. Studying “cultural processes in a broad range of animal species exhibit a number of properties that change the evolutionary dynamic, including detaching the behavior of animals from their ecological environments, generating geographical patterns in phenotypic characters, allowing arbitrary and even maladaptive characters to spreading, influencing evolutionary rates and trajectories, and modifying selection to precipitate and direct evolutionary events.” Not only is this an important insight, it is also an impetus to take culture more seriously among humans as well. We need to know more about this powerful dynamic or capacity, and we are best served if we open up the inquiry beyond the human.

Why domestication now? Let’s start with the Anthropocene: it’s not just our carbon based economy driving drastic climate change; the fact that we and our domesticated species comprise 90% vertebrate biomass on the planet matters greatly. Then there’s the giddy question of agency: who’s doing what to whom when it comes to species transformations? Michael Pollan framed this nicely in Botany of Desire: “All these plants, which I’d always regarded as the objects of my desire, were also, I realized, subjects, acting on me, getting me to do things for them they couldn’t do for themselves” (2001:xv). Mulling his garden further, he recognizes “the truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom”. This insight launched his effort to “take seriously the plant’s point of view” concerning four domesticated species—apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes—that “have spent the last ten thousand or so years figuring out how best to feed, heal, clothe, intoxicate, and otherwise delight us,” (xvi) in order that we propagate them more widely and fully. Once the capacity of these life forms to work upon us is acknowledged, the real fun begins.

Another aspect is that the domus—the core of domestication—is getting more complicated. Not only do microbes outnumber us internally by 9 to 1 (a core fact in multispecies analytics), they colonize our built environments, as well. A fascinating study in Science, based on the Home Microbiome Study, reports that bacteria travel with us from one dwelling to another; settling in while we do the same, and playing crucial roles in keeping more harmful bacteria at bay. Just as “the human” is harder to maintain when we realize we’re 90% bacteria, so too, basic assumptions about domestication crumble when domiciles no longer appear to be strictly human artifacts.

The domus increasingly complicates the ability to delineate between the species we genetically and behaviorally alter and those that evolutionarily adapt to our habitats. This is glimpsed both in how the human past is being rethought and some tantalizing new ethnographies. James Scott depicts domestication as arising in the “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp,” dense assemblages that combined not just livestock and cereal plants, but attendant birds, obligate weeds, and “a great pilgrimage of rodents, insects, parasites, worms, fungi, bacteria, and so on, all specialized to the complex and, over time, selected to thrive in that niche.” Meanwhile, in Alex Nading’s Mosquito Trails, “houses are very much alive” (2014:99), teaming with life forms such as Ae. aegypti that “do something more than make people sick; they are productive of political and social relationships”(85). Similarly, in Dar es Salaam, Ann Kelly and Javier Lezaun reconfigure domestication in relation to current urbanism: “Considering the city, in its physical and political dimensions, as the domus of human-mosquito cohabitation illuminates the foundational and often unexamined assumption of public health interventions” (2014: 379). Furthermore:

“Our reading of the anthropological notion of domestication helped us chart the paths and scales of multispecies (dis)entanglement: not because the cohabitation of humans and mosquitoes in Dar es Salaam involves taming, appropriation, or control—central themes in the anthropological literature on domestication that are inapplicable to our case—but because the concept draws our attention to the role of a shared built environment—in this case, the city, understood as both urbs and civitas—in shaping human–animal connections.”

But perhaps the most exciting aspect of a revitalized deployment of domestication is the fact that so many other species do it too. Dugongs (Dugong dugon) or sea cows (Sirenia) are herbivores that cultivate and graze specialized seagrass communities. Ambrosia beetles (subfamilies Scolytinae and Platypodinae) are fungiculturists, carving intricate tunnel systems or “galleries” where they raise fungi. Other include the North American marsh periwinkle (Littoraria irrorata), a mollusk that farms salt marsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora), which harbors an ascomycete fungus, drawn when the snail injures the grass and fertilizes the wound its own nitrogen-rich feces. But these are almost sideshows to the hosts of termites, wasps and ants that domesticate other species. Leafcutter ants not only fertilize fungus, they apply fungicides in the form of antibiotics from their own bodies to limit unwanted life forms. Notably, too, these species all manifest sociality in the form of division of labor, just as was apparently requisite in the rise of agriculture among humans. What could destabilize anthropocentrism more than the recognition domestication allows that we’re not the only species doing it?

I’m sitting in the auditorium of LANGEBIO, a national genomics biodiversity lab in Mexico. Perched towards the middle of a room that holds about 220 people, I’m listening to a day-long series of presentations by doctoral plant geneticists. The bare concrete walls bear streamers of sponsors, such as Illumina, Biosis, and Biosistemas Avanzados. Each speaker strides out onto an overly large stage that dwarfs them as much as the giant overhead screen, across which their presentations flash. The featured species are Zea mays and Arabidopsis thaliana (the first flowering plant to have its genome sequenced), along with varieties of yeast—all well-established model organisms upon and through which genetics steadily advances.

This is my third field stint at LANGEBIO but the first time I get such an overview of the institution. Instead of first catching up with the lab practices of particular researchers, this trip starts with the panoply of projects underway throughout LANGEBIO. So initially I’m overwhelmed and a bit disconcerted. First, I’ve focused entirely on maize and particularly “razas de maíz” or races of corn. So I’m surprised to realize this institute, founded in response to U.S. efforts to sequence the maize genome, features so much work on Arabidopsis—a plant genus with no agricultural value, but whose rapid reproductive cycles are far more conducive to publishing dictates. But I’m also overwhelmed by the slew of genetics techniques on display in the presentation. In the first paper alone (“Search and Description of New Genomic Regions Selected during the Domestication Process of Maize”): a window analysis to assess nucleotide diversity, which leads to a series of comparative studies (one for a gene encoding a S-adenosyl methyltransferase, another for one encoding an ARF-gap zinc finger protein), followed by an experimental analysis looking for genetic sweep selection during domestication, closing with coalescent simulation (CS) and Hudson-Kreitman-Aguade (HKA) statistical tests. Before the second paper (“Delving in bioinformatics of –omics data from a biochemistry background) is finished, I’m feeling unmoored.

What seemed so intelligible in lab settings spiraled quickly beyond my comprehension; due in part to my modest grasp of genetics, but also the detachment of hearing this work rendered in the abstract—that is, removed from routine, material contexts. Perhaps in a mild panic, I fall back on my ethnographic training and ask, ‘What’s cultural here?’ Of course, I turned to metaphor immediately. Even before George Marcus asserted “follow the metaphor” as a basic focus of multisited fieldwork, metaphors have long captivated ethnographers. And they’re plentiful in the presentations. Soon my notebook is jammed full of them: “window,” “signature,” and “downstream,” etc. There were ones that made me hesitate, such as “promoter” and “transcript,” but “housekeeper genes” [see Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies] “genetic architecture” seemed quite clear.

My head was buzzing with all of this during the coffee-break when Jean Philippe Vielle Calzada—the senior researcher who had generously allowed me to do fieldwork in his lab—asked me what I had observed so far. In reply, I blurted out an initial analysis of the metaphorics of genomics. I was neither disappointed nor surprised that it made so little of an impression upon him. After all, this is not an unusual reaction to science studies accounts. What did surprise me is that I experienced a moment of doubt as I heard myself talking. This doubt was amplified further in a string of such conversations with other researchers, that year and on a subsequent visit in 2014, when my words seemed to fall flat or ring hollow, even to myself.

Looking back, I recognize a disparity opened up between the kind of insight I could generate with an attention to metaphor and what the researchers depict about what is happening with these species: how their reproductive behaviors are operating in lab settings, performing in close calibration with that of other model organisms, all aligned via utterly massive comparative genetic databases around the world. For that matter, I recognized my line of analysis ran in one direction, towards ideology and what was going on in the researchers’ heads; and that inexorably this led away from the plants. Following the coffee break, as I listened to more papers, I grew more interested in the life forms they were depicting. Two realizations followed: first, that I needed the geneticists more as guides than as ideological ciphers; second, I had to follow the species (maize, in this case)—follow how its sexual history, reflecting 9,000 years of domestication, is being molded and directed to produce genetic knowledge, not just for greater yields but for insights on how companions species relations have developed and may yet unfold in the future.

John Hartigan (University of Texas, Austin) theorizes culture across species lines at www.aesopsanthropology.com and @aesopsanthro. His guest posts concern ethnography of life forms. Aesop’s Anthropology is also available in e-book format from University of Minnesota Press.