Introducing With Microbes: From witnessing to withnessing

Abstract

With Microbes shows the diversity of human-microbe relationships and their dynamism, through detailed ethnographies of the relationships between humans, animals, plants, and microbes. The objective is to look at situated practices: categories mobilized by people to talk about their relationships with microbes, their practices and actions, stories people tell about microbes and materialities that are specific to them. Therefore, the volume is just as much on scientific practices of living-with-microbes as it about other ways of engaging with them. The introduction develops the notion of 'withnessing' to understand these relations. Ethnographic contributions of the book present diverse forms of microbial encounters that open up new perspectives, showing how humans and microbes compose common worlds together. Crucially, the authors and editors of this project put forward new vocabulary for describing the human-more-than-human nexus without dichotomizing between nature and culture, subject and object, human and other, etc. This is a move away from an approach that stresses on terms, entities, and individual organisms, to attend to the relationships between human-microbe entanglements, how they develop and by which they exist.

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