Nature writing: ethnography, travel literature, and literary ethnography (2)

 

Writing near the Tagus River, Portugal, by Pedro Simōes. Wikimedia commons.

The editorial introduction to the section of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (9th ed., 2016) that contains “Ethnographic and Naturalist Writings” calls the former “literary ethnography” (instead of travel literature, the normal term) and in so doing suggests that in some sense the latter (i.e., nature writing) is also ethnographic. To be sure, the writings of natural historians are descriptive and may be systematic and scientific, just as anthropological ethnography is. But, strictly speaking, the idea of an “ethnography” of plants and animals is a misnomer. Why? Because ethnography's Greek root ethnos refers to human beings. Yet what happens when the boundaries between human and more-than-human blur? Is an ethnography of nature possible?
    Nature writing is not to be confused with scientific writing about nature. Scientific writing about nature is fact-based, descriptive, often reductionistic, concerned chiefly with structures and functions, parts and wholes. The parts of a plant, how they work together, how a plant grows, that sort of thing. Animal behavior as it is observed. Science writing like this can be found in biology textbooks and in reports on experiments in journals such as Science and Nature. Nature writing, on the other hand, is, in the words of Richard Mabey, editor of The Oxford Book of Nature Writing, an attempt to “portray the life of nature in prose”—not so much how a plant grows, but to convey, somehow, the “life” of the plant, what it is, or is like, for the plant to be alive: in Mabey’s words, both the plant’s “kindredness and otherness” to human life (1995, vii). Nature writers you may be familiar with include Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, Daisy Hildyard, and Peter Matthiessen. Some scientists have also tried their hand at nature writing: Lewis Thomas, Aldo Leopold, and E. O. Wilson, for example. The tradition of nature writing in English also includes earlier writers like John Muir, John Burroughs, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Gilbert White. 
    Nature writing is a “quest for the essential characteristics and boundaries of being human” (Mabey, ibid.). It is often lyrical and conjectural. It is, certainly, literary. Still, the idea that nature writers are also doing something like ethnography is intriguing. That is, when they write about plants and animals to probe those “essential characteristics” of being human, they must, to some degree, anthropomorphize non-human nature. To take the most obvious example, birds are said to “sing.” A scientist—that is, a behavioral ecologist—may use the term birdsong but only as a placeholder for the sounds that birds make in order to communicate with one another. Behavioral ecologists such as Richard Dawkins have taken pains to deny any aesthetic component in birdsong—that is, any possibility that birds are singing for their own pleasure. Nature writers, on the other hand, take pleasure in the possibility that birds sing not just for practical purposes—to attract a mate, to sound alarm calls, and so on—but also for their own enjoyment. One might point out that birdsong is not parsimonious: a bird will appear to “sing its heart out” for a long time, surely longer than seems necessary to frighten an enemy, attract a mate, sound an alarm, or otherwise announce its presence in the neighborhood. In anthropomorphizing birdsong, nature writers are in effect trying to understand the “native’s (i.e., the bird’s) point of view”— which, beyond mere detailed, “thick” and systematic description, is one of the most important aims of ethnography, as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski expressed it more than 100 years ago. Certain non-Western beliefs about nature also play into the idea that it has something in common with ethnography. Indigenous social groups whose view of nature is what Viveiros de Castro has termed “perspectivism” do not exactly anthropomorphize animals but, rather, consider that like humans they have consciousness, intentions, feelings, and undergo experience; and that, like humans, they have social lives in groups not unlike human groups. In short, this Indigenous perspective, which can be found in traditional ecological thought among Native groups in the Americas, does not need to anthropomorphize because it views animals as kindred, not other. Ethnography from this perspective would not need to overcome the barriers that science throws up by denying inner lives to plants and animals.
    Of course, the Norton Anthology editor’s category, “literary ethnography,” is separate from “naturalistic writings”; yet to juxtapose them in the same space does suggest the systematic and descriptive (ethnographic) approach to nature which has been characteristic of certain natural historians in their taxonomic activities—Linnaeus, for example, or Darwin for that matter. Yet until early in the 20th century most natural historians in their “naturalistic writings” mixed objective, scientific taxonomy of particular species with lyrical, anthropomorphic descriptions of animal lives, often in the same entry. In nineteenth-century books about bird species, for example, natural historians took pains to classify, determine prevalence, and describe size, coloring, shape, habitat, range, reproductive habits, nests, seasonal activities, etc. but they also added anecdotes thought to typify what was characteristic of that particular species, as well as conjectures about inner lives while sometimes imputing motives and feelings to individual birds whose behavior was described. Moreover, they represented bird species' songs either in mnemonic syllables, or in musical notation. In the twentieth century musical notation gave way to sound spectrograph representations of birdsong, but while objectivity and precision were gained, the reader’s ability to sing back the song from musical notation was lost. The same precision and objectivity is apparent in twentieth-century bird identification guidebooks such as Peterson’s and Sibley’s. Yet there is no shortage of lyrical nature writing about birds and other animals in contemporary literature; indeed, it’s a very popular literary genre—not only in writing but also in films and television shows that attempt to portray animal lives.
    As more and more plant and animal species are endangered, or threatened by extinction, due to human encroachment on habitat, global heating, and so forth, a sustainability/conservation component inevitably enters nature writing, often accompanied by a combination of sentiment if not sentimentality, along with a sense of emergency. But there is a truth to this component, regardless of the perspective: Western science, nature writing, or perspectivism. For Western science, nature provides ecosystem services for human beings; for naturalists, nature reveals the porous boundaries between the human and more-than-human; and for Indigenous perspectivists, nature reveals life’s universal kinship.