CUSAS Talk: Dr Liana Chua (Brunel University)

Disentangling Entanglement: Ethics, Politics and Privilege in the ‘Multispecies Turn’

In recent years, ‘entanglement’ has become a pervasive trope in anthropological and other scholarly discussions of multispecies relations, particularly in ‘the Anthropocene’. In this paper, I reflect on the term’s gradual transformation from ontological descriptive to ethical imperative, and its implications for anthropological engagements in/with the world. Drawing on ongoing research on the global nexus of orangutan conservation, I reflect on how currently influential tropes of entanglement privilege certain ethico-political visions while occluding others, and – more reflexively – how anthropological privilege is implicated in these processes.