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.

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.