Environmental ethnography

Abstract

This article discusses the theory and practice of environmental ethnography and how it joins with (and differs from) multispecies ethnography. In the context of geographical research, environmental ethnography attends to the irreducibility of context and the individuality of living and non-living entities. Moving beyond the universalizing ontology of species—which in some instances can be too narrow and in other instances too broad—facilitates a line of posthumanist inquiry that complements multispecies research even as it opens up new frontiers. In doing so, environmental ethnographies overcome the dualisms of “organism-environment” and “life-nonlife” that structure Western ontology and remain stubbornly (if partially) embedded in some academic theory and practice. I begin with a brief history of the decentering of the human in geographical research before mapping the still-in-progress development of environmental ethnography, highlighting examples from other scholars while drawing on my own experiences in remote Iñupiaq and Siberian Yupik communities in Western Alaska. Moving beyond the rigid ontologies of genetics and metabolism reveals the political horizon to be wider than we often imagine.