Venue: Canberra

Date: 5-8 December 2019

Donna Haraway has encouraged us to value Significant Others as companion species, where the more-than-human is not just good to think with but good to live with. Both Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing utilize critical description within narrative, striving to avoid human exceptionalism, while embracing multispecies landscapes. In order to include a sensorial understanding of interspecies sociality, thinking beyond the human necessitates different modes of communication beyond classic forms of anthropological text. Through the work of Paul Stoller, Steven Feld and more recently through filmmaker Castaing-Taylor’s Sensory Ethnography Lab there has been a push towards sensory ethnography, fusing the intelligible with the sensible, examining vision, sound, smell, touch and taste to examine a more-than-human world.

In this panel we invite presentations broadly engaging with the senses, while focusing on the agency and subjectivity of more-than humans. We welcome papers that incorporate multiple beings, including plants, fungi, horses, dogs, pigeons, whales, insects or spirits. Anna Tsing, for example, has written evocatively about the smell and taste of the matsutake mushroom; while Steven Feld recorded and subsequently described how a woman tilling a taro field spontaneously composed a song to accompany the strident sound of a cicada. Submissions that integrate written sensory ethnography with visual and auditory material to enhance our understanding of self and others are preferred.