Donna's
current work on "the cultures of nature of contemporary western dog worlds"
requires the "labor-intensive work of developing serious relationships
with informants and communities of practice," that is to say, the cultivation
of new friendships and the creation of new working relations. (DH self-statement
00) I got the chance to go with Donna to one of her new research sites last
summer, where I met some of these new friends, people and dogs, companion species
together, having fun in agility games and trials.
Companion species are the nodes in a dense interdisciplinary practice and a
rich array of audiences. Donna points out: "Companion animals are contested
for by animal rights activists, breed clubs, pet owners, humane societies, city
councils, veterinary medicine, trainers, sports organizations, working and sporting
dog associations, ranchers, and many more communities of practice. Evolutionary
and archaeological origin stories, detective fiction, genome projects, training
manuals, websites of all kinds, and magazines ranging from literary rags to
holistic health newsletters do not begin to contain the proliferation of contemporary
dog discourses. The oral and written practices are dense, and the social worlds
are many."
Gregory Bateson asked "How do ideas interact?" (p.
xvii Steps) while Donna has always literalized knowledge dynamics: like Bateson
she understands that things are knots "in a field of relatedness"
(p. 94 Leaf) and that the lively processes are what matter in material-semiosis.
Such lively processes are akin to the friendships that anchor and concretize
our interdisciplinarities. How could we know it all? How much we depend upon
each other in collective knowledge projects. How much we have to honor the friends
who do work quite other than our own, to know and value it without asking them
to leave their work and do ours. It is the friendship of interdisciplinarity
that permits us to decenter ourselves and practice intellectual generosities.
Interdisciplinary work requires great friendships. As Donna says "[i]nterdisciplinarity
is risky but how else are new things going to be nurtured?" (p46 Leaf)
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