Multispecies Succession: New perspectives

​Succession was placed firmly at the forefront of anthropological discussions about inheritance, kinship, and the reproduction of social order by mid-twentieth-century, William Wyse Professors Meyer Fortes and Jack Goody. Meanwhile, in biological science, succession has been defined as the process by which species and habitat in an ecosystem change over time, particularly following disturbance. The Multispecies Succession: New Perspectives project seeks to gather natural and social science perspectives to rethink succession. Reinvigorating succession and exploring its usefulness to address fundamental questions about multispecies relations and intergenerational continuity, we will bring together scholars calling for paradigm shifts to respond to global challenges including the fragility of life on a devastated planet.

​In thinking about succession, this conference will contribute new perspectives on multispecies ethnography and more-than-human theory. While the language of ‘succession’ appears in both natural and social science literatures, it has not been a widely theorised framework through which attempts to understand multispecies relations have been made. Thus far, terms like assemblage (Tsing 2015; Kirksey & Helmreich 2010) or entanglement (Kohn 2007; Ingold 2008; Tsing 2015) have been centered in the literature, used to emphasise co-presence and relational flexibility. In contrast, succession – used in ecology to describe how organisms replaced one-another following disturbance to reach a ‘climax’ community – may seem to introduce a teleology that goes against the grain of multispecies studies’ essential open-endedness. In rethinking succession with the new perspectives on evolutionary processes and challenging assumptions about linear processes therein, this project seeks to contribute a renewed lens through which to view multispecies relations. Theories of succession in both ecology and anthropology invite an attention to themes of disturbance, colonisation, change and inheritance – themes shown to be significant for navigating uncertain ecological futures (Tsing 2017; Bird-Rose 2014; TallBear 2013; Todd 2016). Critiquing classic theories of succession, a post-teleological revision of the term will contribute a method through which to further unpack how we approach temporality in multispecies studies, how we address kinship and how we might understand inheritance across species-lines. In introducing the concept of succession into multispecies discussions more deliberately, this conference will also provide the opportunity to question the fundamental ideas inherited in this literature and to think about the succession of multispecies approaches. Now established, what is next for multispecies studies?