Experiencing Nature and Society. A Multi-Sited Inquiry into Marine and Ethnographic Field Sciences

• Applicant: Dr. Tanja Bogusz
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464363634

Facing the current global ecological and sanitary crisis, the project aims to create new paths of associating “field sciences” with the notion of “experience” in an age of increasing demand for inter- and transdisciplinary co-operation. It contributes to the anthropology of nature in a threefold manner: firstly, it introduces an experiential and experimental perspective beyond the disciplinary boundaries between the natural and the social sciences through forms of knowledge generated by “field sciences”. Associating anthropology and biology with STS through concrete research practices, it provides, secondly, an up-to-date reflection on epistemological and methodological modes of proceeding nature and society. Thirdly, the multi-sited approach embraces a detailed comparative and international inquiry of marine and ethnographic fieldwork. The project builds on the theoretical basis of practice theory, pragmatism and experimentalism that will be empirically grounded through fresh accounts of humanities of nature. The multi-sited work programme spans geographically far: building on a laboratory study of marine invertebrate taxonomists at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris and a participant observation of a taxonomist’s biodiversity expedition in the coastal zone of Madang, Papua New Guinea, I integrate three further sites: the Laboratoire d‘anthropologie sociale (LAS) at the EHESS Paris, the Bremen NatureCultures-Lab (BNCL), and the marine biological station in Concarneau in Brittany, France. The project is motivated by the following questions: Can nature and society, as objects of inquiry, be merged through an experiential approach of knowledge generated through different ontologies of the field? How do anthropological and biological field sciences situate, co-relate and materialize their respective research experiences? How do different geo-political, spatial and architectural habitats and places shape different forms of field research and reflexivity? As a result, I aim for the establishment of a „third knowledge-space“ between different modes of experiencing and knowing nature and society through fieldwork. As a result, this knowledge-space will hopefully contribute for mutual learning procedures, and provide sustainable options for problem-oriented collaborations between anthropologists and marine biologists in the era of the Anthropocene.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants