#16 Birdwatching and loss in the Anthropocene w/Andrew Whitehouse

Anthropology on Air

Welcome to season 4 of Anthropology on Air! With autumn on the way in Bergen, we kick off a new season with a resident of another North Sea city: dr. Andrew Whitehouse. Andrew is a multispecies, environmental anthropologist and a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Aberdeen with a lifelong interest in birdwatching, the main topic of our conversation today.

We begin with how Andrew’s own bird-watching – mostly carried out at his local ‘patch’ of Girdle Ness, a promontory next to Aberdeen harbour – informs the kind of anthropology he practices. We also discuss the role of bird sounds in people’s perceptions of environmental changes; how watching birds can give people a strong sense of place; the legacy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962); the benefit for anthropologists of drawing on multispecies approaches, and much more.

Andrew Whitehouse is co-editor of the book Landscapes Beyond Land (Berghahn Books, 2012) and the forthcoming volume More than Human Aging (Rutgers UP, 2024), and he has published extensively on various aspects of human-bird relations. Andrew’s articles have appeared in journals such as Environmental Humanities, Conservation and Society, Social Anthropology, The Swiss Journal of Musicology, and Sociological Review.