Humans and Bears

Svetoslava Toncheva's monograph Humans and Bears: Politics and Coexistence Models falls within the field of several anthropologies.On the one hand, it is influenced by the posthuman turn in social sciences and humanities and therefore engages with the anthropology known as multispecies anthropology, labelled with definitions such as posthuman, extrahuman or more-thanhuman.This anthropology seeks to transcend both the anthropocentric perspective and the nature-culture divide, as well as view both human and non-human species as actors who jointly participate in political, economic and social processes.On the other hand, the book is an example of engaged anthropology, an anthropology that not only deals with issues that excite or trouble (parts of) our society, such as policies and practices of biodiversity conservation and encounters between humans and large carnivores, in this case, but also attempts to provide models that could be useful for solving these problems.Coexistence is the key word both in the title and in the whole monograph.The author strives to answer the question of how successful coexistence between human and non-human species could be achieved, with brown bears in particular.In order to provide answers, Svetoslava Toncheva presents two case studies from two small areas in the Rhodopi mountains in southern Bulgaria that allow for a comparison to be made.In the collection of empirical materials, and in their analysis, she relies on the approaches of multispecies ethnography, selecting those that appear fruitful for the purposes of her research, adaptively combining them into an approach of her own, which she calls ethnography of

Anthropocentrism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ethnography · Field (mathematics · Order (exchange · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Politics · Posthuman · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Computer Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy