Paper short abstract:

This paper explores somatic spaces through the use of materials as communicative devices. What is the potential of reaching beyond one’s own perceptive world? Invoking Laruelle’s non-philosophy, I ask: How can shared environments provide more-than-human material thinking spaces?

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Soiot herder-hunters of southern Siberia, this paper highlights ways in which aspects of our environment have the potential to become non-verbal communicative devices. Drawing on an affordance perspective, I look at how human and other species identify available materials in different ways, resulting in multi-layered somatic spaces. These layers of species-specific meaning beg us to explore the extent to which diverse natures are capable of reading each other’s signs in the landscape. But going beyond acts of non-verbal inter-species communication, I am interested in exploring landscapes and their material potentialities as more-than-human thinking spaces. I invoke Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy to see how useful this approach might be for anthropologists studying animal-human relations in shared spaces. To what extent can humans and other animals engage in joint acts of material thinking?