Sketchiness and trust: On the effort to write nonhuman animals

Abstract My tip offers a technique for rendering as subjects—“who,” not “what”—the nonhuman interlocutors of multi‐species ethnography. This involves a particular mode of description which I theorize as “sketchy,” because the process resembles drawing in that it is accretive; prioritizes sensory witnessing; and insists on leaving evident the uncertainty and partiality inherent to such an effort.