Paper short abstract:

A recent turn to rewilding in nature conservation has prompted biologists to rethink position of the human in the management of the living world. This rethinking, I argue, inadvertently challenges discrete anthropologies in ways that may mediate anew feelings of responsibility across species-divides

Paper long abstract:

During the last decade, biologists and other biodiversity champions in Europe and beyond have begun to champion rewilding as an effective tool in the attempt to rehabilitate a natural world that is growing less diverse by the day. In recent years, however, rewilding has turned from a conservation strategy into a goal in itself: The wild.

Taking as the empirical starting point biologists engaged at the Mols Laboratory in Denmark, a nature reserve and rewilding testing tube celebrated for its live diversity, dynamism, and vivacity, the paper explores how this new wave of idealizing the wild partakes in and feeds from an eerily familiar, yet deeply 'polybiguous' re-configuration of the human. That is, as biologists discuss 'natural processes', the meaning and significance of 'invasive species', and the 'unconditional entitlement to exist' of all living beings, they repeatedly, if mostly implicitly, frame relations between the human and (the rest of) nature in ways that alternate between continuity, contiguity, and stewardship, setting up fragile and polymorphous structures of alterity.

If it is true, as Donna Haraway has argued, that the ripening of the human happens "from the soil of the animal" (1989:11), this particular expression of what I call biologists' doublethink (Orwell 2000) - that is, to paraphrase Willerslev (2004), humans are not nature and not not-nature - serves to problematize, in ways that are perhaps themselves problematic, narrowly defined anthropologies in ways that may generate or mediate feelings of responsibility across species-divides.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork from an industrial pig slaughterhouse to reflect on how the human/nonhuman binary is both reinforced and blurred during public tours.

Paper long abstract:

The transformation of animals to food relies on a number of critical oppositions, not least the distinction between humans and nonhumans. This dualism underpins industrialized forms of death that facilitates the killing of 20,000 pigs a day in a Danish slaughterhouse. This slaughterhouse offers twice-daily public tours led by tour guides.

Rather than focusing on the life of the human and nonhuman, reflecting on the industrialized deaths of nonhumans can shed light on conceptions of the human as well as the humane. Following fifteen months multispecies ethnographic research, six of which were spent in an industrial pig slaughterhouse, I illustrate how inevitable killing and industrial forms of death are critical ways used to distinguish the human from the nonhuman. Industrialized forms of death rely on the crucial othering of the nonhuman by emphasizing the teleological life of the pig who is bred for meat. Therefore, nonhuman death as an industrialized form distinguishes nonhumans from humans.

Nevertheless, whilst nonhuman death can be industrial in nature, it cannot be perceived as violent. Thus, drawing on ethnographic moments from these public tours, I convey how killing pigs industrially is framed by animal welfare discourse and guides emphasize human/nonhuman similarity by taking sentience seriously.

This paper will show how public tours exhibiting industrialized forms of deaths blur the human/nonhuman boundary upon which they operate. This reveals a structure of alterity that both reinforces and dispels difference between humans and pigs.

Paper short abstract:

Humanlike robots explicate the human as a social being - not by how such robots inhabit a social humanity, but by how they fall short of it. The humanlike robot I suggest, are ideal traps for others to articulate their own humanity when engaged in human-robot conversation.

Paper long abstract:

For more than a decade professor Hiroshi Ishiguro and his staff of researchers at Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (IRL) at Osaka University has worked on creating humanlike robots in their search for the elusive nature of human nature. But what does a human nature beyond nature look like? And can we as social scientists learn something about the human by how it is articulated by digital and mechanical means?

Taking IRL's flagship robot Erica, according to IRL the most humanlike robot in the world, as empirical case, this paper discusses how Erica, both when she succeed as humanlike and when she fails, captures the human as a social and inherently relational being. Erica is first and foremost created as a communication robot, and it is thus in her conversations with human interlocutors that the visibility of humanness as a shared social property is heightened. Using the example of one conversation between Erica and an especially skilled human interlocutor this paper shows how Erica explicate the human by how she is not. The more Erica fails by her many social faux pas the more she makes her interlocutor elicit humanness enough for both of them.

Erica, this paper proposes can be understood as an epistemic trap of humanness. Despite, or maybe because of the humanity Erica lacks she entraps her interlocutor in a social bond. Through her interlocutor's human overcompensations of Erica's lack, what humans do in order to behave humanly stands out and becomes externally visible between them.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the changing human-animal relations on the Indonesian island of Komodo, suggesting that local ideas about Komodo lizards as ancestral twins are not representing a symmetrical ontology of human and non-human persons but rather reflect and establish an asymetrical moral ecology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores what it means to be human for the inhabitants of the Indonesian island of Komodo who regard themselves as ancestral "twins" of a dangerous predatory species, the Komodo lizards or "dragons". But while they see the lizards as intentional and intimately related persons, I argue that this does not imply that humans and lizards are symmetrical partners in a homologous mode of identification, as Descola and others might argue. Nor would the people of Komodo claim that their lizard twins regard themselves as "human", analogous to well-known claims about Amerindian perspectivism and animism.

I argue instead that this kinship relation does not represent an ontology that denies the dichotomy and asymmetry of humans and non-humans but rather it reflects and establishes what I describe as a "moral ecology": a mode of mutual recognition binding two different species by the same morality and ethos. I explore this moral ecology through the lens of a dramatic change imposed by a global politics of nature conservation, which is regarded by the people of Komodo as evidence of their - but not the lizard's - moral failure.

My analysis of human-animal relations on Komodo Island thus critically responds to the idea that because the global ecological crisis is the result of a modern dichotomy and fundamental asymmetry between nature and culture, animals and humans, it should be overcome by replacing this dichotomy with 'posthumanist' entanglements and symmetries.

Paper short abstract:

My paper attends to the vernacular fascination of cat metaphors intersecting occult, spatial, animal and political realms emerging as an occult diagnostic of being human in the city among young lower class civil society activists.

Paper long abstract:

Among my interlocutors, young lower class civil society activists, in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, the cat haunts, in Derrida's (2008) sense, reflexive discourse serving at various conjunctions as descriptive metaphor for interpersonal dynamics, economic exploitation, magical efficacy, city-life and human fickleness. My paper ethnographically engages this fascination with the cat as a vernacular metaphor mobilized in reflecting on contemporary conditions of life. I read my interlocutors reflective invocations of the cat as an occult theorization of a situated humanity. This diagnostic of felinity exposes, by way of metaphorical occultation, an entwined isomorphic configuration of microsociality and politics. Drawing on Mbembe (2001) and Asad (2015) I situate this emergent self-diagnosis in the sociopolitical space of Kuching and within the intellectual tradition of Bornean animal tales. Based on this, I ask if we also can, in contextually bounded ways, cathect the 'human' through animal figuration and deepen our attention to the insights produced through violation of category boundaries.

Paper short abstract:

Reflecting about the isolated indians in their territory, the Kawaiwete often debate whether these indians are "people" or "spirits", an indeterminacy they extend to some degree to themselves. How should one describe the differences between humanity and spirituality among this Amazonian people?

Paper long abstract:

Recently, many stories about "isolated" people have travelled throughout the Xingu Indigenous Park, a territory located in Mato Grosso, Brazil and inhabited by 16 indigenous ethnic groups. The Kawaiwete, a tupi-guarani speaking people that lives in the region, are often the authors of such stories, which are frequently accompanied by an intriguing debate: are these isolated indians "people" or "spirits"? Starting with this controversy, I shall argue that one of the most important differences for the Kawaiwete when they conceptualize alterity is that between indians-enemies (tawajat) and spirits (mama'eukwaap), which we could hastily place within the scope of the human/non-human divide. However, this difference is not mutually exclusive, since the Kawaiwete always seem to pose an indeterminacy regarding the ontological condition of the Other. Furthermore, this indeterminacy is also extended to a certain degree to the "real people" (aerete), the Kawaiwete themselves. Firstly, the origin and destiny of the person is spiritual: he/she comes from the sky (ywak), where many spirits live, and returns to it after death. Secondly, the living person is also composed of a "spiritual" part (-'ang) which enables all sorts of communication with the multiple spirits that inhabit the kawaiwete cosmos. Taking shamanic speculations as my point of departure, I offer some initial ethnographic reflections that trouble any simple division between humanity and non-humanity, thus showing how humanity and spirituality mutually constitute each other and cannot be easily distilled in dealing with Kawaiwete thought.

Paper short abstract:

My paper considers the relationship between grief, empathy, and openness to others, human and nonhuman. Taking the notion that we are undone by grief quite literally, it reads grief as producing an ontological vulnerability that can open us up to nonhuman presences, including the dead.

Paper long abstract:

My paper considers the relationship between grief, empathy, and openness to all kinds of others, human and nonhuman. We sometimes say that the recently bereaved have been undone by grief, seeing presences or hearing voices that are not there. I take this notion of being undone seriously, asking after the bodily fragmentation that grief enacts, the undoing of the boundaries we secular moderns imagine as "I." Drawing on philosophers Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe, I read grief not as debility but as a mode of capacitation. As Derrida notes in an essay on blindness, in this mode, "The eye would be destined not to see but to weep," and in the moment when those tears veil sight, they also "unveil what is proper to the eye." I therefore read grief - and the vulnerability it produces - as having the potential to open us up to the possibility of experiencing nonhumans - including no-longer-humans, i.e. the dead - in ways that upend secular notions of the real, and that extend the sensory (in)capacities that constitute the secular-modern self. I draw on both ethnography (especially Tibetan frameworks of death and dying) and non-scientific genres - Joan Didion's memoir about bereavement and the sci-fi film Arrival - to work through this relationship between grief and openness to unexpected presences.