We Need to Talk about the Dog! Human-canine relations in the Andes, multispecies ethnography and the ontological turn in anthropology

This article seeks to add to anthropological scholarship on human-animal relations in the Andean region by considering relations between humans and their dogs in southern Bolivia. The Andes region with its history of animal domestication and colonial record is an ideal place to develop our understandings of human-animal hybrid communities. Andean dogs are ambiguous beings. They are essential workmates of humans and ‘become together’ with humans in joint activities, yet they are also outsiders, disconnected from the enmeshment of beings that comprise the ayllu. Analytically, the article looks both to multispecies ethnography and the ontological turn in anthropology to elucidate the position of dogs, and finds a tension between the two approaches which is necessary for understanding the ambiguities inherent in their position. It suggests that what we term ‘dog’ is an aggregate created by partial connections arising from a collision of worlds in the colonial encounter.