Lessons in the Anthropocene

Kim Tallbear (associate professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta) writes in the journal Cultural Anthropology about the importance of “Indigenous” perspectives (or standpoints as she says) in thinking about what has been called “interspecies thinking.” We are using ‘interspecies’ or ‘multispecies’ thinking as a critical valence for understanding the anthropocene.

Finally, it is not just indigenous voices, but queer voices that help us expand this conversation. Mel Chen has a new book coming out with Duke University Press, with a chapter entitled “Queer Animacies.” Chen uses the concept of animating and de-animating certain beings. We have seen some humans de-animated or made to seem less alive in order to justify hierarchies. And we see it in our classifications of nonhumans. That human/animal split engenders a lot of violence. And therein lies a key intersection between queer theory and American Indian metaphysics—an aversion to the human/nonhuman split because of an explicit understanding that it engenders violence. There are some really important—not new voices—but new-to-having-a-real-voice-in-the-academy voices that have important insights to offer this field. These voices can help us make our sciences more multicultural and thus more rigorous.

• http://culanth.org/fieldsights/260-why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints
• http://www.kimtallbear.com

One of the pressing concerns in multispecies research is how to extend and apply our analytics across species boundaries. The difference between, say, “a cultural history of plants” and an account that purports to render plants as ethnographic subjects is rather stark. The former is interested in these lifeforms as they’ve conformed to cultural uses; the latter begins from the recognition that much human thought is materially and metaphorically dependent upon plants, as well as the way many of them can be seen as manipulating us to further their species-extension through domestication. With such entanglements, how can we formulate reliable accounts of the world that don’t just include nonhumans but that become a basis for confronting anthropocentrism?

Read the rest of this article here.

See Hartigan’s book, Aesop’s Anthropology, here.