As we sojourn in our various anthropological field sites, we are often haunted by people’s misapprehension that we study dinosaurs (paleontology) or bizarre insects (entomology). Or people imagine us trekking about virgin forests among wild beasts and spearing our own boars.
But the wildlife we encounter is often far more mundane.
You’ve got your run of the mill anthropological discussions of animal husbandry and subsistence practices. You have Evans-Pritchard studying cattle sacrifice among the Nuer, Clifford Geertz analyzing the “deep play” of a Balinese cockfight, anthropologists debating the significance of llama fetuses in Aymara rituals, or the ways wealth, prestige and power are expressed in animal form. You’ve got biological anthropologists tracing human evolution from our ape ancestors (Australopithecus afarensis – LUCY!). You have all the anthropologists calling for a radical re-thinking of the role of animals in anthropocentric anthropological accounts.
And then you have me, who spends 90% of my time running away from El Alto’s enormous stray dog population. My sophisticated anthropological analysis of the wild dogs of El Alto?
They’re SCARY!
And they are after me.
What are YOUR experiences of non-human animals, insects, or other wee beasties in your field site? You have two weeks to complete this assignment.
* Finally, a note regarding an upcoming Cohorticulture assignment. In the next couple of days Sohini will be posting the details of our next scavenger hunt task – one that comes in 3 parts -- so that we have time to ponder while we work on this first assignment. Be on the lookout for her explanation.
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