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Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
Do invasive species also come bearing gifts? By acknowledging the other in or around one’s corporeal system, I focus on the interweaving of bodily material at the cellular level to rethink the gift as an enduring entanglement, empirically different from the classic model of debt or exchange.
Paper long abstract
In the context of inter and intra-corporeal embodiment I ask whether invasive species may also come bearing gifts. By acknowledging the presence of the other – even potentially malign others - in or around one’s corporeal system, the gift is rethought as an enduring entanglement, ontologically and empirically different from the classic model of debt and exchange. Conventional theory is radically displaced by exploring gifts in an intracorporeal as well as extra-corporeal location, specifically thinking of the interweaving of bodily material at the cellular level.
The arenas of organ transplantation, pregnancy and stem cell therapy - where life-threatening rejection is always a risk – already show that giving/receiving a gift need not imply any distance, but rather an entanglement. The areas of the microbiome and microchimerism provide ample evidence of the ambiguity of such gifts. On a more challenging level I consider the onslaught of global pandemics like Covid-19, widely characterized as aggressive onslaughts of external bioagents to be countered by defensive strategies. A better understanding sees a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by diverse agents. Rather than wholly formed entities being in conflict with would-be invaders, they are produced by millennia of previous mergers and entanglements. Not all encounters are beneficial, but the condition for any species’ thriving lies in an openness to otherness. Biology and medical technologies that offer new understandings are embedded in complex socio-cultural, political, environmental discourses that reject singular causes and the crude binary of positive and negative effects to offer resources for resilience.
Ecology, species, NHA
Session 1