Elusive Encounters With Geckos, Or, How to Cross the Human-Reptile Divide

Abstract

In multispecies ethnographies, the question of how to encounter the ‘Other’ is urgent and challenging. Debates about alterity and difference, and different ontologies have informed such debates, and they become even more pressing in ethnographic encounters with nonhuman others, where not only culture and language are a factor contributing to difference, but divides between taxonomic categories. This article focuses on the role of strangeness in encounters for the ethnographer. Interweaving methodological reflections about the nature of alterity in ethnography, biological discussions about the difference between mammals and reptiles, and my own ethnographic experiences in researching human-gecko relations, I will illustrate here how I dealt with the difficulties of encountering Phelsuma day geckos ethnographically by focusing on the niches of shared spaces. I will recount how I made small spaces fruitful for my research by tuning into the dynamics of human-gecko encounters that happened there. Politeness, respect, and protocols shaped spaces and encounters, but were always volatile and never fully reliable. As such, encounters were less elusive and could be well accessed ethnographically, and alterity was constantly renegotiated.