Introduction: An Ecology of Ethnographic Methods

Abstract

The idea for this book arose some years ago after we had completed our first joint monograph together, Animals at Work (Hamilton & Taylor, 2013). In it, we presented a series of ethnographic vignettes of people working with animals in some capacity or other, from those in caring occupations, such as sanctuary volunteers, to those at the opposite end of the spectrum working in abattoirs. We spent many hours, days and, in fact, years interviewing people in, and observing, places where animals and humans laboured together in some fashion. This took us to some interesting and unusual settings: veterinary surgeries, animal shelters, meatpacking plants and farms. We noticed that work with animals took very different forms, from the close-up intimacy of the rescue shelter to the distant, strictly zoned and highly mechanised factory floor of the abattoir. While doing this fieldwork that interrogated meanings of humanity and animality, we analysed modes of identity construction for both human and animal groups, and assessed attitudes towards other species. In doing so, we realised that this kind of ethnographic work necessarily required us to acknowledge that we, as humans, were the ones doing the research and the writing and that the animals, while present in our day-to-day activities as ethnographers, were often absent from our final—written—books and articles.