Harold C. Conklin: Atlas of Multispecies Relations in Ifugao

Abstract

In his Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao, Harold C. Conklin describes the agricultural practices that have shaped a landscape of extensive terraced irrigation. While the book may be read as an anthropocentric story of human control of plants and animals, I demonstrate that the book also describes how humans and nonhumans are entangled through relations of mutual responsiveness. By drawing on concepts such as ‘sympoeisis’, ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway [2008]. When Species Meet. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press), and ‘dwelling’ (Ingold [2000]. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge), I uncover the Atlas’s hidden story of the terraced landscape as an ongoing materialisation of multispecies mutuality. I argue that it is in Conklin’s focus on the coordination of temporalities that multispecies relations become most visible, and I show how the introduction of high-yielding rice and Pentecostalism have led to interruptions in these carefully coordinated temporalities.