Wild and Wonderful: An Ethnography of English Naturalists

Examining social constructions and perceptions of nature.

In Wild and Wonderful, social anthropologist Vanessa Manceron investigates an understudied but indispensable scientific practice: getting to know and recognize the living worlds around us. Her research takes her to England, where a longstanding naturalist tradition brings together professionals, academics, and amateurs to study the world around them. Observing the natural world here is regarded not as a simple hobby, but as a necessary activity. This is participatory science, an itinerant brand of scholarship that immerses itself in a specific and delimited territory, meticulously documenting the species living there and how they develop and expand their domain or regress and disappear. Manceron leads us through woods and fields, showing us another way of looking, of paying attention to minute differences, sounds, and variations of color. Her book is both a contribution to the anthropology of science and an opportunity to take a fresh look at our relationship with nature, affording us a glimpse of another way of living and living with.

Author: Vanessa Manceron
Publisher: Hau
Published: 01/19/2025
Pages: 260
Binding Type: Paperback
ISBN: 9781914363092

About the Author
Vanessa Manceron is a social anthropologist and researcher at the Centre national de recherche scientifique and director of the Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative in Paris. Michael Taylor has translated not only many book-length essays in art history, including Matisse's correspondence with M.-A. Couturier, but several volumes of poetry, including Victor Segalen's St?les and Horace's complete odes. He is also the author of books on Rembrandt and Vermeer. Stephen Hugh-Jones is Emeritus Research Associate at the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology. His research and publications focus on the culture of the Eastern Tukanoan peoples of Colombian Amazonia.


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