Sposare una pianta, sposare un animale. Punti di vista multispecie nella narrativa popolare della Siberia orientale

Recent anthropological resoning, fostered by the ontological turn debate (Descola, 2005; Viveiros de Castro, 1998; Ingold, 1988, 2001) tackled the issue of multispecies etnography: it deals with the lives and deaths of all the creatures that for decades have stayed on the margins of anthropology. According to this approach, animals, insects, plants and other organisms have started to appear alongside humans with legibly biographical and political lives (Agamben, 1998). Focused on the changing contours of the “nature” wriggling within whatever “human nature” might mean, multispecies ethnography recalls that “human nature is an interspecies relationship”, as Anna Tsing would put it (Tsing 1995:94). This last statement may also refer to the connections between humans and non-humans. In my essay I take into account interspecies marriages mentioned in some Eastern Siberian folk tales, specifically the issue of marrying a plant, an animal and “other-than-humans” social actors.