This chapter reassesses Bradbury’s fictionalization of the academic world as a multifaceted exploration of the ironies of a value-free society and of literature’s responses to dehumanization, from the 1950’s “Age of Anxiety” to the postmodern vanishing of the author and its much-awaited re-materialization. From the ambivalence of liberal humanism in Eating People Is Wrong to the bitter satire of sociology as a threat to free will and accountability in The History Man, from the caricature of intellectual arrogance in Doctor Criminale and Mensonge to the problematization of anti-foundational epistemologies that legitimize interpretation in To the Hermitage, Bradbury’s novels of ideas dissect the institutional conditions of knowledge in democratic societies. They offer us not only a humorous outlook on postwar England but also a critical lens to examine the role of the humanities and the mission of academic institutions on a broader scale, issues that continue to be timely.

The fields of critical animal studies and feminist new materialisms have important implications for anthropology. In attending to ethics in human-animal relations, these fields not only decenter but also destabilize the very category of the Human. In conversation with critical animal studies and feminist anthropology, multispecies ethnography thinks with nonhumans and honors their specificities as both individuals and species. Multispecies ethnography encourages analysis of humans’ entanglement with other species as well as thinking about seemingly inanimate matter such as rocks as animate entities. Recognizing the animacy of objects offers interesting and important insights for ethnography. In this chapter, the author provides an overview of the cross-pollination of the multispecies and new materialist turns to explore how feminist and queer studies of the non/human are important for anthropology. Multispecies and feminist new materialist interrogations of sexuality are discussed, focusing on their innovative and important ethical contributions to human understandings of sexuality. The author argues that anthropology is uniquely positioned to intervene further in this conversation and posits that queering multispecies ethnography, rather than simply using nonhuman animals to reify or resist human formations of sexuality, can offer an opening to interrogate sexuality as a multispecies entanglement.