Hello and welcome to the July newsletter of morethanhumanworlds! This month, I'm sharing a new article on ecologies of hunger and satiety in West Papua, published in Medical Anthropology, an essay on space exploration and Indigenous sovereignty, published in The Conversation, and a recorded guest lecture on human-plant entanglements in the monocrop oil palm nexus, hosted by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institut. As part of the ARC-funded The Promise of Multispecies Justice project, I'll be hosting two online talks featuring social anthropologist Jia-Hui Lee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and plant philosopher Michael Marder (University of the Basque Country). Jia-Hui will explore possibilities of justice between rats and humans in rural Tanzania, and Michael will examine justice as actuality and potentiality in an age of planetary unraveling. In this month's Morethanhuman Matters interview, I speak with Paul Keil, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Paul’s research interests are in human-nonhuman teamwork, recreational hunting, and life lived with charismatic wildlife, informed by theoretical and methodological frameworks from more-than-human and ecological anthropology, cognitive science, and the environmental humanities. If you'd like to share resources, news, or anything else related to morethanhumanworlds, please send them to me for inclusion in the August newsletter. Enjoy and thank you for subscribing to morethanhumanworlds! |
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NEW OUTPUTS Read an article on the cultural construction of hunger and satiety in West Papua, published in Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness. In this article, I examine how mass deforestation, agro-industrial expansion, and urbanization produce new ecologies of hunger across the human and other-than-human dwellers of the Papuan oil palm frontier. Read an essay on space exploration and Indigenous sovereignty in West Papua, published in The Conversation. In this essay, I examine how techno-dreams of extra-planetary colonization collide with dreams of political self-determination in the settler-colonized region of West Papua. |
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Listen to a guest lecture on human-plant entanglements in the monocrop oil palm nexus, hosted by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institut. In this talk, I should some thoughts on distributed personhood, multispecies cosmologies, and multispecies justice among Marind peoples of West Papua. To read an interview based on this talk with art historian Sanja Savkić Šebek, click here. |
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UPCOMING EVENTS Join us for two online talks with social anthropologist Jia-Hui Lee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and plant philosopher Michael Marder (University of the Basque Country), as part of the ARC-funded The Promise of Multispecies Justice project. Jia-Hui Lee will offer stories about how rodent traps are designed and used in Morogoro, Tanzania, reflecting on these traps as "cognitive devices" that help people mediate human-rodent relations and meditate on how best to live with rodents, who are sometimes considered agricultural pests. This will be followed by a discussion with Evan Mwangi, who will critically reflect on animal studies in Africa and the possibilities for multispecies justice that can come from an appreciation of African literature. Michael Marder's talk will explore a unique knot in theology, politics, and philosophy—the maxim Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus (“Let justice be done, even if the world perishes”). Marder argues that the ideal of justice oblivious to the material textures of life may be as damaging as the actual practices of injustice. He develops the notion of the energies of justice attuned, without a tinge of utopia, to every kind of being, whether human or non-human, animate or inanimate. Taken to its logical conclusion, justice is the proliferation of worlds, of everything and everyone that just is. To register for upcoming Promise of Multispecies Justice talks, visit www.multispeciesjustice.space. |
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"Human-elephant relationships are often broadly framed as either coexistence or conflict, with coexistence largely defined in opposition to or as the absence of violence. This research also often overlooks other mundane and concurrent forms of co-presence and interaction. Ethnography gives researchers the luxury to follow people in their everyday activities, to attend to the range of encounters they have with elephants across different socio-ecological contexts, and to stay with the ambivalence that characterises these relations." Paul Keil |
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MORETHANHUMAN MATTERS This week, morethanhuman matters interviews Paul Keil, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Paul’s research interests are in human-nonhuman teamwork, recreational hunting, and life lived with charismatic wildlife, informed by theoretical and methodological frameworks from more-than-human and ecological anthropology, cognitive science, and the environmental humanities. | | |
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FOR THE READING LIST Büscher, Bram. 2021. “The Nonhuman Turn: Critical Reflections on Alienation, Entanglement and Nature Under Capitalism.” Dialogues in Human Geography, DOI:10.1177/20438206211026200. On the need for a shift away from ‘decentring the human’ to a dialectics between 'more-than-human' and ‘less-than-human’ that highlights how forms of capitalist domination continue to diminish (certain) humans and (certain) nonhumans. Winter, Christine, and Jakelin Troy. 2020. “Indigenous Justice in Times of Climate Crisis.” Sydney Environment Institute. https://sei.sydney.edu.au/opinion/indigenous-justice-in-times-of-climate-crisis/. On how destruction of sites of incalculable importance to Indigenous communities during the 2019/2020 Australian fire crisis and its implications for government and public action and recognition. |
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Fujikane, Candace. 2021. Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. On how Kanaka Maoli cartographic practices rooted in an ethos of more-than-human abundance, relationality, and reciprocity subvert the logos of scarcity and extractivism conjured by neoliberal capitalist ideologies. Jensen, Casper B., and Anders Blok. 2013. “Techno-Animism in Japan: Shinto Cosmograms, Actor-Network Theory, and the Enabling Powers of Non-Human Agencies.” Theory, Culture & Society 30 (2): 84–115. On Shinto cosmograms as an illuminating analytical vantage point for interpreting the immanent, affective, enchanting and enabling powers of non-humans in contributing to collective life. |
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