Multispecies Anthropology: New Ethnographies
About the Book Series
Human-Animal Studies has come of age. Intrinsically inter or transdisciplinary, it has encouraged scholars from diverse disciplines to use a range of approaches and resources to explore the relationships that humans have with other animals and forms of life and how these are experienced and expressed.
Animals have traditionally appeared in anthropology as aspects of cosmological systems, essential to livelihoods including hunting, fishing, pastoralism, herding and agriculture; significant in economic systems as wealth and for exchange; celebrated in sports and other forms of entertainment and so on. More recently, animals and other forms of life have been brought to the foreground, where they are framed as important in and of themselves, rather than as reflections of other, more important relationships between people. This series is interested in this approach and the wider questions it poses about subjectivity, representation and anthropological theory.
Uniquely, this series focuses exclusively on monographs which are based on first-hand, sustained, ethnographic fieldwork: an approach which allows for the exploration of the intricacies and immediacies of lives with other animals. It brings together detailed accounts of how humans experience, engage with, live with, other animals, but also with plants and other living matter, generated within particular social and cultural worlds as they are captured by fieldwork. This format will enable authors to pursue some of the most important questions about our lives with others – and the role that anthropology might play in our futures together.
Submitting a proposal
The series welcomes proposals for either single or co-authored monographs. Book proposals should be sent to the Routledge editor: [email protected]
For guidance on how to structure your proposal, please visit: www.routledge.com/info/authors
Editorial Advisory Board
Radhika Govindrajan, University of Washington, USA
John Hartigan, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Catherine Hill, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Marianne Lien, University of Oslo, Norway
Piers Locke, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Laura Ogden, Dartmouth College, USA
Sea Cucumber Stories
1st Edition
By Paula Uimonen
November 05, 2025
Sea Cucumber Stories explores multispecies entanglements and ocean worldings, from a sea cucumber perspective. Drawing on environmental, multispecies and ocean anthropology, it enlists the sea cucumber to tell stories of how and why the ocean and its creatures matter to life on our blue planet. The...
The Multispecies Triad of Cattle Ranching: A Horseback Ethnography
1st Edition
By Andrea Petitt
October 03, 2025
This book explores the multispecies triad of cattle ranching, focusing on how humans, horses and cattle meet, interact and shape a common multispecies culture. Based on a year of horseback ethnography in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, it provides a detailed account of the everyday lives of ...
Liang Shaoji’s Silkworm Art: Untangling Multispecies Craft
1st Edition
By Feixuan Xu
May 26, 2025
This book focuses on the work of Chinese contemporary artist Liang Shaoji and emphasises the contribution of multispecies ethnography to art criticism. Over three decades, Liang has worked with domestic silkworms to craft art that embodies the Daoism-inspired ecological motif of ‘ziran’. Are ...
The Presence of Elephants: Sharing Lives and Landscapes in Assam
1st Edition
By Paul G. Keil
October 14, 2024
How to dwell in a forest alongside giants, avoid disturbing a living god, assist an animal with their manners, and help an elephant cross the road. The Presence of Elephants is an anthropological consideration of coexistence, grounded in people’s everyday interactions with Asian elephants. Drawing ...
Human-Horse Relations and the Ethics of Knowing
1st Edition
By Rosalie Jones McVey
October 09, 2024
This book explores how equestrians are highly invested in the idea of profound connection between horse and human and focuses on the ethical problem of knowing horses. In describing how ‘true’ connection with horses matters, Rosalie Jones McVey investigates what sort of thing comes to count as a ‘...
Animal Enthusiasms: Life Beyond Cage and Leash in Rural Pakistan
1st Edition
By Muhammad A. Kavesh
August 01, 2022
Animal Enthusiasms explores how human–animal relationships are conceived, developed, and carried out in rural Pakistani Muslim society through an examination of practices such as pigeon flying, cockfighting, and dogfighting. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork carried between 2008 and ...