Prof. Nayanika Mathur to deliver the annual Cressida Jervis Read seminar at Oxford Center for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Comparative Ethnographies of Crooked Beasts: an uncertain method for the climate crisis

This paper draws a comparison between orcas off the coast of Gibraltar that have been mysteriously attacking boats and big cats in India that have been increasingly preying on humans. Drawn from ethnographic and archival research on changing human-animal relations in India, this comparison is marshalled to make three interrelated arguments on how we come to understand and write the climate crisis. Firstly, this paper makes a case for embracing the uncertainty that lurks within the tales of human and nonhuman beasts described here. Uncertainty is not just the defining feature of our times but is also a critical mode through which knowledge of the climate crisis can be formulated. Taking uncertainty as a productive form of knowledge-making this article moves on to consider how long-standing methods – ethnography, oral histories, and storytelling – can be adapted to speak for a climate-changed world. It makes a case for ‘informed musings’ as a modality of ethnographic knowledge. Finally, the traditional ethnographic focus on detailed, layered, situated accounts is extended to make a case for more creative comparisons that bring planetary climate politics into view. As extreme events, intense heat, crooked beasts, and new forms of climate disasters come to dominate headlines across the world the comparative method, too, needs to be refined. In this moment ethnography as a method and art of writing the contemporary should take on the comparative project anew to provide thicker descriptions of what it is that ails the planet.  

Further details: https://www.hsmt.ox.ac.uk/event/cressida-jervis-read-seminar-comparative-ethnographies-of-crooked-beasts-an-uncertain-method-f