The Multispecies Triad of Cattle Ranching: A Horseback Ethnography

This book explores the multispecies triad of cattle ranching, focusing on how humans, horses, and cattle meet, interact, and shape a common multispecies culture. Based on a year of horseback ethnography in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, it provides a detailed account of the everyday lives of cowboys, cowboying women, and ranchers as well as of horses and cattle. It highlights the different ways that humans, horses, and cattle come together on working ranches and in settings such as rodeos and tourist operations inspired by the American West. By focusing, empirically and conceptually, on the multispecies triad, the author moves beyond binary human–animal approaches and develops the idea of multispecies intersectionality. In particular, this brings a gender perspective to the kinds of interactions that the various seasons in the Rockies require. Furthermore, the author discusses the possibilities of a multispecies concept of power by engaging empirically, conceptually, and methodologically the "energy bubbles" with which humans, horses, and cattle communicate with and move each other. The chapters also feature examples of artful methods such as ethnographic poetry including rhyming field notes as well as field drawings and analytical drawings. With this, the book showcases the use of sensory data collection and creative and artful methodologies that allow for the capture of what lies beyond human language in multispecies interactions.

Andrea Petitt is affiliated with the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden, and a researcher at the Anthropology Lab at University of Liège, Belgium.