Abstract

GARCIA, Berenice Vargas  and  TREJO, David Varela. Multispecies futures: a manifesto from the South in the face of the capitalist Anthropocene. Etnográfica [online]. 2024, vol.28, n.1, pp.153-169.  Epub Apr 18, 2024. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.15347.

A little over ten years ago, the anthropological academy of the global North baptized with the name “multispecies” a mode of study and writing that de-centers the human and that, in research, pays attention to the socio-cultural and affective force of multiple bodies and materialities. However, these kinds of multiple and diverse relationalities have been a constitutive part of many peoples in the global South, subalternized peoples whose historical, situated, and embodied experience account for epistemologies and ways of life obliterated by the modern-racist-colonial system. In other words, these peoples have been able to recognize and name our fragile and precarious condition, which requires more-than-human beings to become possible, in intimate affectation and interdependence, and in collaborative survival; so “multispecies” is just one more word, among others, to refer to the intricate space of relationships that give shape and content to what we call “society”, “culture”, and “nature”. In the time of the Anthropocene, this era of life annihilation driven by rapacious capitalism-speciesism, it is necessary to acknowledge our vital connections with multiple human, animal, plant, mineral, and other kinds of bodies - and their particular ways of being named - in order to propose politics of collaboration and interdependence from which it might be possible to imagine other, more-than-human futures; futures that, in fact, might already be imagined and contested right now, from and in the South. So, the objective of this anthropological essay-manifesto is, drawing from Robin Wall Kimmerer, to think about “multispecies grammars of the animated” as an alternative to these times of ruin and necessary creativity to converse with other forms of life and non-life and to reorient ourselves from other epistemologies situated in the margins and embracing that other world that walks with us towards plural futures beyond the Anthropo-capitalocene.

Keywords : multispecies futures; Anthropocene; affectivity; global South; speciesism.

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