What is SACTS?

SACTS stands for “Sensory Acts” – a multi-disciplinary 5-year research project, supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Our work is based on the premise that animals, plants, and humans share an ancient history of nonverbal communication. Yet, for most Western thinkers, the human ability to speak and express abstract thought separates us from animals and plants.

Rather than focus on what may set us apart, this project explores the shared capacity of humans and other beings for sensory nonverbal communication.

We pursue this goal through a study of posture, gesture, scent, and sound. Informed by northern Indigenous and non-Indigenous experiences with animals and plants, our project expands current knowledge of material and intangible heritages of multispecies collaboration across the Circumpolar North.

Our Objectives

Our goal is to use our research to directly inspire public debate on the needs, intentions, and life worlds of nonhumans during this critical time in the Anthropocene. Our team’s experience comes from the Canadian Arctic, Siberia, and Mongolia.

We use visual and sonic methods to explore new ways of understanding embodiment, immersion, and experiential apprenticing.

Carefully observing the work of specialist herders, hunters and gatherers, our doctoral and master’s student researchers, and our international collaborators, ask: 

• How do animals, humans, and plants engage their senses as they share meaning across species boundaries?

• How do differences in the perception of time and space (e.g. life rhythm) influence interspecies understanding? 

• What learnable nonverbal communicative acts have northerners observed in wild and domestic beings?

• What makes interspecies collaboration most productive for all parties involved?

We look at how culture is shared by diverse beings. Although all dogs tend to act alike, we cannot speak of a “dog culture” but “a culture of the history of dogs with humans that transformed both dogs and humans, and created an artifact” (Despret in Buchanan, et al. 2015:173). Our team integrates our sensory research experiences (e.g. apprenticing with hunters and/or herders) with oral histories (interviewing Elders about plant and pasture use) and route finding to study how co-constituted decision making and life ways take place among moving, stationary, wild, and domestic species.

A Unique Contribution

Our detailed ethnographic accounts will push current debates in the nonhuman turn, animal and plant studies, and the growing field of interspecies communication, showing how sensory awareness can shape industry, subsistence and sustainability practices in communities comprised of many species.

We explore how humans and others share in each other’s abilities to see, smell, taste, hear, and touch, and how they form habits and memory together.

We look at how species-specific landscape use, circadian rhythm, and life-span jointly enable (or disable) interspecies relationships. These lines of inquiry help us understand culturally specific ideas about the minds of animals and plants, animal transmission of knowledge, and how communication is enacted and shared.

Making it Real

Our research supports many areas of study, such as (zoo)archaeologists re-assessing possible markers for collaboration in joint human-animal burials; environmental historians re-thinking animal, plant, and human agency in landscapes of the past; and consideration of the distribution of language, signs, and meaning in the environment in linguistic anthropology and biosemiotics. Our project touches on key questions in public debates around the knowability of animal and plant minds, providing citizens with tools for their own communicative awareness of the sensory worlds of animals and plants with whom they share their lives.

On Communicative Heritage

Whether we argue for the origins of language on an evolutionary basis (Chomsky 2006) or as cultural artifact (Everett 2017), our human ability to speak and express abstract thought has for a very long time been traced as a major line of perceived division between humans and other beings in Western approaches to knowing. Rather than re-enforcing what separates us, this study focuses on what humans and non humans have in common: a shared capacity for nonverbal (i.e. through posture, gesture, scent, sound, etc.) communication. Informed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing, we consider how the human ability to communicate nonverbally has been suppressed by a historical emphasis on the spoken word.

We need a record of intangible and material multispecies cultural heritage to better understand the needs, intentions, and lifeworlds of diverse life forms in the Anthropocene.

Based in the project team’s longstanding field sites in the Canadian Western Arctic, South Siberia, Far East Russia, and Mongolia, we seek to use ethnographic methods (including high fidelity sound and film recording and, where advisable, near-realtime satellite tracking of animals) to explore new ways of understanding embodiment, immersion, and experiential apprenticing. The project is original in its focus on interspecies communication through sensory collaboration, as well as for its aim to study species-specific differences in time/space perception and strategies for juggling biological differences in multispecies societies.

Objectives

Our main objective is to document new evidence of interspecies communication from the vantage point of multiple world views in the Circumpolar North. The northern hemisphere is home to intricate and ongoing animal-human relations, including social (Losey et al. 2018) and genetic (Perry et al. 2021) domestication events, making it a particularly fertile research ground. As a team, we divide this objective into three manageable sections, based in guiding research questions.

1) A focus on sensory ecology, asking: “How do animals, plants, and humans engage the senses to establish shared meaning, and what role do habituation and memory play in this effort?”

2) A focus on space, time, and materials, asking: “How do differences in spatial cognition, time perception (e.g. life rhythm), and materials use feature in interspecies communication?”

3) A focus on intention, learning, and language, asking: “What learnable (intergenerational) nonverbal communicative acts can be (and have been) observed in wild and domestic settings?”

By sensory ecology we refer to the ways in which organisms obtain, calculate, and respond to signals emerging from their environment. Sensory ecologists examine the different perceptual lifeworlds (umwelten) of organisms, which ‘determine’ a species’ general behaviour (Stevens 2013), often informing conservation strategies (Van Dyck 2012). Our team of researchers will contribute new qualitative (ethnographic) case studies to enrich this quantitative-based (biological) strand of inquiry, focusing on ethno-ethological and ethnobotanical knowledge (approaches to ethology and botany outside European traditions) of and toward perceptual fields of northern species, including herds, individual animals, and plants, both wild and domesticated. Through collaboration with Indigenous Elders and practitioners, and following the example of other similar recent efforts (Westman et al. 2020; Laugrand and Oosten 2015; Nelson 1983; Brightman 2007, 1973), we seek to give voice to extensive non-European, and nonhuman, bodies of knowledge about the sensory worlds of nonhumans.

Space, rhythm, and materials interconnect when interaction and collaboration between species occurs in and among shared environments and objects, often with differing perceptions of time. Lifespans and needs, reproductive cycles, and general life cadences differ between species, effecting different affordances, or perceptions of the usefulness of materials and space and time. Alex Oehler (2020a) has been researching effects of time-based differences on human-animal relations, household composition, and decision-making processes in mobile households in southern Siberia for over the past 10 years.

Intention, learning, and language are also interconnected. Many animals learn to recognize behaviours as standing in for particular intentions held by individuals and groups, which can then be communicated among members of the same species, or between species (Marchina 2016). Going further, and following Marder (2013:75), we use ‘language’ in a non-metaphorical sense — even in relation to plants — because we see it as a spatial-material articulation, and because we are interested in the extent to which semiotic principles, known to us from speech, pervade beyond spoken communication. So far, we have worked with falconry teams in the air (Schroer 2018, 2016, 2015) and with dog teams and wolves (and other species) on the ground (Oehler 2021, 2020, 2018). In this study, research will be extended to prey animals and plants.

Our ethnographic observations will inform current debates in the nonhuman turn, animal and plant studies, and the growing field of interspecies communication, showing how sensory awareness can shape industry and subsistence practices in communities comprised of many interacting species (i.e. hybrid communities). In summary, our objective is to examine how animal/plant-human interactions allow nonhuman and human participants to share in their diverse abilities to see, smell, taste, hear, and touch, and how diverse species engage in the formation of and recourse to habits and memory. We will look at how species-specific landscape use, circadian rhythm, and lifespan jointly enable (or disable) interspecies relationships. These lines of inquiry will help us gain an understanding of culturally specific ideas about the minds of animals and plants, about animal transmission of knowledge, and about the ways in which communication is distributed in the environment.

Theoretical Context

Philosophers of science have made a strong case for a deeper study of hybrid communities (e.g. Lestel, Burnois, Gaunet 2006; Despret 2013; Rees 2018). They envision new research into how human and other lives are shared on a daily basis. For Despret, all dogs may act alike in some ways, but this does not make it a dog culture. It is “a culture of the history of dogs with humans that transformed both dogs and humans, and created an artifact” (in Buchanan, et al. 2015:173).

Others call us to “study the hybrid communities comprised of humans and animals sharing meaning, interests and affects,” which they refer to as a “bi-constructivist ethology” that is concerned with individual animal persons (Lestel et al. 2014:125, 128, 155). This recognition of individuality beyond the species level in wild and domesticated animals resonates with many communities of the North (e.g. Miller and Davidson-Hunt 2013). Foliage, and especially trees (including the management of tree stands and lichen patches) play integral roles in this relationship. We respond to the call from philosophy of science with an ethnographic inquiry into radically different bodily viewpoints of diverse collaborators.

Our interest is rooted in a longstanding tradition in Western scholarship, most prominently pioneered by biophilosopher Uexküll (2013) whose work has been used to argue both for and against the permeability of species-specific perceptive life-worlds (Schroer 2021). At the core of his work lies the question: Can members of diverse species communicate meaningfully with each other, or are they limited to their own worlds, unable to reach out to that of others? Building on the work of scholars who have theorized more-than-human worlds (e.g. Adams 2020; de la Bellacasa 2017; Kohn 2013), we aim to provide new insight into the practices and skills of co-creating meaning between species. We follow Sarah Schroer’s (2021) interpretation of Uexküll’s umwelten, which favours mutual knowability of another’s perception beyond a mere imagination of it in one’s ‘mind’s eye.’ While we may never fully know how another sees the world, we believe our ethnographic observations provide evidence of sufficient overlap to enable meaningful interspecies collaborations.

Historically, the social sciences have shied from the study of animal perspectives due to a shared consensus on the unknowability of other species’s minds (e.g. Candea 2010), and due to the danger of anthropomorphic representation, which projects human rationale onto the actions of other animals (Servais 2018; Milton 2020; Lien and Pálsson 2021). The emphasis on interspecies difference has led to critical studies of speciesism, or the unequal valuation of one species over another (Noske 1997; Corbey and Lanjouw 2013; Mancuso 2018). There have arisen critiques of how we define species boundaries themselves in biology, science and technology, and in philosophy (Robert and Baylis 2003; Harrison and Larson 2014). Rather than suggesting others’ minds are in fact knowable, our study will focus on what it means to share physical and semiotic space between beings (Westman et al. 2020), and in so doing to observe and draw on each other’s ways of knowing as a means of interspecies perspectival sharing.

Evolutionary theory and its exposure of ‘man’ as just another animal shook Euro-centric notions of our ‘creation in God’s image,’ but it did not topple it. Neither did it prevent Western society from turning to a firm anthropocentrism. Co-architect of evolutionary theory, Alfred R. Wallace, himself saw speech and abstract thought as the not-to-be-crossed divide separating humans from other animals (Richards 2013). Resisting this tendency, we ask, “How central to the human experience is nonverbal communication?” And, “How much of our nonverbal communicative repertoire has atrophied as the result of an overwhelming emphasis on the spoken word?” These questions will place our study at the heart of current debates in logocentrism and human exceptionalism (Taylor 2016), universal grammar and recursion (Everett 2017; Chomsky 2006), and theory of mind in animals (Krupenye and Call 2019), with a uniquely northern perspective.

The Circumpolar North region offers rich archaeological, historical, and ethnographic records of local practices that deliberately engage more-than-human perspectives (e.g. Betts et al. 2015; Desjardins 2017; Moore 2018; Laugrand and Oosten 2014; Brightman et al. 2012). Evenki and Soiot hunters of Siberia recognize the omi (shadow/essence) of deceased persons acting through bears (Lavrillier 2012:118; Oehler 2020:113). Iukaghirs take on the viewpoint of their prey through dreams (Willerslev 2004). In Canada, Boreal Algonquians and Athapaskans recount animal-human marriages from the distant past in which humans recognize their bear, beaver, or caribou spouses’ actions as human (Brightman 1993:164). Perspectival sharing in cross-species couples also occurs in Inuit Kiviuq accounts (Oosten 2016:122). In Mongolia, householders recognize their own reborn kin in dogs and vice-versa (Terbish 2015). It is this rich heritage that draws us to the northern hemisphere, where our work will connect multi-sensory field observations with oral and ethno-historical records.

Our project stands at the forefront of a new research field in animal-human communication, with an aim to form a hub of scholars who foster collegiality and support. Our collaborators are fluent in the languages of their respective field sites (English, Tyvan, Russian, Mongolian), and by facilitating an ongoing open reading group, we will attract other scholars, ensuring our engagement with current academic debates at the highest level. The broader social relevance of the project also stands out. The popular desire to better understand the intentions of non-human actors and to enshrine their sentience in law (more recently including plants) (Abbott 2021; Blattner 2019), the felt need to ‘re-wild’ and find anew our connection to the sensory world (Bates 2020; Sandom et al. 2013), not least through our bodies, rather than merely through our minds—including in how we shop (Stolz 2015; Krishna and Schwarz 2014), are growing collective concerns in Western society.

Methodology

Strategies and activities (embodiment, immersion, and apprenticing):

Our more-than-human focus is part of a growing field in the social sciences and humanities, in which scholars are searching for new ways of documenting and analyzing multi-sensorial data. We will experiment with new ways of understanding immersion, and experiential long and short-term apprenticing (enskillment under local leadership) in multi-species settings, ranging from cohabitation and architectures of domestication (e.g. corral structures, fences, and land feature use) to trickery (e.g. traps, multi-entry wolf den architecture, etc.). Alex Oehler has been working on these questions in Siberia, recording a human-shared landscape at the eye-level of migratory wolves to record their field of vision to learn about mutual knowability (Oehler 2021; 2020). Expanding this work, we will build on our colleagues’ recent innovations in multispecies data collection (Dowling et al. 2017), for herding, breeding, and hunting contexts (Marchina 2021; Fijn and Kavesh 2020; Laplante et al. 2020), and in tree/plant-human relations (Abbott 2020, 2021a, 2021b).

Methodological approaches (experiential film and sound):

We follow the three-pronged phenomenological approach of ‘Sensing, Moving, and Imagining’ put forth by Julie Laplante et al. (2020:1). Rather than upholding a methodological framework that lends itself to replication, we emphasize “knowing from the inside” (Ingold 2013), by which we mean experiential, embodied knowledge instead of verbally articulated instruction-based knowledge. Together with our graduate students (MA/MFAs and PhD), we will record these nonverbal experiences in HD video and high fidelity sound, documenting the process of apprenticing with Elders, including the sensory worlds of other-than-humans as seen and heard by the apprentice. Conceptually, we will aim to intersect art with ethnography, following the body-focused examples of Wacquant (2004) and Vélez (2007) (see also Schneider 2021) to produce material for gallery, museum, and open media spaces (see also our Knowledge Mobilization Plan in the Documentation section).

Procedures for data collection and analysis (community and relationship-based):

We look to Indigenous scholars for guidance with Indigenous Research methods (IRM). In their edited anthology, Applying Indigenous Research Methods: Storying with Peoples and Communities, Windchief and San Pedro (2019:x-xii) identify three core principles of IRM:

1) “relational accountability” (see also McGregor et al. 2018; Wilson 2008), which recognizes, creates, and maintains “respectful and mutually beneficial relationships between researchers and Indigenous communities” and between humans and nonhumans (Pierotti 2011);

2) guiding standard social science methods (such as ethnographic interviews, audiovisual documentation of specific practices, recording of oral life histories, focus groups, and archival research) by Indigenous and locally specific theories; and

3) adjusting methods, theories, analysis, and dissemination in relation to the felt needs of local communities (Windchief and San Pedro 2019: x-xii).

Across all research stages, along with our students, we will collaborate with local knowledge holders, producing a dialogue that will co-shape our output, and which may result in co- authorship. Recognizing reciprocity, another principle within IRM, we will share our research results with the communities we work with (see also our Knowledge Mobilization Plan in the Documentation section).

Instruments and researcher training (participant observation and ethnographic interviewing):

Our data collection relies on qualitative participant observation, some of which will be informed by ethological methods (Van Belle 2016; Lehner 1998), ethnographic interviewing, apprenticing, and (where advisable) satellite tracking — all based on a series of Research Ethics Board approved questions, and recorded audio visuals where possible. In years two and three, one University of Regina PhD research student will conduct 10 months of fieldwork in in a northern location (formerly Russia), focusing on a sensory apprenticeship (formerly with a reindeer herding Elder). Also in year two, we aim for two graduate research students (Masters of Arts and Masters of Fine Arts) to interview and learn from approximately 15 elders each (30 in total) over a period of two months in Arctic Canada. In year three, we aim to conduct a two-week field school with five University of Regina undergraduate honours thesis students who will interview and learn from 15 Elders in Arctic Canada.

The undergraduate students will be hired for data analysis in Regina. Data will be analyzed using qualitative data analysis software, allowing graduate student researchers to mentor undergraduate researchers. Video recordings allow us to discuss raw data with specialist practitioners in the field, documenting a second layer of commentaries and interpretations in situ. If at any time direct participant observation, tracking, and/or interviewing will not be possible due to restricted field access, as it has been during Covid-19, the project is set up to use Internet-based communication and archival research to compensate for missing field data. Virtual research methods (Roberts et al. 2021; Arya and Henn 2021; Góralska 2020) and physical and digital archival research also form for us a contingency plan.

Field sites, collection, preservation, and sharing of research data:

Given our longterm connections with communities in the North, we are continuing our work in existing and re-established partnerships in at least two northern regions (for details go to Field Sites):

1) Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR), Northwest Territories, Canada

2) Bulgan District, Arkhangai Province, Mongolia

3) Other North American and European sites to replace Russian field sites

Prior to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, we had set up the following field sites and community relations:

4) Sorok, Okinskii District, Republic of Buriatia, Russia

5) Tes-Khem, Erzin, Tyva Republic, Russia

6) Tere-Khöl Districts, Tyva Republic, Russia

In all of our field sites, communities retain full ownership of collected materials, and where facilities permit, they do their own archiving. Elsewhere the University of Regina and/or the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (or comparable alternative) will provide necessary data repositories in accordance with each research agreement. In all of our field sites, communities retain ownership of collected data, and where facilities permit, they do their own archiving.

Objectives and steps taken to achieve each (participation, mapping, and filming):

Our first objective focuses on sensory ecology, asking:

“How do animals and humans engage the senses to establish shared meaning, and what role do habituation and memory play in this effort?” Our PhD student, supervised at Regina, aims to apprentice with Indigenous Elders, documenting non-verbal interspecies communication out on the land. Formerly, they were going to learn about the breeding and training of a founder herd of 10 reindeer in Siberia. Alex Oehler will help set up the apprenticeship, while engaging in data collection with the PhD researcher during periodic field visits, and remaining in regular communication with the Elder(s) and apprentice. This objective is low risk, promising a high yield of usable data.

Our second objective focuses on space, rhythm, and materials, asking:

“How do differences in spatial cognition, life rhythm, and materials-use feature in interspecies communication?” For this purpose, in collaboration with wildlife biologists, we aim to review available data on the movement of diverse polar species in northern Canada. Formally, we were hoping to work with specialists at Ulan-Ude State University to employ Iridium (Satellite tracking collars) and GIS (Geographic Information System) to map the speed and pattern of movements in varying terrain for several different species in Siberia. This would have allowed us to track domestic herd movement in relation to wolf migrations, pairing herder interpretations of animal behaviour with tracked movement to show how lead animals and herders communicate about joint decisions in timing and direction. Because wolf collaring can be challenging, this would have been a higher risk objective in terms of guaranteeing usable data.

Our third objective focuses on intention, learning, and language, asking:

“What learnable (intergenerational) nonverbal communicative acts can be (and have been) observed in wild and domestic settings?” MA/MFA and undergraduate students will focus on these themes in their interviews with Elders in Canada. Using the same collaborative (and antagonistic) interspecies settings, our team will record nonverbal interactions (possibly via AudioMoth sound recording) between people, animals, and objects to learn how (mis-) interpretation between species is exploited. For instance, we will study how hunters disguise their intent, for example in stalking techniques or in the design of traps (including wolf traps). We aim to observe predator (wolf, etc.) interactions around traps, using game cameras to record animal habituation around built structures to probe how traps are found out and how knowledge about concealed intent is transmitted in groups of animals between generations. We will layer this data with local accounts of predator communication and den architecture collected by our research students and team. In Siberia, wolf dens were a key aspect of our study in concealed animal intent because the strategies they embody parallel human trap design. We anticipate to continue with this third objective in our new field sites, as it is also relatively low-risk in terms of data yield, allowing graduate student researcher participation.

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*All photographs from Storyblocks.com (license holder A. Oehler, 2022).