Paper short abstract:

Looking at economies from a post-human perspective reveals that production in many economies is not the exploitation of passive resources, but exchange with non-human persons.

Paper long abstract:

The production of livelihood is commonly portrayed as a collaboration

of human beings in regard to non-human, passive resources. However,

recent debates on animism have revealed how a great diversity of

peoples considers processes of production as exchange with non-humans.

What seems to be exploitation of resources can thus be read as the

production of agentive beings through mutual collaboration. A major

means to do so is to entangle beings into exchanges as processes of

giving and receiving which articulate differences and identities, are

risky and often unpredictable, and are based on asymmetry and

hierarchy. The work of Bruno Latour or Michel Callon allows for

considering how a continuum of agentive beings, from objects and

impersonal forces to full human and non-human persons emerges through

exchanges which aim at the production of livelihood. This is true for

non-modern as well as modern societies. However, the recognition of

agency and personhood does not exclude relations of hierarchy and

asymmetry. I thus critique the notion of a Latourian “symmetrical”

anthropology.