Call for Papers
Companionship is integral to anthropological history, theory, and practice. Going back at least to Emile Durkheim, anthropologists have understood that all humans need companionship. More recently, analytical attention has illuminated the ways in which human and more-than-human relationships emerge co-constitutively (Haraway 2003; 2006), and has expanded how we situate the place and role of companions in the unfolding of local and imperial histories (e.g. Tsing 2012) or the role of colonial companions in the ongoing process of Indigenous survivance (e.g. Lonetree 2019). Yet, companions and companionship can be found far beyond these more explicit references, and can arise in sometimes surprising and unexpected places.
Anthropological practice is full of companions, both human and non-human, embodied and metaphysical, ephemeral and everlasting. During our fieldwork, a companion might be a friendly dog who scrounges around camp for scraps, an FM radio that brings us news from home, or a neighbor with whom we share stories and food. Returning from the field, the linguistic quirks picked up from our interlocutors also bespeak our recent companions. There are innumerable other forms of companionship that the process of research compels us to follow: a pest in a plantation, a chemical in a watershed, an artistic motif that moves across political borders, a community of practice that spans continents and generations, colonial or ancestral companions in the archives, or a medical device that travels beyond its intended use. Companionship can be read in everything from human pathologies to COVID vaccine passports and inherited genetics to acquired isotopic bone chemistry. Invisible and figurative companions, such as our ancestral and intellectual predecessors, can be omnipresent. How do our ancestors move with us as companions, traversing the boundaries of time and place, shaping the projects we undertake, the scholarship we write, and the type of scholars we hope to be? What of those giants in anthropology, in whose footsteps we follow, and whose collective writings we compile in weighty volumes with addendums called “companions to...”? Companions can also disappear, be unanticipated, have troubling afterlives, or fail to materialize, making for relationships that are rarely uncomplicated.
We are particularly interested in the historical and geographical contingencies of companionship. In other words, we seek to explore the emergence of companionship from, with, and through particular times and places. These particularities matter. It is our hope that attending to the specific forms of companionship that saturate, inform, and shape our work can help to create more relationally-conscious frameworks through which to understand the worlds in which we find ourselves. We invite you to think with us, expansively and experimentally, about anthropological companions and anthropologies of companionship.
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