This paper is about how emotion generates sociolinguistic advocacy for dairy cows, and activism for nonhuman animals. It discusses my case for an animal turn in sociolinguistics that came about as I was carrying out ethnographic fieldwork among dairy cows in an industrial farming context in which the routinized separation of newborn calves can be considered as an act of normalized violence, confronting me with numerous emotions when relating to these calves, their mothers and other dairy cows. The aim of the paper is to show what research into animal others can contribute beyond the assumptions of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy. It shows that emotion, although historically gendered, should have a place in sociolinguistics since it performs an important role in the various streams producing reflexive researchers, scientific knowledge and motivating action i.e. animal advocacy and activism. Advocacy of animal welfare rests on three public mainstays: (i) the researcher who makes a case for an inclusive sociolinguistics in which nonhuman animals are no longer silenced and muted; (ii) sociolinguistic knowledge in which bodies are part of the semiotic landscape, and (iii) the voice of the calves, although portrayed as victims can be heard when we as humans decentre ourselves.

The fields of critical animal studies and feminist new materialisms have important implications for anthropology. In attending to ethics in human-animal relations, these fields not only decenter but also destabilize the very category of the Human. In conversation with critical animal studies and feminist anthropology, multispecies ethnography thinks with nonhumans and honors their specificities as both individuals and species. Multispecies ethnography encourages analysis of humans’ entanglement with other species as well as thinking about seemingly inanimate matter such as rocks as animate entities. Recognizing the animacy of objects offers interesting and important insights for ethnography. In this chapter, the author provides an overview of the cross-pollination of the multispecies and new materialist turns to explore how feminist and queer studies of the non/human are important for anthropology. Multispecies and feminist new materialist interrogations of sexuality are discussed, focusing on their innovative and important ethical contributions to human understandings of sexuality. The author argues that anthropology is uniquely positioned to intervene further in this conversation and posits that queering multispecies ethnography, rather than simply using nonhuman animals to reify or resist human formations of sexuality, can offer an opening to interrogate sexuality as a multispecies entanglement.

In Chapter 16, “The Nature of Animality,” Michael Lundblad explores how questions of animal (and human) nature animate the contemporary interdisciplinary fields of posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies, animality studies, and human-animal studies. The chapter examines how animality has long defined how humans think about each other and how rejecting a fundamental distinction between humans and animals enables us to see the intertwined “becomings” of different beings. The chapter constructs a genealogy of prominent theoretical responses to questions about animals and animality by Jacques Derrida, Erica Fudge, and Donna Haraway, among others. Theories of animality, Lundblad demonstrates, challenge how we think about history, periodization, and culture, and breathe new life into old debates within literary studies such as questions of agency, character, and perspective.

Blending colonial archives and travelers’ accounts with ethnography, landscape observations, and geospatial analysis, this chapter reconstructs the historical-geographical and political-ecological development of Bahia’s palm oil landscapes. After examining the biogeographical dimensions of Bahia’s Atlantic coasts, it lays out the agroecological contexts that welcomed and established the African oil palm. It then situates those changing landscapes within geographies of resistance—socioecological strategies of survival and fulfillment that remain embedded in the contemporary region. Emerging from transatlantic assemblages of biota, knowledge, and environments, Bahia’s palm oil landscapes coalesced to create and sustain novel cultures, ecologies, and economies. While Afro-descendants emerge as principal agents in its development, humans cooperated within biodiverse socioecological networks, leveraging their environmental knowledges to help establish and proliferate Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian landscape. These relationships amplify our comprehension of the African diaspora and the Atlantic World by revealing multispecies collaborations and landscapes of resistance in the colonial Americas.

Human–Animal Studies is an interdisciplinary field which takes as its subject matter the relationships between humans and other animals. The field is rapidly growing as scholars are recognizing the importance of animals in our own lives, and, increasingly, the ways in which humans shape animal lives. Okunoshima, an island located in the Hiroshima Prefecture in southern Japan, has been host to a large population of feral rabbits for decades. The rabbits of the island have access to limited vegetation and water, and thus rely for their survival on the tourists who feed them. These tourists, who are largely drawn to the island in order to see, touch, and spend time with the rabbits, have altered the rabbits’ lives in ways that have been complicated and unexpected. This chapter will use the case study of the rabbits of Okunoshuma to uncover some of the problematics of the increasingly popular practice of animal tourism, and to shed light on the ways that multispecies ethnography can be useful to sociologists.