In Animate Planet Kath Weston shows how new intimacies between humans, animals, and their surroundings are emerging as people attempt to understand how the high-tech ecologically damaged world they have made is remaking them, one synthetic chemical, radioactive isotope, and megastorm at a time. Visceral sensations, she finds, are vital to this process, which yields a new animism in which humans and "the environment" become thoroughly entangled. In case studies on food, water, energy, and climate from the United States, India, and Japan, Weston approaches the new animism as both a symptom of our times and an analytic with the potential to open paths to new and forgotten ways of living.

      "Definitive and well-rounded. . . . Explores how anthropologists
        manage issues of identity and sexuality in field research and professional
        life. In an era when the field worker's positionality is critical to research
        and ethnographic writing, this insightful book has much to say to gay
        and straight researchers alike." -- Louise Lamphere, University of
        New Mexico
      "Addresses sensitive, controversial, and tabooed subjects. . . .
        Out in the Field will be read by a variety of audiences, within
        and outside of anthropology." -- Jean Jackson, Massachusetts Institute
        of Technology
      Lesbian and gay anthropologists write candidly in Out in the Field
        about their research and personal experiences in conducting fieldwork,
        about the ethical and intellectual dilemmas they face in writing about
        lesbian or gay populations, and about the impact on their careers of doing
        lesbian/gay research.
      The first volume in which lesbian and gay anthropologists discuss personal
        experiences, Out in the Field offers compelling illustrations of
        professional lives both closeted and out to colleagues and fieldwork informants.
        It also concerns aligning career goals with personal sexual preferences
        and speaks directly to issues of representation and authority currently
        being explored throughout the social sciences.
      CONTRIBUTORS: Geoffrey Burkhart, Liz Goodman, Delores M. Walters, Walter
        L. Williams, Sabine Lang, Ellen Lewin, William L. Leap, Ralph Bolton,
        Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline Davis, Will Roscoe, Esther Newton,
        Stephen O. Murray, James Wafer, Kath Weston, Sue-Ellen Jacobs