Latin American Multispecies Studies

The multispecies studies considered here include relations between humans and nonhumans, as elaborated in Latin American cultural studies. Cultural approaches to multispecies relations began in the late 1990s in branches of anthropology and Indigenous studies that started to question the separation between humans and nonhumans, nature and culture, organic and inorganic inherited from Western modernity. The definition of species started to be contested, and alternative terms emerged as “the living” and “life-forms” to decenter the human as an object of study. Embodied and affective approaches to animals, plants, water, soil, and microbes began to articulate alternative modes of knowledge in art, theory, and criticism to challenge speciesism and anthropocentrism. As an emerging area, multispecies studies is an open field that embraces the nonhuman turn through a wide range of sources in philosophy, anthropology, geography, political ecology, and media studies in intersections with zoology, botanic, geology, hydrology, and mineralogy. “The multispecies turn” in culture rejects human exceptionalism to consider forms of co-constitution and horizontal relations with nonhumans in society. Latin American cultural studies bring a unique contribution to inter and multispecies relations, arguing that they are sites of identity formation, power relations, and resistance. The colonial and extractivist history in the region has shaped the variety of Latin American cultural perceptions and approaches to nonhumans. The inter- and transdisciplinary field of multispecies studies in Latin America elaborates post-anthropocentric perspectives by drawing on a wide range of emerging disciplines in the environmental humanities, animal and plant studies, Indigenous philosophy, more-than-human anthropology, climate justice, posthumanism, and ecofeminism. Its publications are still fragmented, and studies applying a multispecies approach to cultural studies in Latin America are found in a variety of anthologies and publications that deal with a great diversity of issues, mostly socio-environmental and cultural. A number of books, articles, special issues, and chapters that focus on the role of multi-cross-inter interspecies relationality are shaping this emerging field in Latin America. Much of the scholarship tends to focus on cultural relations between humans and particular nonhumans (animal, plant, water bodies); however, scholarship that considers relations between and across diverse life forms is also emerging in climate justice studies, feminist studies, anthropology, architecture, biopolitics and political ecology in Latin American studies. The authors of this article wish to thank Ximena Briceño, Sophie Esch, Ernesto Semán, and the anonymous reviewers.