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Abstract: This article proposes that multispecies anthropology and its curiosities about non-humans constitute a 'minor anthropology' that poses challenges not only to anthropological categories, but also to anthropological methods. Through attention to Pacific salmon, I probe why and how anthropologists might explore the ways non-humans know and enact worlds via collaborations with natural scientists. Working with biologists, I examine salmon scales and otoliths, or ear bones, whose crystallization patterns act as a kind of fish diary, recording a fish's migrations and relations. I take up these methods with an anthropological eye, asking how one might use such practices to learn about multispecies encounters that classical ethnography often misses. Lastly, I demonstrate how anthropologists can engage natural science tools while remaining alert to the politics of knowing.
Keywords: animal studies, knowledge practices, minor anthropologies, multispecies ethnography, salmon, social science methods, STS
"This is how I know a salmon," George said, handing me a small fleck of white calcified matter (see fig. 1). Sitting in one of the folds in my palm, the object looked like a bit of broken seashell. Instead, it was an otolith, or fish ear bone. George, a long-time fisheries science lab manager at a California university, spends his days working with such bony chips, making them tell stories. He mounts the otoliths on slides and polishes them thin enough so that their treelike rings can be counted, measured, and analyzed in an effort to learn about salmon life histories. George almost never sees salmon in the flesh. The otoliths that he processes arrive in tiny vials, already separated from piscine bodies. George knows salmon not through fishing or cooking, or even through fieldwork: he knows them through a microscope and the practices needed to 'read' the patterns on otoliths.
I begin with this brief description of George because it is part of a familiar genre. The ways that salmon are enacted in laboratory practices are precisely the things that scholars engaged in multispecies anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) have become skilled at studying. Scholars trained in the social sciences and humanities have become adept at asking questions about how different humans know and enact animals, plants, and landscapes.1 This article, however, starts in a different place. It begins not...