Human-Nonhuman relations

Catalogue essay produced for Portals: past, present, future 14 November to 13 December, Western Australian Maritime Museum Victoria Quay Fremantle. The exhibition featured 23 emerging and established artists with work based around the port of Fremantle: 

Patricia Tarrant, Shiva Amir-Ansari, Nic Compton, Simon Gilby, Denise V Brown, Sally Stoneman, Lorraine Spencer Pichette, Angelo Caranna, Beverley Iles, David Small, Vanessa Wallace, Eva Fernández, Tracey Hart, Denise Pepper, Criss Sullivan, Dianne Souphandavong, Anna DeLaney, Andrew Nicholls, Richard Foulds, Karin Wallace, Robyn Pickering, Stuart Elliott, Perdita Phillips

My contribution today is titled Walking with buildings. The flâneur and the (im)mobilizing power of non-human narrators and aims to reflect on the contrasting encounter between the apparent immobility of buildings, as non-human inert bodies, and the peculiar mobility of the flâneur. I said apparent immobility because my provocation starts precisely from the idea that buildings, despite their inertia, have an intrinsic power to mobilize our gaze and move our feet: my proposal is to imagine them as non-human narrators that invite the flâneur to move in the city both vertically, discovering changes in time, and horizontally, exploring connections in space. Furthermore, as (im)mobile concrete archives, buildings invite us to reflect once again on the peculiarity of the flâneur’s mobility, which is made of a constant alternation between walking and resting, listening and writing practices. Even if always on the move, the flâneur constantly takes time for slow practices like resting, reflect and writing, thus resisting through his own body to the rapid flows of contemporary cities and neoliberal rhythms.
I will explore these suggestions by proposing three examples: first, a graphic novel by Will Eisner published in 1987 and titled "The building"; second, "Living with buildings and walking with ghosts" the latest work by the well-known psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, which appeared in 2018 and became also an exhibition; third, a personal flânerie in the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens Estate, that I’ve realised in February 2019 while I was living in Tower Hamlets, East London. Following Sinclair’s exploration, I will focus on brutalist estates as architectural bodies that have peculiar stories to tell thanks, to their controversial and critical position in contemporary London as in many other cities. But, How can we listen to voices of buildings, interpreting them as non-human narrators that keep stories hidden in them? Furthermore, “is there a link between the walking and storytelling practice of the flâneur and the encounter with the (im)mobilities
of buildings?”

This work deals with a study about the contemporary relationship between humans and animals in the context of Animal Assisted Therapies ­ TAA, a growing therapeutic practice in the promotion of human health. The field research was carried out through participant observation of different TAA projects, developed in public hospitals and geriatric homes, in the cities of Porto Alegre, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Methodologically, this research is based essentially on the ethnography of the therapeutic sessions, in order to perceive some of the principles that structure the practice, especially regarding the human­animal relationship and the interaction between the beings that participate in the therapeutic process. As a theoretical horizon, I focused on the thinking of Tim Ingold, whose analytical basis rests on the consideration that the bonds we establish with nature, beings and things, emerge practices and lifestyles, as a pragmatic key to thinking the outcrop of sensibilities and worlds. This proposition has a practical character serving as a support with the works of Andres Georges Haudricourt, Carole Ferret and Perig Pitrou, to try to understand some meanders of this relationship, based on the actions exchanged between humans and animals, during the therapeutic session . We also explored some discourses related to the actions exchanged between the participants of the session, approaching what could be called a therapeutic rationality, according to the thought of Madel Luz , which would be characteristic of the activity, linking it to the Conventional health system, but also offering innumerable new ways of relating and expanding the ways of expression. The therapy in question, as a care technology, adapts to the precepts of Sanitary Reform and Psychiatric Reform (Amarante), since it encompasses processes of changes at the legislative, political, theoretical and practical levels. This work points to a diversified form of therapeutic technique whose therapeutic device is associated with the patient's interaction with an animal, thus allowing criticism of the medicalization of life processes (Illich, 1975; Gaudenzi and Ortega, 2012). that other social actors come in contact with the "patients", besides doctors and nurses (Palombini, 2012). The animals, under the protection of movements in defense of the animals and the benefits (physiological and affective) arising from interspecific interaction in the TAA, occupy the prestigious status of “therapists”.

This essay traces the shifting landscape of ethics in the context of gene modification via art practices, GM critics and CRISPR.

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In January 2015, artists Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen presented a new work in Berlin entitled Sterile. The project began six years earlier and eventually came to fruition when the duo commissioned Professor Etsuro Yamaha to produce forty-five goldfish in his laboratory in Hokkaido, Japan. The goldfish, genetically modified to lack reproductive organs, were to be sold as individual editions of works of art. To further Cohen and Balen’s ambition to remove any evolutionary traits that were associated with reproduction and attracting a mate, the goldfish were bred to be albino. Albinism is a rare genetic condition affecting all vertebrates, characterised by a lack of pigmentation in hair, eyes, skin, scales, feathers and cuticles. In humans, the condition often causes impaired vision and ultra sensitivity to light resulting in a greater susceptibility to skin cancers. Popular superstitions in parts of Eastern Africa regard those born with albinism as sorcerers or demons. Hunting albinos for their body parts is said to bring good fortune to Others, a complete set of body parts costing up to seventy-five thousand dollars on the black market. Whilst protection from hands of greed have failed, numerous local and international charities, along with filmmakers, have been drawing attention to the persecution of albinos, engendering a significant decrease in the murder rate. In 2014, the Tanzanian government made crimes against those with albinism punishable by death. Later in 2015, two hundred and twenty-five Tanzanian witch-doctors were arrested on charges of murdering albino adults and children.

Cahiers de littérature orale est mis à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution-Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale 4.0 International. Interview: Katell Morand "The juxtaposition of contrasting grammatical concepts may be compared with the so-called 'dynamic cutting' in film montage, a type of cutting, which, e.g, in Spottiswoode's definition, uses the juxtaposition of contrasting shots or sequences to generate in the mind of the spectator ideas that these shots or sequences by themselves do not carry." Roman Jakobson 1 K.M: 2 The poetics of place has been a central theme in your work since the 1970s. After years of doing fieldwork in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, you introduced in 1993 in your influential essay "Waterfalls of song" the concept of "acoustemology, " or sound as a way of knowing, 3 and you analyzed in fine detail the linguistic and poetic features of the Bosavi acoustemology. As a way of introducing the French translation of this essay, I would like to focus on the poetic performances of the Bosavi people: what they tell of a way of being in the world, and how you have chosen to translate and represent them through texts,

Primer capítulo de introducción de la publicación “Traducir un bosque”, editada y coordinada por Santiago Morilla y publicada por la Diputación de Granada (2021): Los estudios y experimentos sobre comunicación entre plantas nos indican que todos los seres vivos nos relacionamos dentro de un complejo tejido de interdependencias que nos afectan de manera simbiótica, más allá de lo que los humanos podemos ver u oír, o siquiera creemos saber sobre ellas. Es más, pese a que la biomasa planetaria está esencialmente por plantas, siguen siendo las grandes desconocidas en nuestra cotidianeidad antropocéntrica. Desde este planteamiento, el proyecto “Traducir un bosque” pretende, con ayuda de la mediación tecnológica, hacer perceptible aquello que no vemos ni oímos, que ni siquiera sabemos o creemos saber sobre las plantas. “Traducir un bosque” despliega un sistema experimental de interacción simbólica entre humanos y plantas; una red que nos invita a considerar que no somos únicamente espectadores, sino cocreadores de la realidad que compartimos con el ecosistema vegetal, pero cuyos datos necesitan ser traducidos y acotados para ser –de nuevo– reobservados y reinterrogados desde otro lugar para la convivencia multiespecie.

Through an ethnography of the C4 Rice Project's sorghum experiment in the Philippines, this article analyzes particular practices in experimental rice fields and how rice researchers understand their work through specific material practices and engagements with the plants. Returning to the critiques of disembodied science, the author looks at the particular, situated, and subjective labor that researchers do in the fields to argue that these relationships offer different and richer ways to understand scientific knowledge production and practices. Drawing out a distinction between working on plants (the human as producer and plant as passive raw material) and working with plants (a process of humans and plants working together in a situated and particular relationship), the article offers an different approach to Marx's concept of labor by incorporating nonhumans as active and relational actors in the labor process. Labor, then, can be seen as a creative relationship between humans and nonhumans situated in particular times and places.

Negotiating Personal Autonomy offers a detailed ethnographic examination of personal autonomy and social life in East Greenland. Examining verbal and non-verbal communication in interpersonal encounters, Elixhauser argues that social life in the region is characterized by relationships based upon a particular care to respect other people’s personal autonomy. Exploring this high valuation of personal autonomy, she asserts that a person in East Greenland is a highly permeable entity that is neither bounded by the body nor even necessarily human. In so doing, she also puts forward a new approach to the anthropological study of communication.
An important addition to the corpus of ethnographic literature about the people of East Greenland, Elixhauser‘s work will be of interest to scholars of the Arctic and North, Greenland, social and cultural anthropology, and human geography. Her conclusion that, in East Greenland, the ‘inner’ self cannot be separated from the ‘public’ persona, will also be of interest to scholars working on the self across the humanities and social sciences.

This article engages the Nietzschean problem of nihilism from a "cross-cultural", comparative vantage-point. In Nietzsche's diagnosis of the "sickness" of nihilism, the measure of that illness is taken with reference to a particular conception of health -- rooted in Nietzsche's relational ontology of the will to power. Here, instead, I wish to take the possible nature and entailments of relationality as an open question to be pursued in conversation with Indigenous American and especially Amazonian Kichwa thinking. Doing so, I argue, allows for a distinctive kind of gloss on how we might think about what is impoverishing in nihilism, and also opens distinctive horizons for exploring what it might mean to live otherwise, to pursue health. To explore how this may be so, I focus on the question of power and how power is experienced as relating to the self -- both within nihilism and within Kichwa relational thought and practice. Drawing on classical and recent explorations of nihilism's symptoms, I try to show how orienting ourselves in conversation with Kichwa relationality yields a kind of medicine -- a possibility and an invitation for worlding otherwise -- that is adeptly suited to the illness we must grapple with today in the shadow of interrelated social and ecological breakdowns.

There is a present need in contemporary queer theory to join forces with ecological criticism, specifically with the burgeoning field of animal studies, to critically assess the controversial life and writings of self-proclaimed “eco-warrior” Timothy Treadwell (1957–2003). For thirteen summers on Alaska’s Katmai coast, Treadwell maintained a dangerous intimacy with a population of grizzly bears, a species of totemic significance with the power, he believed, to both redeem and destroy him. Theoretical works by Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway help illuminate the vexed power relations between human and animal subjects as well as the queer contours of Treadwell’s conservationism. Drawing on his 1997 memoir, Among Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska, as well as film representations of his life’s work (principally, Werner Herzog’s acclaimed 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man), I ground the queerness of Treadwell’s environmentalism in his radical view that Ursus arctos is not exactly nonhuman and therefore capable of loving man in ways that disturb any easy distinction between the “human” and the “animal.” Treadwell’s relentless personification of other species is the clearest expression of his queer anthropomorphism, the belief that animals are not only human-like but that humans are irrepressibly animal-like because of their shared sexual nature. Through a highly confessional and sexualized discourse, Treadwell’s text registers a sacrificial and masochistic desire to ultimately die for his culture’s fantasy of a masculine nature. The article turns finally to the fetishized status of the bear within a sizable gay male subculture known as “bear culture” to align such sexualized iconography with Treadwell’s own cross-species identification.

CARRYING ON FROM THE SERIES “MARX EN SCÈNE” IN 2016 AND “MATÉRIALISMES À L’ŒUVRE” IN 2017, LE BAL, THE ÉCOLE NORMALE SUPÉRIEURE (ENS) AND UNIVERSITÉ SORBONNE NOUVELLE-PARIS 3 JOIN FORCES FOR A SERIES OF DEBATES-PROJECTIONS ON THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE HUMAN AND THE NON-HUMAN AND THE PARAMETERS THAT ARE DESTABILISING AND BLURRING THEM. THROUGH THE PRISM OF ANIMISM, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, NON-HUMAN SENSIBILITIES AND POST AND TRANS-HUMANISM, THE DEBATES SPUR THINKING ABOUT A DECENTERING OF THE HUMAN AND ENVISAGE WHAT SOME CONSIDER A NON-HUMAN TURN OCCURRING IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES.

This article rethinks the presence of the lion in Bronze Age Crete and its participation in poetic culture in the Aegean. In the absence of living lions on the island, representational embodiments were the basis of people's encounters with the species, and the peculiarities of these object-bodies powerfully contributed to the characterization of the beast. Throughout the Bronze Age, the vast majority of Cretan lion representations occurred in glyptic. Seals were worn on persons' bodies, consistently placing the leonine in direct relation to the human; this juxtaposition had both physical and cultural dimensions and was invigorated by the spatiotemporal dynamism of seal use. This paralleling of human and beast is considered in its lived context, including its likely relationship to oral traditions , especially the comparison formulated by similes. In the period from Middle Bronze III to Late Bronze II, after centuries of development in Crete, the lion's association with glyptic extended to the early Mycenaean mainland. This was a moment of intense intra-Aegean sharing that had linguistic, practical, and material dimensions and that likely saw the birth of the epic tradition. I argue that the beast's persistent position in glyptic contributed to the formulation of Aegean poetic culture, configuring a lasting but fluid parallel between lions and humans. https://www.ajaonline.org/article/4109

Agnès Giard, « “Jouer” au pervers. Amour pour la 2D et radicalité au Japon », L'ethnographie, 3-4 | 2020, 28 octobre 2020. URL : https://revues.mshparisnord.fr/ethnographie/index.php?id=519
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ABSTRACT: Playing “Pervert”. 2D Love and Radicality in Japan
In Japan, the industry of emotional commodities provides video game users or manga readers with attractive and charming creatures as tools to fill their heart and fulfill their fantasies. It is significant that these characters – kyara – are being developed on a rapidly expanding scale which mirrors the economic crisis. They mainly target the market of men and women who refer to themselves as otakus, i.e. consumers of "2D" partners. Held accountable for the low birth rate, otakus engage in fictitious romance or sex relationships as a means to construct their identity and to express a feeling of inadequacy with social expectations: a lot of them believe that it has become impossible, or pointless, to create a family. Is this why they are involved in romantic/sexual relationships with media mix characters? What is the meaning of this "preference" given to imaginary beings? By examining the way otakus build their discourses and adjust them to current events, my goal is to question the very notion of "radicality" in the context of a subculture that is extremely revealing of the tensions pervading contemporary Japanese society.
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RÉSUMÉ 
Il existe au Japon une industrie en plein essor de créatures séduisantes ou charmantes, élaboré-es comme autant de propositions visant à combler l'absence de l'autre. Dans ce pays-leader en matière de simulacres émotionnels-ces personnages appelés kyara s'inscrivent de façon significative dans une logique de développement commercial en contexte de crise et concernent, principalement, le marché très porteur des hommes et femmes qui se désignent comme otakus, c'est-à-dire comme adeptes de partenaires affectifs et sexuels « en 2D ». Longtemps tenu-es pour responsables de la dénatalité, les otakus font de leurs amours fictives un outil de construction identitaire et le moyen d'exprimer un sentiment d'inadéquation avec les attentes sociales : beaucoup estiment en effet qu'il est devenu impossible, ou vain, de fonder un foyer et avoir des enfants. Est-ce la raison pour laquelle ils s'investissent dans des relations fantasmatiques avec des personnages issus de jeux vidéo et de manga ? A quoi rime cette « préférence » affichée pour des êtres imaginaires ? En examinant la façon dont les otakus construisent leurs discours et les ajustent à l'actualité j'espère questionner la notion même de « radicalité » dans le contexte d'une sous-culture extrêmement révélatrice des tensions qui parcourent la société japonaise contemporaine.

Nature is being destroyed. The city is expanding territories and boundaries to create shelter, infrastructure, high-rise buildings, and etc. Only a few expansions consider or examine non-human that also inhabits with us in the territories and urban areas. This paper going to look into the relationship between Architecture and Non-human. How architecture and human action impact non-human in negative and positive ways. How we could consider non-human as part of us to create co-existing between humans and non-human. How we could see Nature in the Anthropocene as part of the design, construction, and architecture in a different scale and scope

La violencia especista es un problema social emergente a escala planetaria que, lejos de prevenirse o erradicarse, se presenta como un recurso disponible para actuar en sociedad. El objetivo del presente trabajo consiste en introducir el término violencia especista y otorgar claves para su reconocimiento y erradicación. Con este fin, desde una perspectiva integral, se realiza una aproximación a su intrínseca complejidad mediante el abordaje de tres grandes ejes psicosociales: orígenes de la violencia especista, definición de violencia especista y tipos de violencia especista. Con respecto a sus orígenes, se analiza su causa, el Especismo Antropocéntrico, situándola en el contexto de otras luchas sociales afines (contra el Sexismo, Racismo, Nazismo, Homofobia, Transfobia, etc.). A continuación, se justifica la implementación del término violencia especista frente a otras terminologías de uso actual (maltrato animal, abuso, sadismo, crueldad, trastorno mental, etc.), otorgando rigor conceptual. Por último, se aborda un exhaustivo abanico de tipologías de violencia especista agrupadas en cinco dimensiones o escenarios de acción posible, según el tipo de relación violenta que se establezca con los animales nohumanos: violencia directa (física, psicológica, espacial, linchamiento, negligencia, instrumental), indirecta, colateral, estructural (incluye el Especidio) y discursiva. A lo largo de toda la presentación se fomenta el uso pragmático del discurso y se analizan casos prácticos y cotidianos que permiten aprehender la magnitud de la violencia especista presente en la actualidad.

Palabras clave: violencia especista, especismo, animales nohumanos, psicología vegana

Speciesist violence is an emerging social problem on a global scale that, far from prevented or eradicated, is presented as an available resource to act in society. The aim of this work is to introduce the term speciesist violence and provide clues for its recognition and eradication. To this end, from an integral perspective, an approach to its inherent complexity is done by addressing three psychosocial major axes: origins of speciesist violence, definition of speciesist violence and types of speciesist violence. According to its origins and its cause, Anthropocentric Speciesism is analyzed, placing it in the context of other related social struggles (against Sexism, Racism, Nazism, Homophobia, Transphobia, etc.). Then, it’s justified the implementation of the term speciesist violence against other terminologies currently in use (animal cruelty, animal abuse, sadism, mental disorder, etc.), giving conceptual rigor. Finally, is addressed a comprehensive range of typologies of speciesist violence, grouped into five dimensions or scenarios of possible action, according to the kind of violent relationship established with nonhuman animals: direct violence (physical, psychological, spatial, lynching, negligence, instrumental), indirect, collateral, structural (includes Speciecide) and discursive. Throughout the entire presentation, the pragmatic use of discourse is promoted, and practical and everyday life examples are analyzed, allowing to grasp the magnitude of existing speciesist violence nowadays.

Keywords: speciesist violence, speciesism, nonhuman animals, vegan psychology


A violência especista é um problema social que emerge numa escala global, o qual está longe de ser prevenido ou erradicado, portanto, apresenta-se como um recurso disponível para atuar em sociedade. O objetivo deste trabalho é introduzir o termo violência especista e oferecer pistas para o seu reconhecimento e erradicação. Tendo em vista esta finalidade, a partir de uma perspectiva integral, realiza-se uma aproximação em relação à complexidade que lhe é inerente através da abordagem dos três principais eixos psicossociais: origens da violência especista, definição da violência especista e tipos de violência especista. De acordo com suas origens e causas, o Especismo Antropocêntrico é analisado por meio da contextualização de outras lutas sociais que estão a ele vinculadas (contra o Sexismo, Racismo, Nazismo, Homofobia, Transfobia, etc.). Sendo assim, justifica-se a implementação do termo violência especista, ao invés de outras terminologias correntemente utilizadas (crueldade animal, abuso animal, sadismo, transtorno mental, etc.), em virtude de seu rigor conceitual. Por fim, aborda-se uma gama exaustiva de tipologias da violência especista, agrupadas em cinco dimensões ou cenários de ação possível, conforme o tipo de relação violenta estabelecida com os animais não-humanos: violência direta (física, psicológica, espacial, relativa ao linchamento e à negligência ou instrumental), indireta, colateral, estrutural (incluí o Especídio) e discursiva. No decorrer de toda a apresentação, o uso pragmático do discurso é promovido, ademais, exemplos práticos e cotidianos são analisados de modo a nos permitir apreender a magnitude da existência da violência especista na atualidade.

Palavras-chave: violência especista, especismo, animais não-humanos, psicologia vegana.

What is an animal? In addition to biological and ecological answers, the animal needs to be explored in its psychological and social dimensions. The animal has long been a symbol of human psyche and culture, from fairy tales to horror films, Oedipal pets to animal phobias, scapegoating and large-group symbols, philosophy to ideology and myth. This article explores animal symbols, totems and taboos, and their interaction with non-human nature, through the perspective of ecopsychoanalysis (Dodds 2011), combining, psychoanalytic, eco(psycho)logical and Deleuze-Guattarian modes of thought. Three animal-types are identified, and these are placed within Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ of mind, society, and nature, seen as in constant, complex nonlinear interaction with one another. Expanding Bion’s ‘binocular vision’, we need to include along with individual psychology and social dynamics interactions with non-human nature. How does an idea or a phantasy impact on an ecosystem or social system? How do our own minds shudder upon collision with the hyperobject of climate change? These are some of the core concerns that ecopsychoanalysis seeks to address.

This is the Draft Table of Contents for my forthcoming book (Lexington--hopefully December 2016): Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.

I post it here to give my readers--for whom I'm tremendously grateful--a preview of the book's themes and argument.

This paper attempts to bring some clarity to the debate among sentientists, biocentrists, and ecocentrists on the issue of who or what can count as a candidate recipient of justice. I begin by examining the concept of justice and argue that the character of duties and entitlements of justice sets constraints on the types of entities that can be recipients of justice. Specifically, I contend that in order to be a recipient of justice, one must be the bearer of enforceable moral claim rights. I then suggest that this has important implications for the dispute among sentientists, biocentrists, and ecocentrists. In brief, I show that sentientists cannot exclude nonsentient entities from the domain of justice merely by denying that they have “the right kind of interests,” and biocentrists and ecocentrists cannot move seamlessly from some feature of living things or ecosystems to entitlements of justice. I further argue that ultimately this disagreement on the bounds of justice bottoms out in a normative disagreement about which entities possess moral claim rights, and that the case for biotic or ecosystem rights has yet to be convincingly established.

This is a transcript of an unpublished talk presented in Frankfurt in November 2015. The paper draws from the principles of François Laruelle's non-standard philosophy to develop a critique of recent philosophies of theatre, both analytic and continental.

Two independent technical developments have transformed the metal mining industry in considerable ways: the increasing share of waste materials in the feedstock of metallurgical operations has partially transformed metal extraction into a recycling industry, and the employment of microorganisms in the extraction of metals from mineral ores has rendered metals mining a biologically based industry. Increasing industrial interest and research activity in the application of biotechnologies to the extraction of metals from waste, particularly electronic waste, intimate a potential intersection of those two processes, destabilizing further the analytical distinctions between extraction and manufacturing, biologically based and nonbiologically based production, waste and resources. This combined deterritorialization of metal extraction requires a theoretical deterritorialization: rethinking extraction beyond extractive industry narrowly defined and the role that nonhuman forms of life play in the production of value in nonbiologically based (extractive) industries. This article is a first step toward outlining the effects of such developments on understanding extraction. It begins by reflecting on the effects of recycling on the spatiality and materiality of the mine and then it proceeds to examine the productive role of microorganisms in mining, the limits of biomining, and the biotechnologies that have developed to transcend those limits. The conclusion draws out theoretical implications of those ongoing lines of deterritorialization and their combination on understanding the spatiotemporality of extraction and the active involvement of nonhuman nature in the production of value.


两项独立的技术发展, 大幅改变了金属採矿业: 冶金作业原料中逐渐增加的废弃物质比例, 已将部分的金属萃取转变成回收产业, 从矿种萃取金属的过程中运用微生物, 则使得金属採矿成为以生物学为基础的产业。对于将生物科技应用至从废弃物、特别是电子废弃物中萃取出金属, 有着逐渐增加的产业兴趣及研究活动, 提示了上述两个过程的互动潜力, 并进一步挑战了萃取与製造、根据生物与非生物的生产, 以及废弃物与资源之间的分析区别。此般金属萃取的联合去领域化, 同时需要理论的去领域化: 在狭隘定义的冶金工业之外重新思考冶金, 以及非人类的生命形式在以非生物为基础的 (冶金) 工业的价值生产中所扮演的角色。本文是迈向概论此般发展对于理解冶金之影响的第一步。本文首先反思回收对于矿场的物质性及空间性的影响, 接着检视微生物在採矿中的生产性角色、生物採矿的限制, 以及克服上述限制的生物科技发展。研究结论部分, 从上述持续进行中的去领域化路径与路径的结合中汲取理论意涵, 以理解冶金的时空性和积极参与至价值生产的非人类本质 。


La industria minera de metales ha sido transformada de manera considerable por dos desarrollos técnicos independientes: la proporción en aumento de elementos de desecho en los materiales con los que se alimentan las operaciones metalúrgicas ha transformado parcialmente la extracción de metales en una industria de reciclaje, y el empleo de microorganismos en la extracción de metales de rocas que albergan el mineral ha convertido la minería de metales en una industria apoyada biológicamente. El creciente interés industrial y la actividad investigativa para la aplicación de biotecnologías en la extracción de los metales contenidos en desechos, en particular en la basura electrónica, permiten entrever una interacción potencial de los dos procesos, desestabilizando aun más las distinciones analíticas entre los procesos de extracción y manufactura, la producción de base biológica y la abiótica, residuos y recursos. Esta desterritorialización combinada de extracción de metales demanda una desterritorialización teórica: repensar la extracción más allá de la industria extractiva definida con estrechez y el papel que juegan formas de vida no humana en la producción de valor en industrias (extractivas) que no están biológicamente basadas. El presente artículo es un paso inicial hacia el enunciado de los efectos de tales desarrollos en el entendimiento de la extracción. El artículo empieza con una reflexión sobre los efectos del reciclaje sobre la espacialidad y materialidad de la mina y luego se procede a examinar el papel productivo de los microorganismos en minería, los límites de biominería y las biotecnologías que han sido desarrolladas para trascender aquellos límites. La conclusión extrae implicaciones teóricas de aquella líneas de desterritorialización y su combinación para tratar de entender la espacio-temporalidad de la extracción y la activa participación de la naturaleza no humana en la producción de valor.

Les images visionnaires, qu'elles soient induites par l'ingestion de substances psychotropes, suscitées par des dispositifs rituels ou saisies à l'occasion d'un débordement perceptif, constituent de véritables agents de la vie sociale. Ce volume explore, dans une perspective comparatiste, la nature de la relation liant ces images aux cultures qui les inspirent ou en sont inspirées. Modes d'attribution d'agentivité, statut ontologique des images, processus de constitution des identités et des collectifs, relations entre figuration, mémoire et problématiques du présent sont autant de thèmes auxquels l'étude anthropologique des images visionnaires offre une contribution significative. Abordant ces images à la lumière de la critique du grand partage entre nature et culture, ce volume accorde une attention particulière à l'intersection des processus biologiques et sociaux ainsi qu'aux transformations en cours dans le panorama mondial de circulation des images. Cahier dirigé par David Dupuis et Maddalena Canna Images visionnaires Sous le haut patronage de Claude Lévi-Strauss, Françoise Héritier et Nathan Wachtel La collection des Cahiers d'anthropologie sociale publie les travaux menés au Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale du Collège de France, en particulier les journées d'études régulièrement organisées en son sein qui réunissent des membres du laboratoire et des chercheurs d'autres institutions autour de grands thèmes d'actualité abordés dans la perspective réflexive de l'anthropologie. Philippe Descola Cahiers d'anthropologie sociale cahiers 17 d'anthropologie sociale 15 €

This dissertation explores the dolphin release project of South Korea to discuss how the nonhuman agency of dolphins as implicated in biolpolitics, related bodily practices and the meaning of space. Jedol, along with two further Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins, captured illegally and performing dolphin shows, were returned to their home-range, the Jeju Islands, through an extensive rehabilitation programme in 2013. This dissertation stands at juncture of scholarly approaches to human-animal relations, employing theories of Foucauldian biopolitics, relational assemblages and performance studies. Based on ethnographic research employing participant observation of scientific dolphin population surveys, dolphin watching tourism and dolphin shows, and interviews with key players involved in the dolphin release project, it examines agency of the dolphins that crossed over the contradictory spaces of dolphinaria and open sea. Critically observing changing embodied performances of dolphins, dolphin trainers, scientists in both the captive and the wild, it explores how humans materially affect dolphins and conversely how dolphins respond to human biopolitics and sometimes overturn it. This dissertation then presents the 'assemblage of captivity' and the 'assemblage of the wild' that exercise in an emergent way whilst human-dolphin relations are continuously (re)negotiated.

Com base em questões surgidas, porém não abordadas, em minha pesquisa de dissertação, pretendo discutir a existência de um fenômeno na comunidade otaku: os relacionamentos – “românticos” ou não – com personagens oriundas da ficção (primariamente quadrinhos e desenhos animados japoneses). Tais personagens, embora não sejam propriamente categorizadas como “humanas” ou até mesmo “reais”, ainda assim gozam de certa ambiguidade em relação à sua existência. A partir de autores como Alfred Gell, Bruno Latour e Hiroki Azuma, pretendo analisar o estatuto da existência de tais seres e, portanto, a dimensão ambivalente entre “realidade” e “ficção” que elas representam no pensamento otaku.

Collating Tadeusz Różewicz’s poetry with Jacques Derrida’s critique of logocentrism and John D. Caputo’s so­‍‑called poetics of obligation, this article ponders upon the ethical relation to non­‍‑human animals – particularly livestock – in the aforementioned literary project. Although Różewicz’s volumes published early after the end of the war seem to drift towards negative anthropology, they tend to benefit from more modern interpretative codes, for instance Giorgio Agamben’s anthropological machine or Caputo’s poetics of obligation. With regard to the means of the latter one, it is argued that Różewicz’s poetry endeavours to rethink animal as the absolute Other, contributing to the ethical relation which has been previously restricted entirely to Human­‍‑Other. Such poems as "Walentynki", "Świniobicie", "Ucieczka świnek dwóch (z  obozu zagłady – rzeźni)", "Buty i wiersze" or "Unde malum?" confirm Różewicz’s sensitivity to animal suffering. Moreover, they often anticipate the ethical and philosophical debates upon the human/animal dyad, and their practical political and economic implications.

This paper analyses the way Richard Powers portrays plant life in his 2018 novel The Overstory. Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, trees are presented as actors and not passive objects. By undermining the mind/ matter, human/nonhuman distinctions Powers reduces the gap separating his human protagonists and trees. The latter have agency, intentionality and the ability to communicate. Powers also attempts to find a new way to give his vegetal life voice. Instead of anthropomorphizing them, plants talk in their own material way. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by, among others, Donna Haraway Anna Tsing, Lowenhaupt, Mark Jackson, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and also from Michael Marder’s and Serpil Opperman’s ideas on plant language and storytelling.

This article examines the possibilities of visual culture to open new perspectives on interspecies relations by analyzing self-portraits from visual artist Elina Brotherus's photography series Carpe Fucking Diem (2011-2015). Brotherus has suggested that this series talks "about a failure to have a family with kids and give normality the finger". The self-portraits can be seen to address this "failure" to have a normative nuclear family, while simultaneously questioning the desirability of the norm itself through Brotherus's relationship with her pet dog, dachshund Marcello. The article explores the more-than-human notions of kinship and family in Carpe Fucking Diem, drawing on Donna Haraway's concept of companion species, as well as discussions on new materialism and posthuma-nism. The concept of companion species deconstructs human exceptionalism and the boundaries between human and animal, and indicates that the physical and affective co-becomings between humans and the non-human significant others co-evolve with each other in complex and asymmetrical ways. In affecti-ve and embodied readings of three self-portraits and one video work from the Carpe Fucking Diem series, I examine how Elina Brotherus's self-portraits call into question the normative notions of family as human-centered and hetero-normative.

The authors of this edition propose a novel and inspiring research approach to the subject of plants, which – being a form of life that is different, yet akin to us – is a constant source of nourishment and metaphors, decoration and obsessions. The articles included in this thematic block on plants enter into lively ongoing debates on genetics, feminism, ecology and plant ontology. They are excellent examples of the fact that in Polish philosophical and cultural reflection there was an understanding very early on of the challenges that posthumanism poses to our anthropocentric intellectual habits. Foreign readers will recognize in these Polish reflections a bold willingness to ask ethical and aesthetic questions of great relevance to the modern world that go far beyond the safe, though most likely imagined, limits of what it is to be human.

Authors: Halina Łapińska, Joanna Łapińska

The article analyzes the idea of a sensory garden as a place of symbiotic affective coexistence of human and non-human subjects in urban space, based on the concept presented in the study of green areas belonging to the “Zachęta” Housing Cooperative in Białystok prepared in 2018 by a team from the Białystok University of Technology. The article tries to answer the question of how the sensory garden becomes a space inviting to build affective connections between the entities that co-create it, and whether this reveals its potential leading to the blurring the boundaries between oppositional categories of “nature” – “culture”, “subject” – “object”. The authors note that the concepts of critical posthumanism appreciating the affective relationships between human and non- human actors, as well as non-humans going beyond the functional framework created by human, resonate in the idea of the sensory garden presented in the study. The sensory garden becomes a productivity sphere appreciating the value of the multi-sensory experience of the world, in which humans and non-humans find countless, often non-obvious ways of interacting with each other.

"This article argues for a specifically Darwinian etiology of the image of the monstrous plant, so ubiquitous in the modern genres of speculative fiction. In the profusion of such narratives in the late 19th century, we can identify a collective anxiety about the implications of universal common descent: acknowledging a shared evolutionary heritage for plants and animals threatens the boundary between the two kingdoms that had always permitted the purely instrumentalist and exploitative relationship between humans and plants. Evolutionary anxiety projected onto the figure of the man-eating plant only multiplied in the early pulp magazines, and continued on through John Wyndham's triffids and beyond. Considering the many monstrous plants of early speculative fiction in this way can help expand the purview of the critical formation known as animal studies: while this paper does not advocate for the development of a "plant studies," it invites further thinking about the implications of taking the word "species" in animal studies a little more literally, as the word so often seems to mean “mammal species" or "animal species."

The rights of nature can be a powerful tool for thinking anew our relationships with so-called "natural beings" conceived as political subjects, and for protecting them against exploitative corporate interests. In this paper, I first inquire into the theory behind this idea and the underlying conceptions of political subjectivity and representation allowing for giving rights to nature. I then analyze some actual cases where rights have been given to nature - notably in Ecuador, Bolivia, the United States, New-Zealand and India - and their relations with the theory.

La Violencia Especista es una violencia social que reproduce los parámetros de complejidad atribuidos a cualquier violencia social ya conocida en la actualidad. El presente artículo realiza un análisis diacrónico y sincrónico crítico de la violencia especista evidenciando los grados de (in)visibilidad que la caracterizan, su nexo con el Especismo y el rol que ocupa el Veganismo como estrategia de erradicación y acción social.

Palabras clave: violencia especista, especismo, veganismo, psicología vegana, estudios críticos animales, antiespecismo, análisis del discurso.

Representing a true portrait, the death mask simultaneously memorialises life and death, offering the living a sense of connection to the dead. Following the invention of photography, the practice of creating death masks languished as a way of preserving the visage of the deceased. However, designer and architect Neri Oxman, along with the group Mediated Matter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have sought to revitalise the practice using new imaging technologies such as multi-material 3D printers and generative computer algorithms. The resulting posthumous portrait represents not the face of the deceased, but rather a symbolic image drawn from the cultural and religious substance of the subject, and is further inspired by archetypal art and architectural structures. Future development earmarks the capture of the microbiome of dying breath, creating a biological interface, to live within the mask long after death. This paper will investigate the transcendence of the death mask from corporeal image to incorporeal relic, considering its implications for human memory and relationality, and its potential to signal a post-anthropocentric vision of humanity

This thesis uses the philosophy of deep ecology as a theoretical framework to explore ecospiritual themes as a key feature of increasing discourse around the ayahuasca phenomenon. The broad objective of the research is to use contemporary ayahuasca discourse to reveal the way cross-cultural seekers engage with and discuss shamanic practices that inform a postmodern ecosophical ontology and deep ecological praxis. Three convergent discourses inform this research; the transcultural ayahuasca phenomenon, nature-based spiritualities of the New Age and the philosophy of deep ecology. Threading through these discourses are ecological and spiritual themes that capture a web of meanings for contextualising the transcultural emergence of ayahuasca spirituality. A key paradigmatic shift suggested by contemporary ayahuasca discourse is a shift in human consciousness toward a non-dualistic ontology regarding humanity’s place in nature. An ecocultural studies approach provides theoretical support for interpreting how the elements of this paradigmatic shift are discussed, understood and practised. As the internet functions as a superlative site for discursive formations of ayahuasca, a thematic content analysis of selected discussion forums within the Ayahuasca.com website was conducted using a multiparadigmatic, deductive and inductive approach. Naess and Sessions’ (1984) eight platform principles of deep ecology were used as a framework to deductively locate textual articulations of the philosophy. Further inductive analysis revealed not only embedded deep ecological themes but also articulations of an ecocentric praxis arising from experiences of unitary consciousness and plant sentience. The deep ecology articulated in contemporary ayahuasca discourse further raised an explicit challenge to hegemonic anthropocentricism through expressions of an expanded sense of self that accentuates the countercultural bearings of entheogenic informed ecospirituality.

I argue that contradictions between contemporary urban Hindutva and more rural and subaltern Bengali Hindu and Muslim religious practices highlight not just deep-seated ideas about caste and community but also reveal a particularly distinct relation to the nonhuman.

Nous devons notre existence au monde. Et pourtant les pollutions de l’air, des eaux, des sols ne cessent de s’aggraver, l’effondrement de la biodiversité suit le rythme d’une extinction de masse, le réchauffement climatique est en passe de mener la planète sur une trajectoire inédite et chaotique, et quant à l’anthropisation massive et généralisée des mers et des terres, elle n’a de cesse de détruire et de brutaliser les vivants. Comment se fait-il qu’une société de la démocratie, de la connaissance et du savoir ait atteint – dans beaucoup d’indifférence – un tel degré de destruction de la terre et du vivant, au point d’en menacer durablement son habitabilité ?

This paper investigates the occurrence of ecocritical thought in two canonical fantasy epics, The Lord of The Rings (1954-1955) by J. R. R. Tolkien and His Dark Materials (1995-2000) by Philip Pullman. Using current ecocritical theory as well as writers and critics of speculative fiction to study the primary works from a marginalized angle, this paper argues that fantasy fiction, more than other literary genres, has an intrinsic exploratory potential for ecocritical ideas because the strong immersive aspect of the genre entices the reader to open up for a less anthropocentric view of the world. If this is investigated further, the narrow space for fantasy literature in literary criticism and academia may be broadened to include a more politically engaged discussion of fantasy than typically assumed. Biography and Contact info: Gry Ulstein is a second-year research master student of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, and plans to write her MA thesis on the topic of ecocriticism and fantasy. She is a freelance editor and translator, and is a member of the editorial board of Frame-Journal of Literary Studies.

"If you were introducing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 's A Thousand Plateaus (1980) to a seven-year-old who found Anti-Oedipus (1972) boring, you might say that the sequel has more animals." This essay argues that Deleuze and Guattari's concept of 'becoming-animal' offers a a supple framework for reading the nonhuman outside the templates provided by psychoanalysis and structuralism. At the same time, it argues that 'becoming-animal' entraps the reader at the very moment that it acquires any normative force, because the will to 'become-animal' presupposes a modality of narcissistic ego-formation. It makes these arguments by way of DreamWorks' 'Madagascar' animated film franchise, read through psychoanalytic, structuralist and queer lenses, and pays special attention to despotic lemur King Julien, an "anomalous" figure of cultural mobility.

Excerpt from Ch. 5 of Capitalism's Holocaust of Animals: In order to equate the human and the non-human animal in the chain of destruction that sustains economy and technology, or to render them equal in the instance of necessary killing, Haraway chooses to treat both the animal (including the lab animal and animals for slaughter) and the human animal as “laborers.” But neither are “laborers” under the terms of capitalism. The system of capitalist economy does not recognise any other form of labor except “wage labor.” The estranged, abstracted wage labor, the abstraction of labor turned into a self-standing reality and commodity (in the narrower economic sense) as reified abstraction are the creation of philosophy and, by structural homology, of capitalism too. By the same token, the wage laborer is by definition human and, in his determination in the last instance, a male human, also more often than not—white. Wage labor is applicable to humans only, or to be more concise—to man only. Women and animals are resource, material, as will become men too with the extinction of the wage laborer—the flesh necessary for the combustion of the Machine-Capital. Haraway seeks to “emancipate” the animal through this move, and in spite of her declared expansion of the category of the animal to include the human, a gesture of subjectivisation of the killed or the suffering animal takes place. Therefore, in spite of the opposite intention, animal’s humanisation takes place. She is elevating both the human and the non-human animal into laborers, which implies both agency and “meaningful purpose” of existence (or productiveness)—her solution is too “philosomorphic” (to borrow the term from Ó Maoilearca).

Singapore the ‘garden city’ has been a longstanding trope used by government officials to promote tourism and actively entice the world’s cosmopolitan well-heeled and moneyed to come and work, or settle, in the small cityscape. Nature in Singapore is primarily seen by the Government as a resource ‘that can be shaped to economic and national development objectives’ (Yuen 1996:968); and indeed, what strikes visitors to this ‘garden city’ is its cleanliness, orderliness, and greenery. But if ‘nature’ in Singapore is a matter of top-down governmental control (of both city-state aesthetics and economy), ‘nature’ has also been the realm for those wanting to rebel against the Government. In other words, politics in Singapore has often revolved around citizens taking up cat- and crow-culling, the saving of graveyards, or specific conservation issues as ways of resisting Governmental prerogatives. In light of the recent writings on the meaning of ‘nature’ and ‘non-humans’ — explored through supposed ‘eco-farms’ for ‘agri-tainment’, fishing and foraging, and the culling of cats and crows — the paper explores the tension between ‘development’ and ‘culture’ in the context of the city-state of Singapore.

This essay explores the much-debated question regarding the extent and viability of Thomas Aquinas as a theological source for expanding Christian ethical concern for the nonhuman creation, particularly nonhuman animals. This exploration focuses on the intersection of two foundational issues in Aquinas’ theological framework, nature and teleology, as well as the effects of this intersection in Aquinas’ work concerning nonhuman creation. From these examinations, I suggest that Aquinas can provide significant contributions for augmenting concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals because his theological framework demands that humans preserve the natural order through conservation. However, Aquinas’ ecotheological
ethics of conservation is foundationally anthropocentric and only permits indirect moral concern for the nonhuman world.

En este trabajo nos proponemos realizar una primera exploración sobre el lugar que ocuparon
las chullpas en la sociedad de Lípez, desde su surgimiento en el siglo XIII hasta el siglo XVI, cuando
la invasión europea parece haber puesto fin a su construcción, aunque no a su gravitación sobre la
sociedad humana, como lo indican las prácticas rituales que continúan generando y la temerosa veneración
que aún hoy les presta la gente. Para ello, dejaremos de hablar de las chullpas en voz pasiva
para pensarlas en voz activa, como personas capaces de hacer diversas cosas según las circunstancias.
Poniendo énfasis en el análisis arqueológico de sus usos y materialidad (v.gr. materias primas, formas
y tamaños, detalles constructivos, cantidad, distribución espacial, asociaciones), buscaremos entender
cómo fueron cambiando sus relaciones con otras personas del mundo andino, incluyendo a otras
huacas y a los propios seres humanos o runakuna, como los llamaremos de aquí en más. En base a esta
información, volveremos al final sobre la identidad de las chullpas.

Humans have been living with other animals side by side since the beginning of their journey on this planet, and have inevitably been dependent on them for various needs and conditions. In one hand, completely relying on natural resources, the prehistoric people had to hunt and heavily exploit other animals for meat and animal products which were very essential for their survival. On the other hand, animals were worshiped, respected and considered to be very vital in different symbolic activities of human groups since Palaeolithic period. Consequently, as like present human societies, the human-animal relationships in prehistoric period were also very complex and multi-dimensional.

Throughout many periods of cultural evolution, perhaps the most crucial stage of human-animal relationships occurred in Neolithic period, particularly during the early phase of Aceramic Neolithic period when human groups were advancing towards a settled socio-cultural and subsistence pattern giving up their nomadic hunting-gathering lifestyle. Contrary to previous periods, Neolithic societies started to live permanently in a certain place throughout the year and hunt animals mainly available in their local environment. Animal species too were forced to cope with this very strange and completely new change in their habitat. Consequently, both humans and animals were going through some very significant and life-changing mutual relationships, which eventually encouraged the domestication of certain ungulate animals in Anatolia and West Asia. Therefore, the essence of the detail study on these complex relationships during this transitional period comes first, if studying any crucial aspect of the human-animal relationships.

Providing that the Central Anatolia is among the most important core regions of Neolithisation, this study attempts to explore multi-scale aspects of human-animal-environmental interactions in Central Anatolian Pre-Pottery Neolithic Settlements throughout a period of about one thousand five hundred years.