Wild and Wonderful

An Ethnography of English Naturalists

By Vanessa Manceron

In Wild and Wonderful, social anthropologist Vanessa Manceron investigates an understudied but indispensable scientific practice: getting to know and recognize the living worlds around us. Her research takes her to England, where a longstanding naturalist tradition brings together professionals, academics, and amateurs to study the world around them. Observing the natural world here is regarded not as a simple hobby, but as a necessary activity. This is participatory science, an itinerant brand of scholarship that immerses itself in a specific and delimited territory, meticulously documenting the species living there and how they develop and expand their domain or regress and disappear.

Manceron leads us through woods and fields, showing us another way of looking, of paying attention to minute differences, sounds, and variations of color. Her book is both a contribution to the anthropology of science and an opportunity to take a fresh look at our relationship with nature, affording us a glimpse of another way of living and living with.

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Extracts from Reviews of the French Edition

“In the context of the ongoing sixth extinction, Vanessa Manceron’s book gives us a little hope, a breath of air. The anthropologist … introduces her readers to the world of [English] naturalists, true artisans of a citizen science. Above all she deciphers their ‘regime of attention to the living world’ and the forms of wonder that set them in motion, their sensibilities. These interactions speak to the complexity of the very notion of naturalism.”

— Frédéric Laugrand, Université catholique de Louvain. Published in Anthropologie et Sociétés

“Vanessa Manceron’s whole book seeks to describe and understand the ‘regime of attention to the living world’ that characterizes amateur naturalists. In their patient and wonderstruck activity, production of knowledge and taxonomic rigorousness are inseparable from sensorial experience and sensitivity. The oral or written testimonies gathered from the naturalists allow us to grasp the mainspring of their hobby, the origins of their vocation in childhood. The ethnographer’s observation in a sense mirrors the naturalists’ gaze, and the passages dealing with the similarities between the birdwatcher’s methods and those of the ethnologist are especially stimulating. Manceron’s book is a valuable contribution, bearing witness to the importance of an ethnographic approach to understanding the eminently concrete and literally vital character of the naturalist’s knowledge ‘without qualities.’”

— Julien Bondaz, Université lumière Lyon 2. Published in Gradhiva

“Vanessa Manceron’s Les veilleurs du vivant is a delightful read for anyone interested in what anthropology has to contribute to understanding the Anthropocene, for all those interested in amateur practices and in citizen participation, all those who would think of humans as one living species among others.”

— David Dumoulin Kervran, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Published in Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances

“What would change in the mainstream accounts of Modernity if amateur naturalists could have their say? Vanessa Manceron provides the means to answer this question by offering up, in her book Wild and Wonderful, a fine-grained ethnography of naturalists in the English county of Somerset. The project Manceron invites us to espouse—to ‘repopulate the world’ as seen by the Moderns with ‘whispering, prolific forms of life’ that have never ceased to be observed and heard—will incontestably capture us. It is clear that this recourse to the margins of ethnography … opens paths of critical reflection that are not only unsuspected but also necessary.”

— Hélène Artaud, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle. Published in L’Homme.

Vanessa Manceron is a social anthropologist and researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and director of the Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative in Paris.

Michael Taylor has translated many book-length essays in art history, including Matisse’s correspondence with M.-A. Couturier, and several volumes of poetry, including Victor Segalen’s Stèles and Horace’s complete odes. He is also the author of books on Rembrandt and Vermeer.

Stephen Hugh-Jones is Emeritus Research Associate at the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology. His research and publications focus on the culture of the Eastern Tukanoan peoples of Colombian Amazonia.