Vol. 66 No. 1-2 (2022)

The next issue of Polish Ethnography (2022) deals with more-than-human anthropology, focusing on non-human subjects as important actors co-creating relations in the world. This theme was inspired by a series of topics addressed in the seminars of the Undisciplined Anthropology Group, Polish Academy of Sciences. Authors of published articles look at how the relations of human and non-human actors can be the subject of ethnographic research, and how social relations are formed that do not refer only to humans. We are interested in situational co-constitution – the becoming of humans and other non-human beings in mutual relations (Dépelteau 2018; Strathern 2020).
Starting from a critique of modernist boundaries, we would like the articles in the volume to show that the notion of community does not refer only to humans, but applies to complex communication networks, arrangements, exchanges (which are also mediated by technology), involving humans, animals, plants, bacteria, etc. (Tsing 2015). Our aim is to show how material and non-material entities (humans, plants, animals, politics, discourses) come together to form new multi-species networks in which they gather and arrange themselves in mutual dependencies (Blavascunas 2020).

The proposed volume is an invitation to an open debate on multispecies ethnography. Our goal is to support the formation of a research community working on similar issues. Assuming that the study of more-than-human relations is an interdisciplinary endeavor, we present articles of anthropologists and ethnographers, and also of representatives of other disciplines who are interested in the topic of more-than-human anthropology.