Whereas I’d previously seen myself as a hack anthropologist doing hack research on semidomesticated hack hyenas, I began to see my project in a different light. In the first place, the hyenas in Harar were not a bunch of second-rate, garbage-munching inferiors to their free-ranging predatory cousins in the Mara. Both groups lived in the shadow of humans and survived by dint of human indulgence—or human indifference. If anything, it was the Harar hyenas who deserved attention, because they represented the future. On a continent experiencing enormous population growth, unfettered develop- ment, and massive habitat destruction, it was the hyenas like those in Harar who stood a chance of persisting beyond the boundaries of protected areas and zoos. I also came to feel good about my own practices. Whereas the Mara project was taking a top-down approach—collecting data to test hypotheses formed out of evolutionary theory—I was working from the bottom up. Rather than control- ling for variables, I was exploring the limits of the variable in Harar, dissecting the interests and agendas of the various players in an urban human/hyena mixing bowl, and asking open-ended questions. What’s important to a hyena person in a maze of narrow lanes? What’s important to a human person encountering that hyena? What’s it like to navigate lanes at night where you might encounter hu- mans at every turn? I was exploring the possibilities that arise when hyenas have to coexist with the old evolutionary enemy, examining socially, politically, ecologi- cally complex relations and how these two and other species operated to mutually shape human/hyena coexistence in a town of a hundred thousand people and two hundred hyenas. This is why it was so crucial for me to be crawling through hyena holes and following hyenas in the middle of the night. I needed to be there when the hyenas did things that expanded the realms of possibility. Epistemologically prepackaged, limited in presence, but unlimited in scope, I was on the ground, in the dark, and subjective as all hell.

— Among the Bone Eaters by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Marcus Baynes-Rock (Page 158)