What kind of animal are we? The rodent-human relationship as a pest entourage
While multispecies ethnography emerged in the social sciences in the early aughts, animals and other nonhumans have long been “good to think with” in anthropological theory. More recent turns have taken nonhuman beings seriously as actors with agency over the way humans live, work, and play. Many focus on the radical alterities of specialist species as aspirational comparisons to pose how things could be different from a capitalist perspective.
But what about the multispecies relations that benefit from our capitalist consequences? Pests have been steadily increasing their residential radius, flourishing in a time called the “sixth extinction.” When we attend ethnographically to the pests at our feet, like the urban rats we share our lives with, we notice the similarities and kinships that showcase human generalist tendencies: adaptability, sociality, and a capacity for destruction.
Reception to follow in PAS Lounge (PAS 3005)
About the speaker: Dr. Darcie DeAngelo
Darcie DeAngelo is an anthropologist, writer, and filmmaker and Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. She is the author of How to Love a Rat: Detecting Bombs in Postwar Cambodia (University of California Press, 2024) and For the Love of Rats (Norton, forthcoming).