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introduction i
TH E M U LTIS P EC IES S ALON
 Many visitors to the Multispecies Salon in San Francisco became
visibly unsettled as they walked past pictures of two gatekeepers—a
menacing “Bodyguard” (page i) and a benevolent “Surrogate”
(opposite)—photographs of silicone sculptures by the Australian
artist, Patricia Piccinini. The Bodyguard was a poster child for the
Multispecies Salon. This fantastic creature was invented by Pic­
cinini to protect a real organism—the Golden Helmeted Honey­
eater, a small colorful bird from the suburbs of Melbourne,
Australia, whose breeding population reached a bottleneck of just
fifteen pairs. Piccinini says that her Bodyguard was “genetically
engineered” with large teeth that have a dual function: “He will
protect [the honeyeater] from exotic predators, and he has power­
ful jaws that allow him to bite into trees, to provide the birds with
sap.” These teeth are also a reminder that other species are not
only good to think with, nor only to play with, but that they just
might bite. More than a few gallery goers wondered aloud: Are
these animals real?

——
FRONTIS.1–2 (page i and opposite) Patricia Piccinini, Bodyguard (for
the Golden Helmeted Honeyeater), silicone, fiberglass, leather, hu­
man hair, 151 3 76 3 60 cm, 2004, and Surrogate (for the Northern
Hairynosed Wombat), silicone, fiberglass, leather, plywood, human
hair, 103 3 180 3 306 cm, 2005. Photographs courtesy of Patri­
cia Piccinini, Haunch of Venison, Tolarno Galleries, and Roslyn
Oxley9 Gallery. See multispecies-salon.org/piccinini.

iv Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

introduction v
 The

M U LT I S P E C I E S
SALON
E B E N K I R K S E Y, EDITOR

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London

2014
© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Whitman by Copperline

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Multispecies Salon / Eben Kirksey, ed.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978–0–8223–5610–3 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978–0–8223–5625–7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Multispecies Salon. 2. Ecology in art—Exhibitions.
3. Plants in art—Exhibitions. 4. Animals in art—
Exhibitions. I. Kirksey, Eben, 1976–
n8217.e28.m85 2014
709.73'09051—dc23
2014000771

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges

the support of the School of Humanities and
Languages at unsw Australia, which provided
funds toward the publication of this book.

Cover art: Tessa Farmer, Little Savages (detail),

2007. Taxidermy fox, insects, plant roots.
Photo: Tessa Farmer. Courtesy of the artist.
TO THE SPIRIT OF BEATRIZ DA COSTA
 CON T EN T S
——

introduction
Eben Kirksey, Craig Schuetze, and Stefan Helmreich 1

part i. B L A S T E D L A N D S C A P E S 25

chapter 1 Hope in Blasted Landscapes

Eben Kirksey, Nicholas Shapiro, and
Maria Brodine 29

chapter 2 R. A. W. Assmilk Soap

Karin Bolender 64

chapter 3 Blasted Landscapes (and the Gentle Arts

of Mushroom Picking)
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, for the Matsutake
Worlds Research Group 87

part ii. E D I B L E C O M PA N I O N S 111

interlude Microbiopolitics
Heather Paxson 115

recipe 1 Plumpiñon
Lindsay Kelley 122

recipe 2 Human Cheese

Miriam Simun 135

recipe 3 Multispecies Communities

Eben Kirksey 145

recipe 4 Bitter Medicine Is Stronger

Linda Noel, Christine Hamilton, Anna Rodriguez,
Angela James, Nathan Rich, David S. Edmunds,
and Kim TallBear 154
chapter 4 Life Cycle of a Common Weed
Caitlin Berrigan 164

part iii. L I F E A N D B I O T E C H N O L O G Y 181

chapter 5 Life in the Age of Biotechnology

Eben Kirksey, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn,
and Dorion Sagan 185

chapter 6 Invertebrate Visions:

Diffractions of the Brittlestar
Karen Barad 221

chapter 7 Speculative Fabulations for

Technoculture’s Generations:
Taking Care of Unexpected Country
Donna J. Haraway 242

acknowledgments 263

bibliography 271

contributors 289

index 295

Color plates appear after page 116.

 INT RODUCT ION
——

tactics of multispecies ethnography

Eben Kirksey, Craig Schuetze, and Stefan Helmreich

A swarm of creative agents animated the Multispecies Salon, an art exhibit

that traveled from San Francisco to New Orleans and then to New York City.
Artists, anthropologists, and allied intellectuals explored three interrelated
questions at the Salon: Which beings flourish, and which fail, when natural
and cultural worlds intermingle and collide?1 What happens when the bodies
of organisms, and even entire ecosystems, are enlisted in the schemes of bio­
technology and the dreams of bio­capitalism? And, finally, in the aftermath
of disasters—in blasted landscapes that have been transformed by multiple
catastrophes—what are the possibilities of biocultural hope? As we began to
answer these questions, the divisions separating anthropologists and infor­
mants, culture and nature, subject and object began to break down. Collab­
orative research and writing projects emerged from the Salon that helped
spawn a new mode of interdisciplinary inquiry: multispecies ethnography.
Ethnography, commonly glossed as “people writing” (ethno-­graphy), is the
signature method of cultural anthropology. In conventional ethnographies,
“all actors are human,” to paraphrase Timothy Mitchell. “Human beings are
the agents around whose actions and intentions the story is written.”2 Lately,
ethnographers have begun to expand the purview of anthropology. Experi­
menting with different modes of storytelling, anthropologists are rediscov­
ering the Greek root of the word ethnos (έθνος) “a multitude (whether of men
or of beasts) associated or living together; a company, troop, or swarm of
individuals of the same nature or genus.”3 Ethnographers are now exploring
how “the human” has been formed and transformed amid encounters with
multiple species of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. Rather than simply
celebrate multispecies mingling, ethnographers have begun to explore a cen­
tral question: Who benefits, cui bono, when species meet?4
To answer this question, multispecies ethnographers are collaborating
with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are
entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Collaborative meth­
ods and tactics are being used to study questions opened up by Anna Tsing,
who recently suggested that “human nature is an interspecies relationship.”
Social conservatives with autocratic and militaristic ideologies have long
dominated discussions of human nature, according to Tsing. Stories about
primates, about the genes and behaviors we share with apes and monkeys,
have been used to assert that dominance hierarchies, patriarchy, and vio­
lence are fixed in our own nature.5 Rather than just consider our genetic
nature, Tsing suggests that we adopt “an interspecies frame” to open “possi­
bilities for biological as well as cultural research trajectories.”6
Exploring ways to bring other species (and ways of thinking) back into an­
thropology, multispecies ethnographers have found inspiration in the work
of scholars who helped found the discipline. Studies of animals have a long
lineage in anthropology, going back to canonical texts such as Lewis Henry
Morgan’s The American Beaver and His Works (1868). Morgan studied the
“acquired knowledge” of lodge, dam, and canal building transmitted among
beavers. Drawing parallels between this knowledge and the engineering of
people, he described beavers as one among many species of what he thought
of as clever animal “mutes.” The book also contained an argument for ani­
mal rights: “The present attitude of man toward the mutes is not such, in all
respects, as befits his superior wisdom. We deny them all rights, and ravage
their ranks with wanton and unmerciful cruelty.”7 In the late nineteenth cen­
tury, at a moment when anthropology was a field of natural history, the pri­
mary theoretical aim of such comparative studies was to better understand
the dynamics of evolution.8
As the theoretical concerns of anthropology broadened in the early twen­
tieth century, diverse forms of life appeared alongside humans in studies of
symbolism, religion, economic systems, and meaning. Animals proved to be
“good to think” (as Claude Lévi-­Strauss wrote in 1962), and also more instru­
mentally, “good to eat” (as Marvin Harris countered in 1985). Early ethno­
botanists also studied the instrumental use of plants and their role in human
belief systems. Later in the twentieth century, plants and animals began ap­
pearing in studies of marginality and mimesis, landscape and place, as well
as agriculture and bio­prospecting. With critical assessments of biodiversity

2 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

discourse emerging from political ecology and social studies of science in the
1990s, scholars began venturing away from animals and plants and toward
microbiota that rarely figure in discussions of biodiversity. 9
As cultural anthropologists became focused on issues of representation
and interpretation, ethnographers interested in plants, animals, and mi­
crobes began asking: Who should be speaking for other species? Arjun Ap­
padurai has raised similar questions about the ability of anthropologists to
represent other people. “The problem of voice (‘speaking for’ and ‘speaking
to’),” he writes, “intersects with the problem of place (speaking ‘from’ and
speaking ‘of’). . . . Anthropology survives by its claim to capture other places
(and other voices) through its special brand of ventriloquism. It is this claim
that needs constant examination.”10 Such critical scrutiny should be redou­
bled when anthropologists speak with biologists, nature lovers, or land man­
agers about the creatures they represent.
As multispecies ethnographers speak for members of other species—or
even attempt to speak with them, in some cases—we certainly still run the
risk of becoming ventriloquists.11 Bruno Latour seems unaware of this risk
with his playful call for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to build
new speech prosthetics: “subtle mechanisms capable of adding new voices to
the chorus.” Echoing Lewis Henry Morgan’s early writing about clever animal
mutes, Latour suggests that “nonhumans” have “speech impedimenta” that
must be overcome so that they might more fully participate in human soci­
ety. In Politics of Nature, he proposes bringing democracy to nonhumans by
drawing them into parliamentary assemblies, where they will be represented
by human “spokespeople.”12 Questioning the ability of other organisms to hold
their human representatives accountable initially led us to ask, rhetorically,
“Can the nonhuman speak?”13 But after further reflection, we realized that
this question was not quite right. “Nonhuman is like non-­white,” says Susan
Leigh Star. “It implies a lack of something.”14 While lacking speech should not
be the defining characteristic of a broad category of beings, Latour’s notion
of the nonhuman has another problem: It assumes too much about the very
thing it opposes—that is, the human.
Moving past questions about representation, Donna Haraway has argued
that animals are not just “good to think” or “good to eat” but are also beings
that are good “to live with.”15 Other species are being regarded by anthropol­
ogists “as parts of human society,” in the words of John Knight, “rather than
just symbols of it.”16 Many anthropologists have begun to chart an “ontological
turn” in the discipline, focusing not just on how humans and their worlds are
portrayed but on how they are thought to be.17 Ontology traditionally refers

introduction 3
to a branch of philosophy that examines modes and structures of being, such
as essence and existence. Matei Candea, a British social anthropologist, asso­
ciates the ontological turn with a move away from foundational distinctions
in European thought between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans.18
Recent provocations within anthropology suggest that human beings, seen
ontologically, are multispecies beings.
Anna Tsing’s suggestion that “human nature is an interspecies relation­
ship” can best be understood with these debates in mind.19 “Multispecies
ethnography is less focused on delimiting and defining the boundaries of
the human,” according to Aimee Placas and Jennifer Hamilton.20 Rather than
“What is the essence of the human?” a key question that is orienting multi­
species ethnography is, “What is the human becoming?” Ethnographers have
long been studying how humans have been refashioned by the modern sci­
ences of biology, political economy, and linguistics.21 Ever since Haraway
issued her influential “Manifesto for Cyborgs” in 1985, cultural anthropolo­
gists have been studying how we are becoming cybernetic organisms, hybrids
of machine and organism, creatures of social reality as well as of science
fiction.22 Bringing other forms of life into this conversation, Cary Wolfe sug­
gests that we have become post-­human, since our mode of being is dependent
on complex entanglements with animals, ecosystems, and technology.23
At the Multispecies Salon, the art exhibit where we started testing these
ideas out, ethnographers began to push humans from center stage to study
the lives and deaths of critters who abide with us in multispecies worlds. The
gallery served as an experimental arena for reworking the relationship of
anthropology to the natural sciences.24 While philosophy was offering us crit­
ical theoretical resources, we found that bringing art interventions together
with empirically rich ethnography could produce unexpected ruptures in
dominant thinking about nature and culture.
Visitors to the 2008 Multispecies Salon, which debuted in San Francisco,
could hear the twitter of live cockroaches mingling with recorded sounds of
chimpanzees screeching for meat. A video installation juxtaposed images
of whooping cranes following ultralight aircraft on annual migrations with
footage of humans playing with dolphins in captivity. Collages of naked hu­
man and animal bodies, including a photograph of a fish head on a human
torso, competed for space on the walls with a painting of two men riding a
shark with its mouth agape. Laboratory organisms—fruit flies and pictures
of transgenic E. coli bacteria—shared the gallery with apparently everyday
household artifacts. One installation contained milk cartons and junk mail

4 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

featuring missing amphibians in the place of missing children. A carton fea­
turing the golden toad of Monte Verde, Costa Rica, an animal now presumed
extinct, asked, “Have You Seen Me?”25
Creative interventions at the Multispecies Salon set the stage for research
collaborations where artists, ethnographers, and biological scientists came
together to explore issues of common interest and concern. Bioartists, who
grew art for the show using living matter as their medium, and ecoartists,
who created aesthetic interventions to “help the worms and watersheds,”
offered ethnographers new tools for grappling with multispecies worlds.26
Following Joseph Beuys’s 1973 decree, “Everyone is an artist,” ethnographers
and biologists brought organisms and artifacts into the gallery, tentatively
venturing together into an opening in the art world created by the Salon.27
Interdisciplinary contacts and encounters at the Multispecies Salon fa­
cilitated new ways of thinking and speaking about critters that normally
inhabit the realm of zoe, or “bare life,” creatures that usually are deemed
killable: hermit crabs slated for “disposal” because they were covered with
oil following bp’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, lab rats who had outlived their
usefulness in experiments, and common weeds growing in sidewalk cracks.
Amid apocalyptic tales about environmental destruction, we discussed mod­
est examples of biocultural hope—delectable mushrooms flourishing in
the aftermath of ecological disturbance, microbial cultures enlivening the
politics and value of food, multispecies communities being cultivated by
guerrilla gardeners in clear-­cut forests. We also began to discuss the best
methods for the emerging field of multispecies ethnography—how artistic
tactics and equipment from biological laboratories might augment existing
ethnographic practices. These discussions also prompted us to experiment
with new collaborative approaches to writing ethnography.

POACHING

Trespassing beyond the art gallery further into the domain of biology, mul­
tispecies ethnographers began stealing organisms—such as bacteria, acorns,
and vultures—and claiming them for their own. These transgressions were
inspired by Michel de Certeau, who describes “reading as poaching,” a form
of intellectual trespassing in The Practice of Everyday Life. Reading as poach­
ing allows one to “convert the text through reading,” to trespass on the “pri­
vate hunting reserves” cultivated by elite literati, who alone claim rights to
ascribe meanings to texts or landscapes.28 The tactic of poaching fits within

introduction 5
FIGURE I.1. The Multispecies Salon picked up new elements, like new infectious
spores, as the exhibit moved around the United States. Initially the show followed
the routes of anthropologists as they travelled from San Francisco (2008) to
New Orleans (2010) for a conference: the annual meetings of the American
Anthropological Association. In New York City the exhibit alighted in midtown
Manhattan at the cuny Graduate Center before migrating across the East River into
Brooklyn. There the Salon took up residence at Proteus Gowanus, an art gallery that
was probing how “movements are affecting our future on the planet, bringing crisis
and calamity aplenty.” A piece illustrating one crisis, called Multispecies Migrations,
involved living African Clawed Frogs in mason jars. These frogs were first exported
from South Africa in the 1930s for use in human pregnancy tests. Unbeknownst to
anyone at the time, this frog species can be an asymptomatic carrier of infectious
spores from a deadly fungus that has begun to drive thousands of amphibian species
extinct. Multispecies Migrations (2012) was a collaborative performance art piece
involving Eben Kirksey, Mike Khadavi, Krista Dragomer. Photograph courtesy of
Rashin Fahandej. See multispecies-salon.org/migrations.
de Certeau’s larger argument that consumption is not a passive act deter­
mined by systems of production. He suggests that reading is a primary activ­
ity of modern consumers and, therefore, of everyday life.
The Matsutake Worlds Research Group, a collective of multispecies eth­
nographers formed by Anna Tsing, brought the tactic of poaching to the Multi­
species Salon. Following the supply chain of matsutake mushrooms around
the globe, the group is illuminating the workings of capital and power, nature
and culture. “Thoughts for a World of Poaching,” a short essay published by
Lieba Faier on behalf of the group, describes how they went about collabo­
rative writing. “What does it mean to “poach” another person’s paper, espe­
cially an unpublished one?” asks Faier. The English word “poach” is related to
the Middle French word pocher (to thrust, poke), and the Old French pochier
(to poke out, gouge, prod, jab).29 “Poaching is a way of pushing or poking
pieces of one’s research towards that of another,” suggests Faier, “something
of an offering; not an encroachment but a gift.”30
Conventionally, a Call for Papers (cfp) is issued by editors of books to
enlist the participation of authors. We issued a different sort of cfp to lay
the groundwork for this book: a Call for Poachers.31 A multitude of creative
agents, a swarm, responded to our call. Biological anthropologists, multi­
species ethnographers, and scholars from kindred interdisciplinary fields
attended a special event at the Multispecies Salon in New Orleans. Rather
than give conventional fifteen-­minute conference presentations about their
own work, participants came to the event with texts they had borrowed from
others. A spirited discussion erupted as authors met authors. Reports from
the field about the latest research were “poached” with fresh theory. Infusing
papers with inventive ideas, participants enhanced one another’s papers as
one might poach a pear, using red wine and honey to intensify and transform
the flavor of the fruit.
Shiho Satsuka, a member of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, told
fellow panelists and the assembled audience that “eating is a nodal point of
life and death.” She was poaching insights from the original work of Thom
van Dooren, whose article “Vultures and Their People in India” describes
how the mass death of carrion birds generated piles of dead bodies and an an­
thrax outbreak.32 The vultures had been indirectly poisoned with diclofenac,
a drug used as an anti-­inflammatory for cows. Vultures once gathered along
riverbanks of India, consuming the dead bodies of cattle and other animals,
sometimes including people. Satsuka framed this ethnographic anecdote as
a problem of situated action with other agents in the world, concluding, “As

introduction 7
humans, we are making choices about what multispecies worlds we most
want to live in—in this case, whether we should live with anthrax or with
vultures.”33
Thom van Dooren’s study of entanglements among birds, anthrax viruses,
and dead mammals prompted Satsuka to rethink her research on the inti­
mate associations of matsutake mushrooms with other fungi, plants, and
microbes.34 “When we think of multispecies connectivities,” she said, “eating
is central. One’s eating and living also means killing other species, directly
or indirectly.” Satsuka described her ethnographic fieldwork with a group of
“Matsutake Crusaders” in Kyoto, Japan, who systematically “clean” the for­
est of dead wood, fallen leaves, and grasses to create a niche for red pines, a
species of tree that forms symbiotic associations with matsutake mushrooms.
The Matsutake Crusaders intensively modify forest ecosystems, uprooting
broadleaf trees and other competitors of pines. Rather than preserve pristine
natural ecosystems outside cultural influences, Satsuka found that the cru­
saders were selectively killing some species of trees and disturbing ecosystem
dynamics to “contribute to the flourishing and health of the land and its
critters” (see chapter 3: Blasted Landscapes).35
Panelists pushed and poked at biopolitics, a concept introduced by Michel
Foucault in 1975 to understand how life has been optimized and controlled.
Foucault was largely concerned with the regulation of human life—how pop­
ulations of certain human groups were “allowed to die” (laissez mourir) while
others were “made to live” ( faire vivre). Our discussions brought these ideas
to bear on plants, animals, and mushrooms living together in ecosystems.36 A
freshly published paper by Heather Paxson, describing her ethnographic re­
search on the biology and politics of raw-­milk cheese, was on the table for
poaching. A diversity of microorganisms figured into Paxson’s paper: some
good for making tasty cheese; others bad for human digestive systems. Draw­
ing on Foucault, Paxson illustrated her own idea of microbiopolitics.37 Talking
about microbiopolitical heroes and villains, she made it clear that such desig­
nations are not absolute but must be judged on the basis of situated, contingent
action and effect. Dissent over how to live with microorganisms, Paxson sug­
gested, reflects disagreement about how humans ought to live with one other.38
Illustrating her ideas with a fact of life that made some feel squeamish,
Paxson reminded us of an often cited biological finding: that 90 percent
of the genetic material in “us” is “not us.” Instead, it belongs to “our” mi­
crobiome. “No matter how many times I hear this I still experience a lit­
tle ontological whiplash,” said Jake Metcalf, the poacher of Paxson’s essay.39
The physical presence of microbes within our bodies thus grounds the claim

8 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

FIGURE I.2 Marnia Johnston, Paranoia Bugs, ceramic sculptures, 2005. This artwork
by Johnston, one of the curators of the Multispecies Salon, invoked the contagious
fears that are often triggered when bioartists make tactical interventions (see
chapter 5: Life in the Age of Biotechnology). Photograph by Eben Kirksey. See
multispecies-­salon.org/johnston.

that “human nature is an interspecies relationship.”40 These beings literally

and figuratively make us who we are. Tactical Biopolitics, an influential book
about bioart edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, begins with a mi­
crobiopolitical dictum: “Never think you know all of the species involved in
a decision. Corollary: Never think you speak for all of yourself.”41
Poaching is just one of the many tactics and clever ruses described by de
Certeau. “A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place,” he writes. “It is
always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing.’ ”42
Drawing on the tradition of “tactical media,” which combines cheap devices
and diverse apparatuses with a do-­it-­yourself (diy) ethos, some artists who
exhibited their work at the Multispecies Salon reconfigured biopolitical re­
lations by tinkering with technoscience.43 Working with some of the same
theoretical ideas animating discussions among anthropologists at the Salon,
the artists began to catalyze new insights by reconfiguring matter and mean­
ing with their own creative research practices. Some showcased artworks

introduction 9
made with kitchenware and readily accessible household tools, cooking up
genre-­bending recipes, bringing our attention to practices of interspecies
care and responsibility.44 Other artists insinuated themselves into the place
of ethnographers as they deliberately messed with the lines that convention­
ally separate anthropologists and natives, experts and informants.45

ARTISTS BECOMING ETHNOGRAPHERS

Performance artists tested out clever tricks for generating productive in­
sights at the Multispecies Salon. These artists might be understood as “para-­
ethnographers,” to borrow a term coined by George Marcus. Para-­ethnography
involves collaborations among anthropologists and “other sorts of experts with
shared, discovered, and negotiated critical sensibilities.” The root of “para”
means “alteration, perversion, or simulation.” It also means “auxiliary”—as
in paramedics, professional staff who perform critical medical functions in
ambulances and on the front lines, or paralegals, who are qualified to perform
legal work through their knowledge of the law gained through education or
work experience. Rather than relegate para-­ethnographers to a subservient
role to bona fide anthropologists, fully embracing their work can destabilize
power hierarchies based on expertise.46 As artists and anthropologists experi­
mented with different tactics and methods, the Multispecies Salon became a
“para-­site,” or an auxiliary ethnographic field site.
When the Salon opened in New York City, one performance artist who
called herself the Reverend of Nano Bio Info Cogno brought critical atten­
tion to biotechnology dreams and schemes. While blessing the gallery open­
ing, she lampooned popular beliefs about the capacity of technology to save
humanity from medical and environmental disasters. The Reverend of Nano
Bio Info Cogno offered prophecy of technologically mediated rapture. After
leading sing-­along hymns for scholars at the City University of New York
Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan, she ministered to the masses out­
side on Fifth Avenue. Some anthropologists at the Salon maintained their
distance from the Reverend—perhaps wary of being caught up in a perfor­
mance by a fellow cultural critic who was using unfamiliar methods and
tactics. Many passersby were simply perplexed or amused by her presence.
Others let the artist do her work. She turned ethnographers into informants,
drawing out ambivalent insights about biology and technology.47 Cornering
an ethnomusicologist who was wandering down Fifth Avenue, she initiated
a lively dialogue by inviting him to commune with his mobile phone:

10 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

 “Put it to your forehead for the third eye experience. You are connected
to that device, you can’t live without it.”
“I want to,” replied the obliging ethnomusicologist with a wan smile.
“I’m trying to put it away, to keep it in the bag, to not have it on my
body.”
“But why, son? Don’t fight it. Join the Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno.”
(see a video of this exchange at multispecies-­salon.org/pilar)
Praba Pilar, the Colombian performance artist who masquerades as the Rev­
erend, has long been critical of emerging technologies that are entrenching
divides marked by geography, race, and class.48 She insists that we think crit­
ically about how technologies are always entangled with systems of resource
extraction, industrial production, and labor.49 But before she began dressing
up in a silver jumpsuit, she found that few people in the United States were
willing to take her seriously—few were willing to listen to her critiques of
biotechnology and inequality. Adopting the persona of an outlandish biotech
booster, Pilar began masquerading as a white person under a thick layer of
silver makeup. Fervently celebrating the vacuous promises of new technolo­
gies in this disguise, she reached new audiences by staging uneasy, thought-­
provoking interventions (see chapter 5: Life in the Age of Biotechnology).50
The Reverend of Nano Bio Info Cogno was just one, among many, perfor­
mance artists who turned the tables on anthropologists at the Multispecies
Salon.51 Some of these artists became authors, contributing chapters to this
book. Caitlin Berrigan invited spectators to join her performance by sipping
dandelion root tea while she fed a living dandelion with her own hepatitis
C-­infected blood.52 This gesture of reciprocal care and reciprocal violence
illustrated that Berrigan’s blood, which would be dangerous to any human,
could nonetheless still serve as a nutritious fertilizer for plants (see chapter
4: Life Cycle of a Common Weed). Miriam Simun offered up a tasty sam­
pling of homemade cheese—a blend of goat’s milk and human breast milk
obtained from an online marketplace. This edible intervention prompted
animated and agitated discussions about the risks of interspecies and intra­
species contact and contagion (see recipe 2: Human Cheese).
Performance art augmented conventional ethnographic methods in a
project by Karin Bolender, who describes herself as “a poet with a busted
tongue.” Bolender’s research involved a seven-­week walking journey in the
US South with an American Spotted Ass, a variant breed of the common do­
mestic donkey (Equus asinus) bred specifically for its piebald (spotted) coat

introduction 11
color. Taking art interventions beyond galleries, Bolender walked with her
donkey from Mississippi to Virginia, using her excursion as an opportunity
to glean ethnographic insights about landscapes blasted by past horrors and
present global economic and political forces. Rather than just write up the
results of this research, she made bars of soap as an experiment in multispe­
cies storytelling. Words contain the danger of hurting—or, at the very least,
obscuring—ourselves and those we love; Bolender’s project involved weav­
ing material and symbolic elements together into a different kind of story.
The soap, made with the milk of her donkey companion, congealed invisible
traces of bodies and antibodies entangled in specific times and places (see
chapter 2: R.A.W. Assmilk Soap).
Hal Foster’s critical essay “The Artist as Ethnographer?” (1994) suggests
that artists and ethnographers once envied each other. From the artist’s
point of view, Foster claims, this envy stemmed from ethnographers’ ability
to conduct contextual analysis, to forge interdisciplinary connections, and
to engage in self-­critique. On the flip side, Foster alleges that with the artist-­
envy of ethnographers, “The artist becomes a paragon of formal reflexivity,
sensitive to difference and open to chance, a self-­aware reader of culture
understood as text.” Anthropology is “prized as the science of alterity,” Fos­
ter claims, describing others and outsiders on the margins.53 If Foster was
writing about the more recent multispecies Zeitgeist sweeping art and eth­
nography, perhaps he would take a similar line to that of Eduardo Kohn,
who writes, “If we take otherness to be the privileged vantage from which
we defamiliarize our ‘nature,’ we risk making our forays into the nonhuman
a search for ever-­stranger positions from which to carry out this project.
Nature begins to function like an ‘exotic’ culture.”54
Getting past any feelings of envy that might have been present when Fos­
ter penned his critical intervention in the 1990s, artists and ethnographers
have since initiated and sustained long-­term collaborations based on shared
aesthetic and critical sensibilities. Ethnographic Terminalia, a curatorial col­
lective that has been staging annual art exhibits since 2009, is only one of
the more steadfast groups of artists and anthropologists committed to explor­
ing the possibilities of new media, new locations for interventions, and new
methods of asking old questions.55 Multispecies ethnographers began col­
laborating with artists to study long-­standing concerns about human nature,
as well as speculative questions about matter and meaning. Anthropologists
insinuated themselves into the place of artists at the Multispecies Salon to
figure out new responses to critiques about the voice, agency, and subjectiv­
ity of nonhuman “Others.”

12 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

ETHNOGRAPHERS BECOMING ARTISTS

During an earlier experimental moment in anthropology, James Clifford

drew attention to the fact that ethnography “is always caught up in the in­
vention, not the representation, of cultures.”56 If Clifford understood ethnog­
raphy as the art of writing culture, then multispecies ethnographers began
making culture by collaborating with artists. “Ethnography is much richer in
possibility if it collaborates with the practices of other intellectual crafts that
have a kinship and resemblance to it,” write Fernando Calzadilla and George
Marcus.57 Rather than just producing “the monograph” or “the essay,” an­
thropologists started to generate multimedia installations and performative
interventions, bringing attention to multispecies associations we take for
granted and exposing emergent forms of life. Multispecies ethnographers
began using art to explore bio­cultural borderlands, places where species
meet.58
Future Mix, a pioneering collaborative project that used art and eth­
nography to probe biocultural entanglements, investigated new possibili­
ties opened up by transgenesis, cloning, regenerative medicine, and stem
cell science. Sarah Franklin, a cultural anthropologist at the University of
Cambridge, collaborated with a biochemical engineer, an artist, and school­
children to generate imaginative responses to emergent technologies. The
team fleshed out new biological connections implied (and forged) by the
cultivation of human stem cell colonies and the production of admixed
human-­animal hybrid embryos. “Multi-­perspectival responses” emerged
from the artistic interventions, writes Franklin, “providing a contrast to
the insights gained through ethnography or more conventional academic
research.”59
Franklin’s team used conventional media, such as drawings, cartoon ani­
mations, and videos. Other multispecies ethnographers have cultivated crit­
ical friendships with bioartists who grow their own artworks with living mat­
ter. Some of these thinkers and tinkerers have even created new life forms,
opening up a host of ethical questions.60 Cobbling together medical and
visual apparatuses in new arrangements, bioartists have illuminated living
objects of interest to anthropologists and opened up new ethnographic hori­
zons.61 Ethnographers are expanding their toolkits with help from these art­
ists, who are practiced at poaching scientific instrumentation—for instance,
microscopes and dna test kits. Purloining materials and methods from bio­
logical laboratories, ethnographers are producing artworks to ask their own
research questions.

introduction 13
 Ethnographers, artists, and living organisms co-­produced a number of
artworks at the Multispecies Salon: a ready-­made flask with transgenic fruit
flies, a retrofit refrigerator housing a living rainforest ecosystem, a collage
made with microscopic images of a queer bacteria called Wolbachia (see
chapter 5: Life in the Age of Biotechnology). These para-­ethnographic ob­
jects facilitated unconventional ways of speaking and thinking about the is­
sues at hand.62 Against the backdrop of this lively art, ethnographers gave
presentations about their use of novel methods and tactics. Eva Hayward
discussed how she “sexed” cup corals by “extracting gut contents with a Pas­
teur pipette and examining them for sperm under a compound microscope.”
Perverting the scientific instrumentation at her disposal, and using her
own appendages, Hayward also described how she came to know cup corals
through her “fingeryeyes” by touching, tasting, smelling, and groping the
creatures.63
Food artists also showed ethnographers how to craft recipes to rework
multispecies entanglements with everyday household appliances. They made
concrete proposals for creating livable futures in the aftermath of disaster
by reworking mater and meaning. Linda Noelle, the former poet laureate
of Ukiah and a member of the Koyungkowi tribe, invited us to savor the
bitter flavor of acorn mush while contemplating deeply rooted biocultural
networks that have survived white settler colonialism (see recipe 4: Bitter
Medicine Is Stronger). Wrapping up indigenous knowledges of starvation
foods in brightly colored plastic packets, the artist Lindsay Kelley drew on
her own familial entanglements with the US Southwest to subvert dominant
regimes for managing life (see recipe 1: Plumpiñon). Deanna Pindell’s guer­
rilla bioremediation strategy, her recipe for reseeding clear-­cut forests with
brightly colored wool balls, offers an opportunity to think about the hopeful
possibilities that emerge when one subverts dominant regimes for managing
life (see recipe 3: Multispecies Communities).64
A pair of cultural anthropologists from the Matsutake Worlds Research
Group who masquerade under the pen name Mogu Mogu brought delectable
mushrooms to a multispecies meal in the gallery. (Mogu Mogu, in China,
translates as “mushroom” twice over, while in Japan, the phrase registers the
kind of satisfaction in the belly one feels when one says “yum, yum.”65) While
participants smacked their lips with delight after eating matsutake mush­
rooms, many certainly also experienced indigestion after sampling insects,
dandelions, and other edible companions. Eating freshly baked sourdough
bread became an opportunity to discuss Haraway’s ideas about companion
species—organic beings such as rice, bees, tulips, and intestinal flora, all of

14 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

FIGURE I.3 Myrtle von Damitz III, Slug Fest, 2010. Paintings by von Damitz, the core
member of the “curatorial swarm” who oversaw the participation of more than
eighty artists in the New Orleans show, framed our discussions of creatures that
are good to live with and to eat. Image courtesy of the artist and Andy Antippas,
Barrister’s Gallery. See multispecies-­salon.org/vondamitz.

which make life for humans what it is, and vice versa.66 The etymological
roots of “companion,” Haraway reminds us, can be traced to the Latin cum
panis (with bread). Sniffing living sourdough cultures during this multispe­
cies meal became an opportunity to nourish indigestion, to dwell on the
presence of parasitic critters eating and living with us.67 (For a video of this
meal, see multispecies-­salon.org/edible.)
Parasites are loathed in popular culture. The bacteria, viruses, and fungi
living on the surface of our bodies, and in our guts, are usually noticed only
when they make us sick. Animals like rats and cockroaches, as well as weedy
plants like dandelions, are associated with vacant lots, trash heaps, and other
sites of abandonment. In French, the word parasite has more diverse asso­
ciations: It refers to “noise” in addition to biological or social freeloaders.68
Michel Serres, a French thinker, wrote an unusual book, The Parasite, which
celebrates the creative and productive potential of noise: “The parasite
doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop eating or drinking or yelling or burping or making
thousands of noises or filling space with its swarming and din. . . . [I]t runs
and grows. It invades and occupies.”69
Anthropologists and artists who poached Serres’s ideas at the Multispecies

introduction 15
FIGURE I.4 Goats from the Pretty Doe Dairy, a guerrilla
bioremediation scheme, by Nina Nichols and Amy Jenkins
(2010). Photograph courtesy of the Black Forest Fancies.
See multispecies-­salon.org/prettydoedairy.

Salon came to understand the exhibit as a para-­site, or a para-­ethnographic

field site. Ethnographic parasites, in the words of George Marcus, are spaces
that facilitate alternative ways to speak and think with “moderately empow­
ered people” who are “deeply complicit with and implicated in powerful in­
stitutional processes. . . . The para-­site is a space of excess or surplus in a
subject’s actions but is never fully controllable by him or her. [It is] a site of
alternativity in which anything, or at least something different, could hap­
pen.”70 The Multispecies Salon involved the unfolding of encounters. The
exhibit was an initial attempt to get at something we did not already know
rather than a reorganizing of existing knowledge. In this book we have writ­
ten up the results of this provisional experiment in conversation with a mul­
titude of poachers and para-­ethnographers.

16 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

GLEANINGS FROM A PARA-­S ITE

The same transgressive spirit that guided artists and anthropologists who col­
laborated in making culture at the Salon also guided our turn back to writing
culture, as we gleaned texts, images, and ideas from galleries after the art­
works were packed up and shipped home. Gleaning is a form of trespassing
that makes use of excess. Rusten Hogness, a science writer, has produced a
multimedia website called “Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change,” with ethno­
graphic vignettes about contemporary gleaning practices in Northern Cali­
fornia.71 Hogness has recorded the stories of gleaners who descend on farm
fields after harvests, picking up any food that is left.
“Gleaning is a democratic, individualized practice,” says Susan Friend
Harding, a cultural anthropologist who accompanied Hogness to lettuce
fields and orchards near Santa Cruz. Gleans involve swarms of people who
descend on freshly harvested fields who generate “a gathering, rather than
a community.” Rather than “conscious collaborations, interactions across
boundaries” of language and culture, gleans are “a bit out of control . . . often
with an element of revelry.” Both the Bible and the Qur’an have passages
celebrating gleaning and charity, but recent legislation has turned gleaning
into stealing. Gleaners must obtain special permissions from landowners in
the contemporary United States before taking excess produce from fields.72
The spirit of gleaning guided the intellectual work that went into editing this
book, as common threads from diverse stories told at the Multispecies Salon
were picked out and woven together.73
“Narratives appeared in sudden snippets and disjointed revelations” at
the Multispecies Salon, wrote Matt Thompson in a review of the exhibit
for the Savage Minds blog. “There was a clear connection to the human,”
he continued. “The exhibit remained consistently relevant to anthropology
throughout. And it sent out rhizomes to tap into relationships with other
living things: animal, plant, microbe. Hidden ecologies—networks of bio-­
culture—unsettled established narratives about history, gender, and trade.
No noble savages were found in this clearing of naturecultures. Indeed,
romantics were largely absent while the surrealist love of the found object
and the psychoanalytic was embraced with revelry. Painting, sculpture, fash­
ion, architecture, collage, video, photography, and installation art enlivened
the show. While robots roamed around, clacking and blinking, a troupe of
actresses demonstrated a home pregnancy test by injecting human urine into
a frog.”74
This book is a gathering of poachings and gleanings from a para-­site—a

introduction 17
collection of recipes, ethnographic vignettes, and other genre-­bending essays
that speak to the three themes at play in the Multispecies Salon. “Blasted
Landscapes” (part I) will lead readers from the wickedly hot, haunted, and
weedy US South to the radioactive gardens of Japan, and back again. Recipes
and treatises about “Edible Companions” (part II) will unravel microbiopo­
litical entanglements with critters that are both good to live with and good
to eat. Creatures that are proliferating amid the dreams and schemes of late
capitalism will be illuminated by essays concerning “Life and Biotechnol­
ogy” (part III). Gathering together snippets of narrative and establishing
connections among disjointed revelations, this book knits together insights
that emerged during the Multispecies Salon. Bringing together multispecies
ethnographers, theorists, and artists who double as authors, this collection
departs from apocalyptic tales about environmental destruction, and fabu­
lous stories of salvation, to illustrate sites of modest biocultural hope.

NOTES

Collaborative authorship is a relatively new phenomenon in mainstream cultural

anthropology. This gives us the opportunity to invent new conventions for spelling
out collaborative labor relations. The journal Science, for example, requires authors
to quantify contributions for each paper they publish with percentage points. In ad­
dition to tallying up numbers for the design and interpretation of experiments, Sci-
ence authors are asked to account for “particular, specialized roles in the research,
e.g. statistical analysis, crystallography, preparation of cell lines.” Eben Kirksey did
the lion’s share of the work in writing this introduction. He designed the experi­
ment (curating art exhibits to test out new methods and tactics of multispecies eth­
nography) and played the leading role in the acquisition of the data by installing the
exhibits, interviewing artists, coordinating para-­ethnographers, and formulating a
Call for Poachers. Kirksey also took the lead in interpreting and analyzing data, as
well as in drafting and revising the manuscript. Craig Schuetze helped in the early
phases of the project by participating in the design of the experiment, formulating
the cfp, and conducting and transcribing interviews. Schuetze also transformed
“raw” field notes into “cooked” thick description, drafting the very first accounts
of Multispecies Salon happenings. Stefan Helmreich provided pointers to histories
of anthropology and kept chasing after questions of sex, gender, and race as they
appeared and (sometimes) disappeared in discussions of multispecies becomings.
This introduction expands our earlier essays (Kirksey and Helmreich, “The Emer­
gence of Multispecies Ethnography”; Kirksey et al., “Poaching at the Multispecies
Salon”). We build on central theoretical concepts and claims from these earlier
interventions, pushing and poking them in new directions. For the “Science/aaas
Authorship Form and Statement of Conflicts of Interest” see http://www.science
mag.org, accessed February 13, 2014.

18 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

 1. Ron Broglio has explored related questions about art in the cultural world
of humans while coming to terms with nonhuman realms. He explores how art
calls us to consider and negotiate the space of the animal other: Broglio, Surface
Encounters, xvii.
2. Mitchell was actually writing about history, but the same can certainly be said
of ethnography: Mitchell, “Can the Mosquito Speak?” 29.
3. Grimm et al., A Greek-­English Lexicon of the New Testament, 168.
4. Susan Leigh Star first suggested, “It is both more analytically interesting and
more politically just to begin with the question, cui bono?, than to begin with a cel­
ebration of the fact of human/non-­human mingling”: Star, “Power, Technologies,
and the Phenomenology of Conventions,” 43. See also Haraway, When Species Meet.
5. Haraway, Primate Visions.
6. Tsing, “Unruly Edges,” 144.
7. Morgan, The American Beaver and His Works, 281–82; see also Feeley-­Harnik,
“The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver.”
8. See, e.g., Star and Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translation,’ and Bound­
ary Objects.”
9. Kirksey and Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” con­
tains an exhaustive review of the literature on ethnobotany, animal studies, political
ecology, ethno-­primatology, and science studies. For other recent literature reviews,
see Cassidy, “Lives with Others”; Fuentes “Ethnoprimatology and the Anthropology
of the Human-­Primate Interface”; Mullin, “Mirrors and Windows”; Nazarea, “Local
Knowledge and Memory in Biodiversity Conservation.”
10. Appadurai, “Introduction,” 17, 20.
11. Donna Haraway has critically evaluated the prospect of “speaking with” other
beings across species lines. She describes how Penny Patterson, a graduate student at
Stanford University, taught a modified version of American Sign Language to Koko,
a gorilla with a “vulgar sense of humor” who invented a variety of jokes and insults:
see Haraway, Primate Visions, 142. Her more recent Companion Species Manifesto
describes attempts at interspecies communication with her own dogs and explores
the power relations at play in a “pedagogy of positive bondage” that provides canines
“the freedom to live safely in multi-­species, urban and sub-­urban environments
with very little physical restraint and no corporal punishment”: Haraway, The Com-
panion Species Manifesto, 46. Joe Hutto, a naturalist who spent a year living with a
group of turkeys, learned how to interpret and imitate turkey calls and even initiate
dialogue about other beings in the world. Hutto learned to say, “Look, a snake!”
and “Everything is OK.” “With the exception of my incorrect vocalizations now
and then,” Hutto reports, “we have never had any significant miscommunication”:
Hutto, Illumination in the Flatwoods, 152. Multispecies ethnographers are starting
to follow naturalists, primatologists, and comparative psychologists to responsibly
speak with and for others, across species lines.
12. Latour, Politics of Nature, 67, 231–32.
13. Here we are echoing Mitchell’s question “Can the mosquito speak?”
Mitchell, in turn, was borrowing from Gayatri Spivak, who famously asked, “Can
the subaltern speak?” Spivak was asking whether subordinate others had any pos­

introduction 19
sibility of being represented in dominant languages and discourses: Mitchell, The
Rule of Experts; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” For a similar criticism of Latour,
see Kohn, How Forests Think, 40.
14. Susan Leigh Star, personal communication, September 12, 2008.
15. Haraway, When Species Meet.
16. Knight, Animals in Person, 1.
17. Henare et al., Thinking through Things, 6.
18. Candea, “I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat,” 243.
19. Tsing, “Unruly Edges,” 144.
20. Hamilton and Placas, “Anthropology Becoming . . . ?,” 252.
21. See Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower Today”; Foucault, The History of Sexuality;
Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic.
22. Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 65.
23. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?
24. Marcus and Myers, The Traffic in Culture, describes how art and anthropology
can interact to create a “discursive arena.” See also Calzadilla and Marcus, “Artists
in the Field.” The fertile terrain where art and anthropology intersect has already
been discussed: see Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer”; Pinney and Thomas, Be-
yond Aesthetics; Schneider, “Uneasy Relationships.”
25. The artists whose work animated the prose in this paragraph are, in order of
mention, Craig Schuetze (Animal Ambassadors); Rachel Mayeri (Primate Cinema), a
collaborative piece involving Traci Warkentin, Eben Kirksey, and Michael Goodier
(Umwelten); Frédéric Landmann (Wolbachia and Drosophila); Andre Brodyk (Alz-
heimer’s Portraits); and Ruth Wallen (If Frogs Sicken and Die, What Will Happen to
the Princes?).
26. Bioart entails “tactical biopolitics,” a do-­it-­yourself approach to remaking
biological and political relations, in the words of Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip,
who edited Tactical Biopolitics, a definitive book on the subject. For other key ac­
counts of the bioart movement, see Anker and Nelkin, The Molecular Gaze; Kac,
Signs of Life; Wolfe, “From Dead Meat to Glow-­in-­the-­Dark Bunnies”; Zylinska,
Bioethics in the Age of New Media. Ecoartists work with dynamic processes and
agents—organisms that grow, mutate, and die, according to Linda Weintraub’s ac­
count in To Life! Grounded in an ecological ethic, these artists are experimenting
with new practices of restoration and remediation: see Wallen, “Ecological Art,”
235.
27. Beuys was a twentieth-­century art icon who inspired much subsequent work
by ecoartists and environmental activists. One of Beuys’s iconic performance pieces,
Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), involved living in a cage for three
days with an animal—a coyote named “Little John”—in a New York City art gallery.
Critics of the day uncritically celebrated Beuys’s attempt to reconcile and communicate
with animals, nature, and shamanic spirits of Native Americans. Art historians
have more recently subjected the piece to rigorous critique. Beuys moved beyond
the notion that “nature” is a physical backdrop to human history but assumed that
nature is deeply ingrained in the “cultural unconscious” of modern human societies.

20 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

While mystifying nature and misappropriating indigenous religious traditions, Beuys
enlisted the coyote in a “social sculpture” that inadvertently reinforced and sustained
the idea that humans are dominant over animals and ecological systems. Regarding
animals, plants, or microbes as “artists” or “collaborators” in a common project
similarly risks hiding relations of domination and exploitation. On Beuys, see Gandy,
“Contradictory Modernities,” 638. On collaboration, see Kirksey, Freedom in Entangled
Worlds, 2–7. On hidden hegemonies in art, see Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational
Aesthetics,” 65. For a discussion of the agency of material artifacts, see Gell, Art and
Agency.
28. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 165, 171, 176.
29. Here we are “poaching” de Certeau’s original ideas and language. In the
French original of The Practice of the Everyday Life (L’invention du quotidien), he
does not play with the Middle French word pocher or the Old French pochier. The
original text uses the word braconnage, which only means “poaching” in the sense
of hunting. We are layering in these other meanings, building on interpretations by
the Matsutake Worlds Research Group and engaging in trans-­linguistic word play.
30. Matsutake Worlds Research Group, “Thoughts for a World of Poaching.” See
also Choy et al., “A New Form of Collaboration,” 385.
31. “cfp: Call for Poachers,” accessed July 19, 2013, http://ebenkirksey.blogspot.
com.au.
32. van Dooren, “Vultures and Their People in India.”
33. Satsuka, “Eating Well with Others/Eating Others Well,” 134.
34. Matsutake form structures called mycorrhiza, or “fungus roots,” with the
roots of red pines. Through these mycorrhiza, the mushrooms exchange nutrients
with living trees.
35. Haraway, quoted in Satsuka, “Eating Well with Others/Eating Others Well,”
137. See also chapter 3 in this volume.
36. Along related lines, Rafi Youatt describes how biopolitics became “a form
of ecologically distributed power that involves interventions in human and nonhu­
man lives”: Youatt, “Counting Species,” 409.
37. Microbiopolitics involves the circulation of matter and meaning in local
networks, outside dominant regimes of biopolitics—standardized and centralized
approaches to managing life. In a similar vein, Molly Mullin has described how
some dog owners, who call themselves “wild feeders,” refuse to buy into the corpo­
rate pet food industry. Elsewhere, Mullin has conducted an authoritative review of
the literature on animals in anthropology. She explores studies that have explicitly
attempted to combine economic, ecological, and symbolic perspectives on food.
Research on hunting and pastoralism has begun to grapple with how relationships
among humans, animals, and their environments have been transformed by
colonial and neocolonial processes: Mullin, “Feeding the Animals,” 293; Mullin,
“Mirrors and Windows,” 209.
38. Paxson, “Post-­Pasteurian Cultures,” 15. See also the interlude in this volume.
39. Metcalf, “Fermenting Ethics,” 147.
40. Tsing, “Unruly Edges,” 144.

introduction 21
 41. da Costa and Philip, Tactical Biopolitics, xvii–xix. Dumit, “Foreword,” xii.
42. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xix.
43. “An aesthetic of poaching, tricking, reading, speaking, strolling, shopping,
desiring” animates the tactical media movement: Garcia and Lovink, “The abc of
Tactical Media.” See also Raley, Tactical Media, 43; Critical Art Ensemble, Digital
Resistance, 23; Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles, 25; da Costa and Philip, Tactical Biopol-
itics, xvii–xix.
44. Bureaud, “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Biological Art,” 39; Zurr, “Compli­
cating Notions of Life,” 402; Kac, Signs of Life.
45. Anthropology has long been focused on “representing the colonized,” in
the words of Edward Said: Said, “Representing the Colonized.” One influential art
intervention in 1993, “The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey,” deliberately
played with this problematic exhibitionary tradition. Guillermo Gomez-­Peña and
Coco Fusco put themselves on display in museums as caged Amerindians from an
imaginary island. While the artists’ intent was to create a satirical commentary on
the notion of discovery, they soon realized that many of their viewers believed the
fiction and thought the artists were real “savages”: Fusco, “Couple in the Cage,”
accessed February 13, 2014, http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco.
46. Holmes and Marcus, “Refunctioning Ethnography,” 1104; Marcus, “Multi-­
sited Ethnography,” 188; Marcus, Para-­Sites, 7–9.
47. See also Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer.”
48. Similar insights about inequalities in access to health care that cut along
lines of race, class, and geography have been explored by medical anthropologists:
see, e.g., King, “Immigration, Race, and Geographies of Difference in the Tubercu­
losis Pandemic”; Sunder Rajan, Biocapital.
49. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_Onco-
Mouse, 42.
50. Fortun, “Mediated Speculations in the Genomics Futures Markets,” 146. See
also chapter 5 in this volume.
51. Playing with the French word hôte, which means both “host” and “guest” in
English, Michel Serres suggests, “It might be dangerous not to decide who is the
host and who is the guest, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite and who
is the table d’hôte, who has the gift and who has the loss, and where hostility begins
within hospitality”: Serres, The Parasite, 15–16.
52. “Viruses appear as authors, as agents; they govern us, they rule, they reign;
they are fickle, whimsical, unreasonable, inconstant” writes Ed Cohen. “They veer
from one place to another; they shift shapes”: Cohen, “The Paradoxical Politics of
Viral Containment,” 17. With this performance, Berrigan explored the limits of viral
agency, showing that human viruses fail to rule and reign in the world of plants.
53. Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?” 305.
54. E-­mail from Kohn, quoted in Kirksey and Helmreich, “The Emergence of
Multispecies Ethnography,” 562.
55. For an early example of such collaborations, after the critical turn in
anthropology, see: Calzadilla and Marcus, “Artists in the Field.” For more on
Ethnographic Terminalia, see Brodine et al., Ethnographic Terminalia.

22 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

 56. Clifford, “Introduction,” 2. See also Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as
Cultural Critique, 8.
57. Calzadilla and Marcus, “Artists in the Field,” 96–97.
58. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 25; Haraway, When Species Meet. See also
Schneider and Wright, Contemporary Art and Anthropology, 1; Kolodny, “Rethinking
Frontier Literary History as the Stories of First Cultural Contact,” 18.
59. Franklin, “Future Mix,” 81.
60. da Costa and Philip, Tactical Biopolitics, xvii–xix. Dumit, “Foreword,” xii.
61. Bureaud, “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Biological Art,” 39; Zurr, “Compli­
cating Notions of Life,” 402; Kac, Signs of Life.
62. See Marcus, Para-­Sites, 5.
63. Hayward, “Fingeryeyes.”
64. Pindell is an ecoartist whose work addresses the web of interrelationships
in which art exists—the physical, biological, cultural, political, and historical as­
pects of ecosystems. “Ecoartists, in creating their work, engage in collaborations
with places and nonhuman agencies,” writes Beth Carruthers. Ecoart involves mak­
ing subversive interventions or confrontational direct actions. It entails a mode of
praxis, to borrow the key phrase from Carruthers’s work, which involves “acting as
if everything matters”: Carruthers, “Praxis,” 8. See also Gablik, The Reenchantment
of Art, 7; Wallen, “Ecological Art,” 235.
65. Tim Choy and Shiho Satsuka are Mogu. See Matsutake Worlds Research
Group, “A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology,” 384–89; Myers,
“Poaching Mushrooms,” 139–41.
66. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 15.
67. Haraway, When Species Meet, 78, 300.
68. Wolfe, “Introduction,” xiii.
69. Serres, The Parasite, 253.
70. Marcus, Para-­Sites, 5.
71. Hogness participated in the first Multispecies Salon event in 2006, playing a
special segment of a different radio show, “California Bird Talk,” which is available
on his website at http://www.hogradio.org. “Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change” is
hosted by the Digital Humanities initiative at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, accessed February 13, 2014, http://humweb.ucsc.edu/gleaningstories.
72. Donna Haraway collaborated with Hogness on the project. (Hogness is
Haraway’s husband). She describes gleaning as “complex connection through
bodily pleasure.” Venturing into these fields became an opportunity for Haraway
to reflect on the fact that hunger “is not a natural disaster but a political arrange­
ment.” She says, “The history of gleaning is tied to the rights of the peasantry to
glean after the harvest.” With enclosures came “the deepening of rights of property
over and against the rights of communities, gleaning became illegal in Europe.”
The contemporary gleaning initiatives described by Hogness are sponsored by
Ag Against Hunger, a group of businesses interested in charity “within a world
where we take poverty and hunger as a natural fact”: see http://humweb.ucsc.edu
/gleaningstories.
73. If Clifford Geertz famously described “The Anthropologist as Author,” per­

introduction 23
haps it is time to move beyond an individualistic model of innovation to think about
the anthropologist as editor who gleans narratives and ideas from others: Geertz,
Works and Lives.
74. Matt Thompson, “Swarm,” accessed January 15, 2011, http://savageminds.
org/2010/11/29/swarm. See also Hannah et al., “The Xenopus Pregnancy Test.”

24 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

 part i

BLASTED
LANDSCAPES

introduction 25
THE MULTISPECIES SALON MIGRATED from San Francisco to New Orleans in 2010, as
oil from the Deepwater Horizon spread in the Gulf of Mexico. Freshly blasted by
multiple disasters, the urban landscape of New Orleans became a place where
a multitude of thinkers and tinkerers were bringing critical attention to the idea
of hope. David Sullivan, a local ecological artist, exhibited digital animations of
oil refineries at the Salon. In his Sunset Refinery, bright clouds of green, orange,
and yellow bled into dripping tar balls and hazy dark smog. Frog calls, peeping
in the background, fuse into noise of passing traffic and pumping pistons. This
piece illustrates ambivalent hopes that have emerged with industrial capitalism.
The bright cascade of colors in the background invokes oil industry marketing
images that portray refineries as aesthetic objects of beauty. As this slowly evolv-
ing lightshow illuminates toxic chemical reactions, it offers an opportunity to re-
flect on the ambivalent properties of the pharmakon —a poison that can double
as remedy, an obstacle or an opportunity. Glowing forms of life growing on the
digital sculpture, Spanish moss and fleshy tumors, are monstrous figures of hope
(see Sullivan’s digital animation Sunset Refinery at http://multispecies-­salon.org
/sullivan).

——
FIGURE P.1 Video still from David Sullivan, Sunset Refinery, a continuously looping,
animated 3D painting in hd with sound (2008). Courtesy of the artist. See
multispecies-­salon.org/sullivan.

26 Kirksey, Schuetze, and Helmreich

introduction 27
 CHAPT ER 1
——

hope in blasted landscapes

Eben Kirksey, Nicholas Shapiro,
and Maria Brodine

In early November 2010, the multitude of creative agents animating the Mul­
tispecies Salon in New Orleans descended on a warehouse, the Ironworks,
and hastily remodeled it as an art gallery. There curators gathered together
some sixty artworks orbiting around a central question: “In the aftermath
of disasters—in blasted landscapes that have been transformed by multiple
catastrophes—what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?” The Ironworks
became a site where culture workers who were deeply implicated in sweep­
ing political, economic, and ecological transformations cautiously explored
future horizons in the wake of recent disasters that put New Orleans in the
national spotlight.1 The opening night of the exhibit coincided with the Sec­
ond Saturday Art Walk in the emerging Saint Claude Arts District. Hundreds
flocked to the Ironworks, crowding to see a recycled fashion show by Calam­
ity, a designer who outfitted models in postapocalyptic garb and crust-­punk
drag. The usual crowd of bike-­riding twenty-­somethings was there in full
force. A strong current of cleaner-­cut middle-­aged viewers and a sprinkling
of out-­of-­towners rounded out the masses. “I flew down from New York for
this,” a beaming fifty-­year-­old noted as she slipped on headphones to hear the
beehive of the sound::medicine::house installation, composed of wood
and plants salvaged from nearby blighted buildings.
Dark, dystopic images, a digital rendering of fugitive emissions from
nearby oil refineries, flickered overhead.2 Illustrations of deformed and
crippled insects, collected from the shadows of nuclear disasters, covered a
makeshift plywood wall.3 Images of chemical oceanographers—working to
FIGURE 1.1 Video still from David Sullivan, Fugitive Emissions, a continuously loop­
ing, animated 3D painting in hd with sound (2008). See multispecies-­salon.org/
sullivan. Courtesy of the artist.

make sense of molecular and microbial transformations taking place near

the site of the Deepwater Horizon explosion—fueled discussions about up­
coming protests against bp and funeral processions for the creatures killed
by the flood of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. One might expect that this accumu­
lated evidence of advancing disasters—a perfect storm of human follies and
agencies beyond the control of gallery visitors—might dampen their revelry.
Instead, these signs of calamity strangely fueled a celebratory atmosphere in
which it seemed as if anything might happen at any time.4
Amid revelry in the wreckage of natural and fiscal catastrophes we found
semi-­empowered intellectuals who were embracing and tussling with forms
of collective desire. Powerful forces have tried to appropriate the very idea of
hope.5 As a vacuous political slogan, “hope” has bulldozed over our dreams.6
Yet artists, scientists, and other culture workers gathered together at the
Multispecies Salon to engage in strategic storytelling about Hope in Blasted
Landscapes.7 Building on the critical insights of these storytellers, this essay
explores the persistence of life in the face of catastrophe. Following people,
and following multiple species, from the art gallery to the blasted landscapes
of New Orleans and beyond, we trace the contours of modest forms of bio-­
cultural hope.8

30 Kirksey, Shapiro, and Brodine

OIL IN WATER

The flood of oil spreading in the Gulf set the backdrop for the Multispecies
Salon in New Orleans.9 When news of oil plumes first reached Jacqueline
Bishop, an artist who teaches at Loyola University, she was hardly surprised.
Some five years earlier, she had created Trespass, an uncanny illustration of
disasters looming on future horizons. First exhibited in the months before
Hurricane Katrina, this assemblage of flotsam and jetsam—baby shoes and
birds’ nests, toys and balls of twine—contained aesthetic premonitions of
the floating debris that were omnipresent after the storm. Coated in a black
patina, a dark, glossy finish like crude oil, this artwork also prefigured the oil
flood that came in 2010. At first blush, from far away, Trespass seems to just
be a collection of wreckage—a dreadful rendering of disaster. When viewed
from the middle distance, it appears to shimmer and dance about like oil in
water—moving in different directions, coalescing around a heterogeneous
collection of objects. Scrutinizing this aqueous landscape at a close range,
moving in even closer still, reveals that it is populated with hopeful figures.
A figure might be regarded as “a fashioning, a resemblance, a shape; also
a chimerical vision,” following Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum of
1730.10 “To figure” also means to have a role in a story.11 Gathering up de­
sires, figures serve as anchoring points for dreams.12 If, at a distance, Trespass
seems to be a uniform black morass—prefiguring Hurricane Katrina and the
bp oil flood—closer inspection reveals colorful organisms hiding in the shad­
ows. Mushrooms, seed pods, and birds’ eggs anchor hopes in living forms.
Like a bird’s nest, built from scavenged detritus, Trespass nurtures hopeful
dreams. The figural play of this assemblage works with shifts of scale: A sea
slick with oil and wreckage, an unfathomable disaster when viewed from
afar, contains anchoring points for hopeful desires that can be grasped on
a molecular level. Zooming in reveals that when droplets merge together,
when they grab hold of almost imperceptible figures, they generate dynamic
coalescences.13 Panning back out reveals the dance of oil in water.
Looking to possible futures, rather than to absolute endings, Jacques Der­
rida draws a helpful distinction between apocalyptic and messianic thinking.14
Messianic hopes contain “the attraction, invincible élan or affirmation of
an unpredictable future-­to-­come (or even of a past-­to-­come-­again),” writes
Derrida.15 “Not only must one not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is
necessary to insist on it more than ever.”16 Yet Derrida’s sense of expectation
is not oriented toward a specific messiah.17 In contrast to Christian tradi­
tions, which pin hopes to a particular figure, Jesus Christ, Derrida’s notion of

hope in blasted landscapes 31

FIGURE 1.2 Outsiders unaccustomed to the celebratory antics of
New Orleans, a city with a venerated history of macabre pageantry,
might have overlooked subtle and thought-­provoking elements
of the fashion show staged at the Multispecies Salon. Some of
the garb on display included fur from the pelts of nutria, a large
amphibious rodent originally from South America. Calamity, a
fashion designer pictured here in a nutria coat, works with the
Righteous Fur collective to probe ethical issues linked to the killing
of this “invasive” animal. Image courtesy of Jonathan Traviesa. See
multispecies-­salon.org/calamity.

——
Nutria were once farmed for their fur. The species was imported
to the United States in the nineteenth century to support trends
in high fashion. As fur became less fashionable, wild nutria
populations exploded in North America. “We used to have a big
nutria trapping industry,” said Elizabeth Shannon, a licensed
alligator hunter and ecoartist who exhibited her work in the
Salon. “But the price of nutria went down to about a dollar a
hide. So my friends basically stopped trapping.” Lately, the prolific
species has been damaging human infrastructures. Jefferson
Parish, the district that includes most suburbs of New Orleans,
largely lies below sea level and is kept dry by an elaborate series
of dykes and canals. “Nutria have seriously weakened the canal
banks by overgrazing and building a labyrinth of tunnels under
the surface,” says Marnie Winter, director of environmental affairs
for Jefferson Parish. “The burrows are interconnected in a sort
of honeycomb pattern so that some extend under the surface
as much as fifty to one hundred fifty feet. Occasionally, severe
tunnelling in a small area will cause a section of canal bank to
collapse into the canal. . . . Patches of grass that hold the canal
banks in place have been grazed down to the bare ground by these
voracious critters.” Calamity was reinvesting nutria with use value,
drawing the nomadic species into micro-­biopolitical networks of
matter and meaning. By generating a new market for nutria pelts
and thereby creating economic incentives for trappers to remove
animals from Louisiana bayous, he scripted this species into what
Haraway might regard as story of lively capital, where commerce
and consciousness, ethics and aesthetics were all in play.
FIGURES 1.3–1.4 Jacqueline Bishop, Trespass, mixed media made with artificial birds,
baby shoes, bird nests, and toys, 59.5" 3 97.5", 2003–2004. Courtesy of the artist
and Arthur Roger Gallery. Photographs by Eben Kirksey. See multispecies-­salon.org
/bishop.
messianicity is “without content.” Celebrating messianic desires that operate
beyond the confines of any particular figure, he describes a universal struc­
ture of feeling that works independently of any specific historical moment
or cultural location: “The universal, quasi-­transcendental structure that I
call messianicity without messianism,” writes Derrida, “is not bound up with
any particular moment of (political or general) history or culture.”18 In other
words, his notion of messianicity is not attached to a specific figure, event,
political project, or messiah.19
The empty dreamscape of Derrida is haunted by a messianic spirit that
refuses to be grounded in any particular figure. Jacqueline Bishop’s imagi­
nation, by contrast, contains multiple specific objects of desire. In Bishop’s
work, we found a cautious spirit searching through refuse, coalescing around
specific figures, and then dancing away again on other lines of flight. When
we first encountered Trespass in Bishop’s studio in the Lower Garden District
of New Orleans, our visit became an opportunity for her to tell a circuitous
story about how she found hope, without even going to look for it, in the af­
termath of the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20, 2010. For Bishop,
the uninterrupted flood of oil was an actualization of her worst nightmares,
the horrible environmental disaster she had long imagined.
Bishop’s first impulse, in the early weeks of the oil flood, was to travel to
Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Initially she wanted to collect some of the oil, to use
the potent substance in her artwork. Powerful fumes, a haunting cloud of
toxicity, was hanging over Grand Isle—a sleepy beach town visited by Bishop
that was quickly becoming the epicenter of the oil flood, as well as of the
efforts to clean it up.20 Spectatorship was officially discouraged by bp and
government officials who were playing rhetorically with the potential harm
of toxic vapors and substances. Rigid codes of conduct and access restrictions
were put in place ostensibly to protect the public’s safety. “They didn’t want
to get anybody hurt,” Bishop told us with a smirk. Safety protocol kept jour­
nalists, independent researchers, and curious members of the public off the
beaches and meant that the bp contractors who took control of the cleanup
were working under a veil of secrecy. People who marched past bp’s cordon
themselves became objects of heightened scrutiny and surveillance. “The
toxicity is why no one was allowed on the beaches, why the beaches were
closed,” Bishop said. “I had access as long as I was with park rangers. There
were some people who drifted off, not abiding [by] the rules and the signs. A
couple walked down the beach, and when they came back, [the bp contrac­
tors] stripped them, made them take all their clothes off, completely nude:

hope in blasted landscapes 35

‘Check their clothes, check their bodies to make sure nothing happened to
them, we have these laws for a reason.’ ”
Forthright claims about toxicity were taken seriously on Louisiana’s Gulf
Coast, for the truth was immediately assumed to be in excess of the official
estimation. The human health effects of emissions from the petrochemical
industry in the Gulf routinely have been low-­balled or rendered impercep­
tible by blunt toxicological methodology. Downriver from one of the more
chemical-­drenched regions of the country—a section of the Mississippi River
called Cancer Alley—Gulf Coast residents were long accustomed to taking
precaution into their own hands as a result of corporate and governmental
abdication.21 Bishop was quick to understand how the specter of toxicity was
functioning as a means of social control on Grand Isle. She also quickly real­
ized that actual chemical hazards were at play.
The reaction of Jacqueline Bishop’s own body to Corexit, the chemical
being sprayed on the Gulf to “disperse” the oil flood, became the source of
critical ambivalence about this poison that was being used as a cure. “When
I went around July 4, I didn’t bring my swamp boots,” she said. “I just had my
forest boots, so I borrowed some swamp boots—they had a little bit of water
in it. I didn’t realize there was Corexit in this water. About two weeks later,
several layers of my skin were eaten off the bottom of my feet. I had to ask,
‘What’s the deal with my feet? Is it just from the water and the oil?’ They said,
‘No, it’s from the dispersants.’ So I came to a realization about these chemi­
cals. If they can affect my feet so quickly, just think what they are capable of
in other species.” Abandoning her plan to collect oil for use in her artwork,
Bishop began to use her camera to document the extent of the disaster and
to chronicle the cleanup response. She took pictures of oiled marshlands
and tar balls on beaches, as well as of bp work crews—including teams of
supervised inmates from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.22 She
also began taking an inordinate number of pictures of hermit crabs.
Bishop’s access to restricted sites was facilitated by Leanne Sarco, a ranger
at Grand Isle State Park, who founded the Hermit Crab Survival Project. A
recent graduate from Loyola University’s biology program, Sarco started her
job at Grand Isle weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blowout. As the first
oil slicks began washing onto the beach, she helplessly watched oil-­drenched
birds struggle. “When we initially saw oiled animals we would call the US
Fish and Wildlife hotline,” Sarco said. “I was frustrated by their response. At
best, it would take them an hour or two to show up. By that time, the bird
had moved on or already died.” Sarco eventually stopped calling the hotline.
She began asking officials if she could clean the birds herself but was told

36 Kirksey, Shapiro, and Brodine

 FIGURE 1.5 Jacqueline Bishop holding
a fistful of oil on the beach of Grand
Isle State Park, 2010. Weeks later,
the skin of her feet began to peel off
from the chemical dispersants in
her borrowed boots. Photography
courtesy of Jacqueline Bishop. See
multispecies-­salon.org/bishop.

FIGURES 1.6–1.7 Oil-­covered

hermit crabs from the Louisiana
shoreline, 2010. Photograph
courtesy of Jacqueline Bishop.
See multispecies-­salon.org/bishop.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
'To set this thought in its true light, we will fancy, if you please, that
yonder molehill is inhabited by reasonable creatures, and that every
pismire (his shape and way of life only excepted) is endowed with
human passions. How should we smile to hear one give us an
account of the pedigrees, distinctions, and titles that reign among
them! Observe how the whole swarm divide and make way for the
pismire that passes through them! You must understand he is an
emmet of quality, and has better blood in his veins than any pismire
in the molehill. Do not you see how sensible he is of it, how slow he
marches forward, how the whole rabble of ants keep their distance?
Here you may observe one placed upon a little eminence, and
looking down on a long row of labourers. He is the richest insect on
this side the hillock; he has a walk of half a yard in length, and a
quarter of an inch in breadth; he keeps a hundred menial servants,
and has at least fifteen barleycorns in his granary. He is now chiding
and beslaving the emmet that stands before him, and who, for all
that we can discover, is as good an emmet as himself.

'But here comes an insect of figure! Do not you take notice of a little
white straw that he carries in his mouth? That straw, you must
understand, he would not part with for the longest track about the
molehill; did you but know what he has undergone to purchase it.
See how the ants of all qualities and conditions swarm about him.
Should this straw drop out of his mouth, you would see all this
numerous circle of attendants follow the next that took it up, and
leave the discarded insect, or run over his back to come at his
successor.'

No. 167. The 'Guardian.'—Sept. 22, 1713.

 Fata viam invenient.—Virg.
Fate the way will find.

The following story is translated from an Arabian manuscript:—

'"The name of Helim is still famous through all the Eastern parts of
the world. He was the Governor of the Black Palace, a man of
infinite wisdom, and chief of the physicians to Alnareschin, the great
King of Persia.
'"Alnareschin was the most dreadful tyrant that ever reigned over
that country. He was of a fearful, suspicious, and cruel nature,
having put to death, upon slight surmises, five-and-thirty of his
queens, and above twenty sons, whom he suspected of conspiring.
Being at length wearied with the exercise of so many cruelties, and
fearing the whole race of Caliphs would be extinguished, he sent for
Helim, the good physician, and confided his two remaining sons,
Ibrahim and Abdallah, then mere infants, to his charge, requesting
him to bring them up in virtuous retirement. Helim had an only child,
a girl of noble soul, and a most beautiful person. Abdallah, whose
mind was of a more tender turn than that of Ibrahim, grew by
degrees so enamoured of her conversation that he did not think he
lived unless in the company of his beloved Balsora.
'"The fame of her beauty was so great that it came to the ears of
the king, who, pretending to visit the young princes, his sons,
demanded of Helim the sight of his fair daughter. The king was so
inflamed with her beauty and behaviour that he sent for Helim the
next morning, and told him it was now his design to recompense
him for all his faithful services, and that he intended to make his
daughter Queen of Persia.
'"Helim, who remembered the fate of the former queens, and who
was also acquainted with the secret love of Abdallah, contrived to
administer a sleeping draught to his daughter, and announced to the
king that the news of his intention had overcome her. The king
ordered that as he had designed to wed Balsora, her body should be
laid in the Black Palace among those of his deceased queens.
'"Abdallah soon fretted after his love, and Helim administered a
similar potion to his ward, and he was laid in the same tomb. Helim,
having charge of the Black Palace, awaited their revival, and then
secretly supplied them with sustenance, and finally contrived, by
dressing them as spirits, to convey them away from this sepulchre,
and concealed them in a palace which had been bestowed on him by
the king in reward for his recovering him from a dangerous illness.
'"About ten years after their abode in this place the old king died.
The new king, Ibrahim, being one day out hunting, and separated
from his company, found himself, almost fainting with heat and
thirst, at the foot of Mount Khacan, and, ascending the hill, he
arrived at Helim's house and requested refreshments. Helim was,
very luckily, there at that time, and after having set before the king
the choicest of wines and fruits, finding him wonderfully pleased
with so seasonable a treat, told him that the best part of his
entertainment was to come; upon which he opened to him the
whole history of what had passed. The king was at once astonished
and transported at so strange a relation, and seeing his brother
enter the room with Balsora in his hand, he leaped off from the sofa
on which he sat, and cried out, ''Tis he! 'tis my Abdallah!' Having
said this, he fell upon his neck and wept.
'"Ibrahim offered to divide his empire with his brother, but, finding
the lovers preferred their retirement, he made them a present of all
the open country as far as they could see from the top of Mount
Khacan, which Abdallah continued to improve and beautify until it
became the most delicious spot of ground within the empire, and it
is, therefore, called the garden of Persia.
'"Ibrahim, after a long and happy reign, died without children, and
was succeeded by Abdallah, the son of Abdallah and Balsora. This
was that King Abdallah who afterwards fixed the imperial residence
upon Mount Khacan, which continues at this time to be the favourite
palace of the Persian Empire."'
 CHAPTER XIII.

THACKERAY'S RESEARCHES AMONGST THE WRITINGS OF

THE EARLY ESSAYISTS—Continued.

Characteristic passages from the Works of Humorous Writers of the 'Era of the
Georges,' from Thackeray's Library, illustrated with original Marginal Sketches by
the Author's hand—The 'Humourist,' 1724—Extracts and Pencillings.

THE 'HUMOURIST.'
BEING ESSAYS UPON SEVERAL SUBJECTS: 'DEDICATED TO THE
MAN IN THE MOON.'
London, 1724-5.

Of News-writers.[23]
Quo virtus tua te vocat, i pede fausto.—Hor. Ep. II. l. 2.

'As to the filling the paper with trifles and things of no significancy,
the instances of it are obvious and numerous. The French king's
losing a rotten tooth, and the surgeon's fee thereupon; a duke's
taking physic, and a magistrate's swearing a small oath, and a poor
thief's ravishing a knapsack, have all, in their turns, furnished out
deep matter for wit and eloquence to these vigilant writers, who
hawk for adventures. A man of quality cannot steal out of town for a
day or two, or return to it, without the attendance of a coach and six
horses, and a news-writer, who makes the important secret the
burden of his paper next day. I have observed, that if a man be but
great or rich, the most wretched occasion entitles him to fill a long
paragraph in print; the cutting of his corns for the purpose, or his
playing at ombre, never fails to merit publication. Now, if my most
diligent brother-writers, who are spies upon the actions and cabinets
of the great, would go a little farther, and tell us when his grace or
his lordship broke his custom by keeping his word, or said a witty
thing, or did a generous one, we will freely own they tell us some
news, and will thank them for our pleasure and our surprise.

'It is with concern, I see, that even the privacies of the poor ladies
cannot escape the eyes of these public searchers. How many great
ladies do they bring to bed every day of their lives! for poor madam
no sooner begins to make faces, and utter the least groan, but
instantly an author stands with his pen in his teeth, ready to hold
her back, and to tell the town whether the baby is boy or girl, before
the midwife has pulled off her spectacles, and described its nose.'

Of a Country Entertainment.
'I am led by the regard which I bear to the ladies and the Christmas
holidays to divert my readers with the history of an entertainment,
where I made one at the house of a country squire.
'When I went in I found the dining-room full of ladies, to whom I
made a profound bow, and was repaid by a whole circle of curtsies.
While I was meditating, with my eyes fixed upon the fire, what I had
best say, I could hear one of them whisper to another, "I believe he
thinks we smoke tobacco;" for, my reader must know, I had omitted
the country fashion, and not kissed one of them.
'At dinner we had many excuses from the lady of the house for our
indifferent fare, and she had as many declarations from us, her
guests, that all was very good. And the squire gave us the history
and extraction of every fowl that came to the table. He assured us
that his poultry had neither kindred nor allies anywhere on this side
of the Channel.

'As soon as we were risen from the table, our great parliament of
females presently resolved themselves into committees of twos and
threes all over the dining-room, and I perceived that every party was
engaged in talking scandal.
'The ladies then went into one parlour to their tea, and we men into
another to our bottle, over which I was entertained with many
ingenious remarks on the price of barley, on dairies and the
sheepfold. But as the most engaging conversation is, when too long,
sometimes cloying, having smoked my pipe in due silence and
attention, I took a trip to the ladies, who had sent to know whether
I would drink some tea. When I made my entrance, the topic they
were on was religion, in their statements about which they were
terribly divided, and debated with such agitation and fervour, that I
grew in pain for the china cups.
'But they happily departed from this warm point, and unanimously
fell backbiting their neighbours, which instantly qualified all their
heat and heartily reconciled them to one another, insomuch that all
the time the business of scandal was handling there was not one
dissenting voice to be heard in the whole assembly.
'By this time the music was come, and happy was the woman that
could first wipe her mouth and be soonest upon her legs. In the
dance some moved very becomingly, but the majority made such a
rattle on the boards as quite drowned the music. This made me call
to mind your mettlesome horses, that dance on a pavement to the
music of their own heels.

'We had among us the squire's eldest son, a batchelor and captain of
the militia. This honest gentleman, believing, as one would imagine,
that good humour and wit consisted in activity of body and thickness
of bone, was resolved to be very witty, that is to say, very strong; he
therefore not only threw down most of the women, and with
abundance of wit hauled them round the room, but gave us several
farther proofs of the sprightliness of his genius, by a great many
leaps he made about a yard high, always remembering to fall on
somebody's toes. This ingenious fancy was applauded by everyone,
except the person who felt it, who never happened to have
complaisance enough to fall in with the general laugh that was
raised on that occasion. For my own part, who am an occasional
conformist to common custom, I was ashamed to be singular, so I
even extended my mouth into a smile, and put my face into a
laughing posture too. His mother, observing me to look pleased with
her son's activity and gay deportment, told me in my ear, "he was
never worse company than I saw him." To which I answered, "I vow,
madam, I believe you."'
 Of the Spleen.
'In constitutions where this humorous distemper prevails, it is
surprising how trifling a matter will inflame it.
'I shall never forget an ingenious doctor of physick, who was so
jealous of the honour of his whiskers, which he was pleased to
christen "the emblems of his virility," that he resolutely made the sun
shine through every unhappy cat that ill-fate threw in his way. He
magnanimously professed that his spirit could not brook it, that any
cat in Christendom, noble or ignoble, should rival the reputation of
his upper lip. In every other respect our physician was a well-bred
person, and, which is as wonderful, understood Latin. But we see
the deepest learning is no charm against the spleen.'

Of Ghosts.
'All sorts of people, when they get together, will find something to
talk of. News, politics, and stocks comprise the conversation of the
busy and trading world. Rakes and men of pleasure fight duels with
men they never spoke to, and betray women they never saw, and do
twenty fine feats over their cups which they never do anywhere else.
And children, servants, and old women, and others of the same size
of understanding, please and terrify themselves and one another
with spirits and goblins. In this case a ghost is no more than a help
to discourse.
'A late very pious but very credulous bishop was relating a strange
story of a demon, that haunted a girl in Lothbury, to a company of
gentlemen in the City, when one of them told his lordship the
following adventure:—
'"As I was one night reading in bed, as my custom is, and all my
family were at rest, I heard a foot deliberately ascending the stairs,
and as it came nearer I heard something breathe. While I was
musing what it should be, three hollow knocks at my door made me
ask who was there, and instantly the door blew open." "Ah! sir, and
pray what did you see?" "My lord, I'll tell you. A tall thin figure stood
before me, with withered hair, and an earthly aspect; he was
covered with a long sooty garment, that descended to his ankles,
and his waist was clasped close within a broad leathern girdle. In
one hand he held a black staff taller than himself, and in the other a
round body of pale light, which shone feebly every way." "That's
remarkable! pray, sir, go on." "It beckoned to me, and I followed it
down stairs, and there it pointed to the door, and then left me, and
made a hideous noise in the street." "This is really odd and
surprising; but, pray now, did it give you no notice what it might
particularly seek or aim at?" "Yes, my lord, it was the watchman,
who came to show me that my servants had left all my doors open."'

Of Keeping the Commandments.

'I have been humbly of opinion for many years that the keeping of
the Ten Commandments was a matter not altogether unworthy of
our consideration and practice; and though I am of the same
sentiments still, yet I dare hardly publish them, knowing that if I am
against the world, the world will be against me. I must not affront
modern politeness and the common mode.
'Who would have the boldness to mention the first commandment to
Matilda, when he has seen her curt'sying to herself in the glass, and
kissing her lap-dog, and worshipping these two divine creatures
from morning till night? Nor is Matilda without other deities; she has
several sets of china, a diamond necklace, and a grey monkey; and,
in spite of her parents and her reason, she is guilty of will-worship to
Dick Noodle. But this last is no wonder at all, for Dick wears fine
brocade waistcoats and the best Mechlin, and no man of the age
picks his teeth with greater elegance.
'And would it not be equally bold and
barbarous to enslave a beau or a bully with
the tyranny of the third commandment?
when it's well known that these worthy
gentlemen and brothers in understanding
and courage must either be dumb or
damning themselves; and, therefore, to stop
their swearing would be to stop their breath,
and gag them to all eternity. Beau Wittol
courts Arabella with great success, and it is
not doubted he will carry her, though he was never heard to make
any other speech or compliment to her than that of "Demme,
madam!" after which he squeezes her hand, takes snuff, and grins in
her face with wonderful wit and gaiety. Arabella smiles, and owns
with her eyes her admiration of these accomplishments of a fine
gentleman.'

Of Flattery.
'Flattery is the art of selling wind for a round sum of ready money. A
sycophant blows up the mind of his unhappy patient into a tympany,
and then, like other physicians, receives a fee for his poison. It is his
business to instruct men to mistake themselves at a great expense;
to shut their eyes, and then pay for being blind. Thus the end of
excelling in any art or profession is to have that excellence known
and admired.
'Sing-song Nero, an ancestor of Mr. Tom d'Urfey, would, probably,
never have banished the sceptre and adopted the fiddle, but that he
found it much easier for his talents to scrape than to govern. In this
reign, he that had a musical ear, or could twist a catgut, was made a
man; and the fiddlers ruled the Roman empire by the singular merit
of condescending to be viler thrummers than the emperor himself.
He who at that time could but wonder greatly, and gape artfully at
his Majesty's royal skill in crowding, might be governor of a province,
or Lord High Treasurer, or what else he pleased.

'This imperial piper used to go the circuit, and call the provinces
together, to be refreshed with a tune upon the fiddle, and if they had
the policy to smother a laugh, and raise an outrageous clap, their
taxes were paid, and they had whatever they asked; and so
miserably was this monarch and madman bewitched by himself and
his sycophants with the character of a victorious fiddler, that when
he was abandoned by God and man, and, as an enemy to mankind,
sentenced to be whipped to death, he did not grieve so much for the
loss of his empire as the loss of his fiddle. When he had no mortal
left to flatter him, he flattered himself, and his last words were,
"Qualis Artifex pereo!—What a brave scraper is lost in me!" And then
he buried a knife in his inside, and made his death the best action of
his life!'

Of Retirement.
'To be absolute master of one's own time and actions is an instance
of liberty which is not found but in solitude. A man that lives in a
crowd is a slave, even though all that are about him fawn upon him
and give him the upper-hand. They call him master, or lord, and
treat him as such; but as they hinder him from doing what he
otherwise would, the title and homage which they pay him is flattery
and contradiction.[24]

'I ever loved retirement, and detested crowds; I would rather pass
an afternoon amongst a herd of deer, than half an hour at a
coronation; and sooner eat a piece of apple-pie in a cottage, than
dine with a judge on the circuit. To lodge a night by myself in a cave
would not grieve me so much as living half a day in a fair. It will look
a little odd when I own that I have missed many a good sermon for
no other reason but that many others were to hear it as well as
myself. I have neither disliked the man, nor his principles, nor his
congregation, singly; but altogether I could not abide them.
'I am, therefore, exceedingly happy in the solitude which I am now
enjoying. I frequently stand under a tree, and with great humanity
pity one half of the world, and with equal contempt laugh at the
other half. I shun the company of men, and seek that of oxen, and
sheep, and deer, and bushes; and when I can hide myself for the
moiety of a day from the sight of every creature but those that are
dumb, I consider myself as monarch of all that I see or tread upon,
and fancy that Nature smiles and the sun shines for my sake only.
'My eyes at those seasons are the seat of pleasure, and I do not
interrupt their ranging by the impertinence of memory, or solicitude
of any kind. I neither look a day forward nor a day backward, but
voluptuously enjoy the present moment. My mind follows my senses,
and refuses all images which these do not then present.'
 Of Bubbles.
'The world has often been ruled by men who were themselves ruled
by the worst qualities and most sordid views. The prince, says a
great French politician, governs the people, and interest governs the
prince.
'Hence it comes to pass, that few men care how they rise in the
world, so they do but rise. They know that success expiates all
rogueries, and never misses reverence; and that he who was called
villain or murderer in the race, is often christened saint or hero at
the goal.
'The present possession of money or power is always a ready patent
for respect and submission. He that gets a hundred thousand
pounds by a bubble—that is, by selling a bag of wind to his
credulous countrymen—is a greater idol in every coffee-house in
town than he who is worth but ninety thousand, though acquired by
honest trading or ingenious arts, which profit mankind, and bring
credit to his country; and thus every South Sea cub shall, by the sole
merit of his million, vie for respect and followers with any lord in the
land, though it should strangely happen, as it sometimes does, that
his lordship's virtues and parts ennoble his title and quality. It
matters not whether your father was a tinker, and you, his worthy
son, a broker or a sharper, provided you be but a South Sea man. If
you are but that, the whole earth is your humble servant.
'At present, nothing farther is necessary towards getting an estate—
that is, merit and respect—than a little money, much roguery, and
many lies. With what indignation have I beheld a peer of the realm
courting the good graces of a little haberdasher with great cash, and
begging a few shares in a bubble which the honourable Goodman
Bever had just then invented to cheat his fellow-citizens!
'But exalted boobies being below satire, I shall here only consider a
little the mischiefs brought upon the public by the projects which
bring them their wealth. It is melancholy to consider that power
follows property, when we consider at the same time into what vile
hands the property is fallen, and by what vile means, even by
bubbles and direct cheating.
'Of our second-hand bubbles, I blame not
one more than another; their name shows
their nature. The "Great Bubble" of all set
them an example, and began first. By it
immense fortunes have been got to
particular men, most of them obscure and
unheard of; happy for their own characters, and for the nation's
trade, if they had still remained so. I hope our all is not yet at the
mercy of sharpers, ignorant, mercenary sharpers; but I should be
glad to see it proved that it will not be so.'

Of Travels.
'As every man is in his own opinion fit to come abroad in print, so
every occasion that can put him upon prating to mankind is
sufficient to put his pen running, provided he himself can hold the
principal character in his own book.
'Of all the several classes of scribblers, there is none more silly than
your authors of Travels. There are several things common to all
these travellers, and yet peculiar to every particular traveller. I have
at this time in my hands a little manuscript, entitled "Travels from
Exeter to London, with proper observations." By the sagacity shown in
the remarks, I take the author to be some polite squire of Devon. In
the following passages our traveller records his observations in the
great metropolis:—
'"In this great city people are quite another thing than what they are
out of it; insomuch, that he who will be very great with you in the
country, will scarce pull off his hat to you in London. I once dined at
Exeter with a couple of judges, and they talked to me there, and
drank my health, and we were very familiar together. So when I saw
them again passing through Westminster Hall, I was glad of it with
all my heart, and ran to them with a broad smile, to ask them how
they did, and to shake hands with them; but they looked at me so
coldly and so proudly as you cannot imagine, and did not seem to
know me, at which I was confounded, angry, and mad; but I kept
my mind to myself.

'"At another time I was at the playhouse (which is a rare place for
mirth, music, and dancing), and, being in the pit, saw in one of the
boxes a member of Parliament of our county, with whom I have
been as great as hand and glove; so being overjoyed to see him, I
called to him aloud by his name, and asked him how he did; but
instead of saluting me again, or making any manner of answer, he
looked plaguy sour, and never opened his mouth, though when he is
in the country he is as merry a grig as any in forty miles, and we
have cracked many a bottle together."'

Of Education.
'People, put by their education into a narrow track of thinking, are as
much afraid of getting out of it as children of quitting their leading-
strings when first they learn to go. They are taught a raging
fondness for a parcel of names that are never explained to them;
and an implacable fierceness against another set of names that are
never explained to them; so they jog on in the heavy steps of their
forefathers, or in the wretched and narrow paths of poor-spirited
and ignorant pedagogues. They believe they are certainly in the
right, and therefore never take the pains to find out that they are
certainly in the wrong.
'From this cause it comes to pass that many English gentlemen are
as much afraid of reading some English books as were the poor blind
Papists of reading books prohibited by their priests; which were,
indeed, all books that had either religion or sense in them.
'How nicely are those men taught who are taught prejudice! A
tincture of bigotry appears in all the actions of a bigot. He will
neither, with his good liking, eat or drink, or sleep or travel with you,
till he has received full conviction that you wash your hands and
pare your nails just as he does.
'Here is a squire come down from London who is very rich, and has
bought a world of land in our county of Wilts. The first thing he did
when he came among us was to declare that he would have no
dealings nor conversation with any Whig whatsoever; and, to make
his word good, having bespoke several beds and other furniture to a
considerable value of an upholsterer here, he returned the whole
upon the poor man's hands because his wife had a brother who was
a Presbyterian parson.
'But this worthy and ingenious squire was
very well served by an officer of the army
at a horse race here. They were drinking,
among other company, the King's health,
at the door of a public-house, on
horseback; the officer, when it came to his turn, drank it to
this Doughty Highflyer, who happened to be next to him,
upon which he made some difficulty at pledging it,
suggesting that public healths should not be proposed in mixed
company. "You would say," says the officer, "if you durst, that a High
Churchman would not have his Majesty's health proposed to him at
all." Upon this he swore he was a High Churchman, and was not
ashamed of it. "So I guessed," said the officer, "by your disloyalty."
"But, Sir," says the officer, "even disloyalty to your prince need not
make you show your ill-breeding in company." The squire chafed
most violently at this, and urged, as a proof of his good breeding,
that he had been bred at Oxford. "So I guessed," says the officer,
"by your ignorance." This nettled the squire to the height, and fired
his little soul at the expense of the outer case, for he proceeded to
give ill words, and to call ill names; but the officer quickly taught
him, by the nose, to hold his tongue, and ask pardon. Thus it always
fares with the High Church in fighting as it does in disputing: she is
constantly beaten; and the courage and understanding of her
passive sons tally with each other.'

Of Women.
'Some of my fair correspondents have lately reproached me with
negligence and indifference to their sex; but if they could know how
vain I am of so obliging a reprimand, they would be sensible, too,
how little I deserved it. I am not so entirely a statue as to be
insensible of the power of beauty, nor so absolutely a woman's
creature as to be blind to their little weaknesses, their pretty follies
and impertinences.
'It will be necessary to inform my readers that my landlady is an
eminent milliner, and a considerable dealer in Flanders lace. She is
one of those whom we call notable women; she has run through the
rough and smooth of life, has a very good plain sense of things, and
knows the world, as far as she is concerned in it, very well. I am
very much entertained by her company; her discourse is sure to be
seasoned with scandal, ancient and modern, which, though the
morals and gravity of my character do not allow me to join in, yet,
such is the infirmity of human nature, I find it impossible to be
heartily displeased with it as I ought.
'If I come in at a time when the shop, which is commodiously
situated above stairs, is full of company, I usually place myself in an
obscure corner of it, and observe what passes with secret
satisfaction. 'Tis pleasant to hear my landlady, by the mere
incessancy of tittle-tattle, persuade her pretty
customers out of all the understanding that they
brought along with them; and on the other side of
the counter to see the little bosoms pant with
irresolution, and swell at the view of trifles, which
humour and custom have taught them to call
necessary and convenient. Hard by perhaps stands a customer of
inferior quality, a citizen's wife suppose her, who is reduced to the
hard necessity of regulating her expenses by her husband's
allowance, and is bursting with vexation to know herself stinted to
lace of but fifty shillings a yard; whereas if she could rise to three
pounds, she might be mistress of a very pretty head, and what she
really thinks she need not be ashamed to be seen in. But for want of
this all goes wrong; she hates her superiors, despises her husband,
neglects her children, and is ashamed and weary of herself.

'This seems ridiculous to my men readers, and it certainly is so; but

are our follies and extravagances more reasonable? Or, rather, are
they not infinitely more dangerous and destructive? What violences
do we not commit upon our consciences for the mere gratification of
our avarice? How much of the real ease and happiness of life do we
daily sacrifice to the vanity of ambition? Is it possible, then, since
even the greatest men are but a bigger sort of children, to be
seriously angry that women are no more? If in my old age I am
struck with the harmony of a rattle, or long to get astride on a
hobby-horse; if I love still to be caressed and flattered, and am
delighted with good words and high titles, why should I be angry
that my wife and daughters do not play the philosopher, and have
not more wit than myself?
 Of Masquerades.
'I must desire my reader, as he values his repose, not to let his
thoughts run upon anything loose or frightful for two hours at least
before he goes to bed. Titus Livius, the Roman historian, is my usual
entertainment, when I don't find myself disposed for closer
application. Happening to come home sooner than ordinary two
nights ago, I took it up, and read the 8th and following chapters of
his 39th book, where he gives us a large account of some nocturnal
assemblies lately set up at Rome; I think he calls them Bacchanals,
and describes the ceremonies, rites of initiation, and religious
practices, together with their music, singing, shrieks, and howlings.
The men were dressed like satyrs, and raved like persons distracted,
with enthusiastic motions of the head and violent distortions of the
body. The ladies ran with their hair about their ears and burning
torches in their hands; some covered with the skins of panthers,
others with those of tigers, all attended with drums and trumpets,
while they themselves were the most noisy. "To this diversion," says
the historian, "were added the pleasures of feasting and wine to
draw the more in; and when wine, the night, and a mixed company
of men and women, jumbled together, had extinguished all sense of
shame, there were extravagances of all sorts committed; each
having that pleasure ready prepared for him to which his nature was
most inclined."

''Tis with design I have referred my reader to the very place, being
resolved not to trouble him with any farther relation of these
midnight revellings, for fear I should draw him into the same
misfortune I unluckily fell under myself. The very idea of it makes
me tremble still, when I think of those monstrous habits, fantastical
gestures, hideous faces, and confused noises I had in my sleep. Join
to these the many assignations made for the next night, the signs
given for the present execution of former agreements; and the
various plots and contrivances I overheard, for parting man and
wife, and ruining whole families at once. These frightful appearances
put me into such uncommon agitations of body, and I looked so
ghastly at my first waking, that a friend of mine, who came early in
the morning to make me a visit, was struck with such a terror at the
sight of me, that he made to the street door as fast he could, where
he had only time to bid one of my servants run for a physician
immediately, for he was sure I was going mad.'

Of Sedition.
'The multitude of papers is a complaint so common in the
introduction of every new one, that it would be a shame to repeat it;
for my own part, I am so far from repining at this evil, that I
sincerely wish there were ten times the number. By this means one
may hope to see the appetite for impertinence, defamation, and
treason (so prevalent in the generality of readers) at last surfeit
itself, and my honoured brethren the modern authors be obliged to
employ themselves in some more honest manufacture than that of
the Belles Lettres.
''Tis impossible for one who has the least knowledge and regard for
his country's interest to look into a coffee-house without the greatest
concern. Industry and application are the true and genuine honour
of a trading city; where these are everywhere visible all is well.
Whenever I see a false thirst for knowledge in my own countrymen,
I am sorry they ever learnt to read. I would not be thought an
enemy to literature (being, indeed, a very learned person myself),
but when I observe a worthy trader, without any natural malice of
his own, sucking in the poison of popularity, and boiling with
indignation against an administration which the pamphleteer informs
him is very corrupt, I am grieved that ever Machiavel, Hobbes,
Sidney, Filmer, and the more illustrious moderns,
including myself, appeared in human nature.
'Idleness is the parent of innumerable vices, and
detraction is generally the first, though not
immediately the most mischievous, that is born of
it. The mind of man is of such an ill make that it
relishes defamation much better than applause;
so every writer who makes his court to the
multitude must sacrifice his superiors to his
patrons.
'That there is a very great and indefeasible
authority in the people, or Commons of Great Britain, everyone
allows. Power is ever naturally and rightfully founded in those who
have anything to risk; and this power delegated into the hands of
Parliament, it there becomes legally absolute, and the people are, by
their very constitution, obliged to a passive obedience.

'Nothing is better known than this, nothing on all sides more

generally allowed, and one would imagine nothing could sooner
silence the clamour of little statesmen and politicians; that jargon of
public-spiritedness, which wastes so much of the time of the busy
part of our countrymen. The misfortune is that though everyone
(who is not indeed crack-brained with the love of his country) will
own that the populace, by having delegated the right of inspecting
public affairs to others, have no authority to be troublesome about it
themselves, yet everyone excepts himself from the multitude, and
imagines that his own particular talent for public business ought to
exempt him from so severe a restraint. Hence arises the great
demand for newspapers and coffee. Happy is it for the nation and
for the Government that the distemper and the medicine are found
at the same place, and the blue-apron officer who presents you with
a newspaper, to heat the brain and disturb the understanding, is
ready the same moment to apply those composing specificks, a dish
and a pipe. Otherwise, what revolutions and abdications might we
not expect to see? I should not be surprised to hear that a general
officer in the trained-bands had run stark staring mad out of a
coffee-house at noon day, declared for a Free Parliament, and
proclaimed my Lord Mayor King of England.'
 CHAPTER XIV.

THACKERAY'S RESEARCHES AMONGST THE WRITINGS OF

THE EARLY ESSAYISTS—Continued.

Characteristic Passages from the Works of The 'Humourists,' from Thackeray's

Library, illustrated by the Author's hand, with Marginal Sketches suggested by
the Text—The 'World,' 1753—Introduction—Its Difference from the Earlier
Essays—Distinguished Authors who contributed to the 'World'—Paragraphs and
Pencillings.

The 'World'—writes Dr. Chalmers, in his historical and biographical

preface to this series—differs from its predecessors in the general
plan, although the ultimate tendency is similar. We have here no
philosophy of morals, no indignant censure of the grosser vices, no
critical disquisitions, and, in general, scarcely anything serious. Irony
is the predominant feature. This caustic species of wit is employed in
the 'World' to execute purposes which other methods had failed to
accomplish.
The authors of these essays affected to consider the follies of their
day as beneath their notice, and therefore tried what good might be
done by turning them into ridicule, under the mask of defence or
apology, and thus ingeniously demonstrated that every defence of
what is in itself absurd and wrong, must either partake of the
ridiculous, or be intolerable and repugnant to common sense and
reason. With such intentions, notwithstanding their apparent good
humour, they may, perhaps, in the apprehension of many readers,
appear more severe censors of the foibles of the age than any who
have gone before them.
The design, as professed in the first paper, was to ridicule, with
novelty and good humour, the fashions, foibles, vices, and
absurdities of that part of the human species which calls itself 'The
World;' and this the principal writers were enabled to execute with
facility, from the knowledge incidental to their rank in life, the
elevated sphere in which they moved, their intercourse with a part of
society not easily accessible to authors in general, and the good
sense which prevented them from being blinded by the glare or
enslaved by the authority of fashion.

The 'World' was projected by Edward Moore[25] —in conjunction

with Robert Dodsley, the eminent publisher of Johnson's
'Dictionary'—who fixed upon the name; and by defraying the
expense, and rewarding Moore, became, and for many years
continued to be, the sole proprietor of the work.
Edward Moore's abilities, his modest demeanour, inoffensive
manners, and moral conduct, recommended him to the men of
genius and learning of the age, and procured him the patronage of
Lord Lyttleton, who engaged his friends to assist him in the way
which a man not wholly dependent would certainly prefer. Dodsley,
the publisher, stipulated to pay Moore three guineas for every paper
of the 'World' which he should write, or which might be sent for
publication and approved of. Lord Lyttleton, to render this bargain
effectual, and an easy source of emolument to his protégé, solicited
the assistance of such men as are not often found willing to
contribute the labours of the pen, men of high rank in the state, and
men of fame and fashion, who cheerfully undertook to supply the
paper, while Moore reaped the emolument, and perhaps for a time
enjoyed the reputation of the whole. But when it became known, as
the information soon circulated in whispers, that such men as the
Earls of Chesterfield, Bath, and Cork—that Horace Walpole, Richard
Owen Cambridge, and Soame Jenyns—besides other persons of both
distinction and parts—were leagued in a scheme of authorship to
amuse the town, and that the 'World' was the bow of Ulysses, in
which it was 'the fashion for men of rank and genius to try their
strength,' we may easily suppose that it would excite the curiosity of
the public in an uncommon degree.
The first paper was published January 24, 1753; it was consequently
contemporary with the 'Adventurer,' which began November 7, 1752;
but as the 'World' was published only once a week, it outlived the
'Adventurer' nearly two years, during which time it ran its course
also with the 'Connoisseur.' It was of the same size and type and at
the same price with the 'Rambler' and 'Adventurer,' but the sale in
numbers was superior to either. In No. 3, Lord Chesterfield states
that the number sold weekly was two thousand, which number, he
adds, 'exceeds the largest that was ever printed, even of the
"Spectator."' In No. 49, he hints that 'not above three thousand were
sold.' The sale was probably not regular, and would be greater on
the days when rumour announced his lordship as the writer. The
usual number printed was two thousand five hundred, as stated in a
letter from Moore to Dr. Warton. Notwithstanding the able assistance
of his right honourable friends, Moore wrote sixty-one of these
papers, and part of another. He excelled principally in assuming the
serious manner for the purposes of ridicule, or of raising idle
curiosity; his irony is admirably concealed. However trite his subject,
he enlivens it by original turns of thought.
In the last paper, the conclusion of the work is made to depend on a
fictitious accident which is supposed to have happened to the author
and occasioned his death. When the papers were collected in
volumes, Moore superintended the publication, and actually died
while this last paper was in the press: a circumstance somewhat
singular, when we look at the contents of it, and which induces us to
wish that death may be less frequently included among the topics of
wit.
It has been the general opinion, for the honour of rank, that the
papers written by men of that description in the 'World' are superior
to those of Moore, or of his assistants of 'low degree.' It may be
conceded that among the contributories the first place is due, in
point of genius, taste, and elegance, to the pen of Philip Dormer
Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield.
Lord Chesterfield's services to this paper were purely voluntary, but
a circumstance occurred to his first communication which had nearly
disinclined him to send a second. He sent his paper to the publisher
without any notice of its authorship; it underwent a casual
inspection, and, from its length, was at least delayed, if not
positively rejected. Fortunately Lord Lyttleton saw it at Dodsley's,
and knew the hand. Moore then hastened to publish the paper (No.
18), and thought proper to introduce it with an apology for the
delay, and a neat compliment to the wit and good sense of his
correspondent.
Chesterfield continued his papers occasionally, and wrote in all
twenty-three numbers, certainly equal, if not superior, in brilliancy of
wit and novelty of thought, to the most popular productions of this
kind.
A certain interest surrounds most of the authors who assisted in the
'World,' and many of the papers were written under circumstances
which increase the attraction of their contents. We have not space to
particularise special essays, or to enter upon the biographical details
which properly belong to our subject; we must restrict further notice
to a mere recapitulation of the contributors and their pieces. Richard
Owen Cambridge, the author of the 'Scribleriad,' wrote in all twenty-
one papers. Horace Walpole was the author of nine papers in the
'World,' all of which excel in keen satire, shrewd remark, easy and
scholarly diction, and knowledge of mankind; indeed, for sprightly
humour these papers probably excel all his other writings, and most
of those of his contemporaries. For five papers we are indebted to
Soame Jenyns, who held the office and rank of one of the Lords
Commissioners of the Board of Trade and Plantations. James Tilson,
Consul at Cadiz, furnished five papers of considerable merit and
novelty. Five papers, chiefly of the more serious kind, were
contributed by Edward Loveybond; the 'Tears of Old May-Day,' No.
82 of the 'World,' is esteemed one of his best poetic compositions.
W. Whitehead, the Poet Laureate, wrote three papers, Nos. 12, 19,
and 58. Nos. 79, 156, 202 were written by Richard Berenger,
Gentleman of the Horse to the King. Sir James Marriott, Judge of the
High Court of Admiralty, and Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, wrote
Nos. 117, 121, 199. The 'Adventures of the Pumpkin Family,' zealous
to defend their honour, given in Nos. 47 and 63, were written by
John, Earl of Cork and Orrery, the amiable nobleman who, as
Johnson whimsically declared, 'was so generally civil, that nobody
thanked him for it.' The Earl of Cork is also said to have contributed
Nos. 161 and 185; he took a more active part in the 'Connoisseur.'
To his son, Mr. Hamilton Boyle, who afterwards succeeded to the
earl's title, the 'World' was indebted for Nos. 60 and 170, two papers
drawn up with vivacity, humour, and elegance.
William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, to whom the second volume of the
'Guardian' was dedicated, contributed to the 'World,' in his seventy-
first year, No. 7, a lively paper on horse-racing and the manners of
Newmarket.
Three papers, Nos. 140, 147, and 204, specimens of easy and
natural humour, came from the pen of Sir David Dalrymple, better
known as Lord Hailes, one of the senators of the College of Justice
in Scotland; in advanced life Lord Hailes contributed several papers
remarkable for vivacity and point to the 'Mirror.' William Duncombe,
a poetical and miscellaneous writer, was the author of the allegory in
No. 84; his son, the Rev. John Duncombe, of Canterbury, was the
author of No. 36. The latter gentleman appears in connection with
the 'Connoisseur.' Nos. 38 and 74 were written by Mr. Parratt, the
author of some poems in Dodsley's collection. Nos. 78 and 86 are
from the pen of the Rev. Thomas Cole.
The remaining writers in the 'World' were single-paper men, but
some of them of considerable distinction in other departments of
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