Multi-species anthropology

brief theoretical perspectives from anthropocentrism to the acceptance of the non-human subjectivity

Abstract

The present article aims – albeit briefly – to reflect in the theoretical origins and development of multi-species anthropology. Our brief “journey” has its starting point in the paradigm of the human exceptionalism and the anthropocentric view of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world. This gaze, having constituted the central paradigm of the origins of the anthropological discipline, is the result of profoundly western ways of looking at and interpreting the world and the diversity it contains. Traditional dualisms such as nature-culture are based on it, which justified the distinct treatment of the non-Western “other”. In turn, the end of this paradigm emerged as a result of the emergence of modernity questions such as the mediatization of environmental issues. In this context, a new area of research emerged, the Human-Animal Studies (HAS), as coined by DeMello, despite other designations used by different research areas (e.g. anthrozoology). In the new area of investigation, relationships with other animals are seen as co-constructed, interdependent and relational, just like ecosystems themselves, and are inside a new line of thought: an Anthropology beyond humanity.