More-than-human kinship against proximal loneliness: practising emergent multispecies care with a dog in a pandemic and beyond.

Dogs are here to live with, not just to think with. In this autoethnographic essay, I share my experience of loneliness and more-than-human kinship while being in lockdown with my dog, Frank, in our small flat in Edinburgh due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I open with our histories and how we have come to be kin in order to make our positionalities explicit. I then tell three stories that illustrate how our lives - and our bodies - are being shaped by the current pandemic, addressing the ways in which its contribution to my loneliness in COVID-induced lockdown manifested in our everyday life. Engaging with existing scholarship on emotional/personal, social and cultural loneliness, I theorise that life in lockdown suffers from a new type of loneliness: proximal loneliness. Then, I build on the concept of response-ability to argue that multispecies kinship helps to alleviate feelings of proximal loneliness through emergent practices that make us response-able - care and respond - to one another. I contend that even in these unprecedented and viral times that have come to elicit profound feelings of loneliness and despair for many, the repertoire of our multispecies emergent practices that may help us through the difficulties of proximal loneliness continues to exist and grow with shared response-abilities of our kinship across the species boundaries.

Thinking global health from the perspective of anthropology.

COVID-19 has brought about political, economic, cultural, and interspecies problems far from medical areas, which challenges academia to rethink global health. For holism principle, anthropology offers valuable insights into these health issues, including the political economy of inequality, cultural diversity, and cultural adaptations, as well as the study of multispecies ethnography. These perspectives indicate that unequal political and economic systems contribute to health problems when people acknowledge disease and illness mechanisms. Moreover, cultural diversity and cultural adaptation are essential for providing appropriate medical solutions. Lastly, as a research method of studying interspecies relationships, multispecies ethnography promotes one health and planetary health from the ultimate perspective of holism. In conclusion, global health is not only a bio-medical concept but also involves political economy, culture, and multispecies factors, for which anthropology proffers inspiring theories and methods.