Introduction: Ethnic Formation with Other-Than-Human Beings

Abstract

Abstract: Literature on ethnicity in Africa meets literature on multispecies ethnography to their mutual benefit. Multispecies ethnography considers people together with other-than-human beings, insisting the figure of the human is an interspecific one. We explore the ways in which multispecies ethnography needs history as part of a story about power and politics. But, the burden of the essay argues that historians of ethnicity need multispecies ethnographers’ embrace of a broader canvas of life, in motion at many scales. Historians of ethnicity need a greater awareness of change and continuity in the presence of other-than-human life forms, over time. Those same historians also might adopt the readiness of multispecies ethnographers to recognize other than the descent metaphor at the heart of thinking and making groups.