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- Convenors:
-
Lodewyk Barkhuizen
(University of Tartu)
Silvie Lang (University of Kassel)
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- Chairs:
-
Silvie Lang
(University of Kassel)
Lodewyk Barkhuizen (University of Tartu)
Short Abstract
The panel explores the ability of natural environments to possess and speak through human bodies. We foreground nature as an active, agential force capable of articulating its grief, resistance, and desires, by penetrating and controlling human bodies.
Long Abstract
This panel explores how natural environments—such as rivers, mountains, forests, and fields—possess and speak through human beings. Moving beyond conceptions of nature as a passive backdrop to human activity, we examine how natural ecological forces actively penetrate human bodies and minds as a means of articulating their own wants, needs, and desires, following Latour’s definition of agency: entities “make us do things” (2005, 50). As a point of departure, we focus on belief narratives that offer evidence of nature’s capacity to take hold of human consciousness. More specifically, we seek to identify the narrative and performative markers—found in both possession and divination accounts—that depicts nature’s expressive and possessive agency and can be understood as an act of communication in which nature and culture are thought together as naturecultures (Haraway 2003, 11). Through this framework, we ask: How is eco-possession distinct from other forms of possession? What defines eco-possession? How do natural environments assert agency through acts of possession? What, precisely, do these natural forces seek to express? Can possession narratives be understood as a voice for nature, and what are the ontological, ethical, and/or epistemological implications of being possessed by the natural world?
Literature:
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Sunday 14 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
This paper maps out a conceptual space from which to articulate the notion of eco-possession in terms of the dynamics between vulnerability, belonging, and mutual care.
Paper long abstract
This paper maps out a conceptual space from which to articulate the notion of eco-possession in terms of the dynamics between vulnerability, belonging, and mutual care. Exploring the idea that one may both “be possessed by” something and “be in possession” of that same thing, we illustrate how possession, rather than being based on the unilateral influence of one agent over another, exists as a sharing of resources across a composite being. The power that emerges from this reciprocity relies on mutual vulnerability: the possessing agent subjects itself to becoming a possession of—something that “belongs to”—the person it is possessing, while the person being possessed must make space within themselves for the external agent “to belong.”
This dynamic is evident, for instance, in traditional sub-Saharan spiritual practices, where being possessed by a spirit also entails coming into possession of that spirit—often in the form of knowledge. From the negotiation of belonging and the resulting formation of a shared body emerges the desire for sustained, mutual care. Accordingly, in terms of eco-possession, as a human body transgresses the boundaries of a specific natural environment, the person and the environment become available to each other, and the possibility of possession emerges. Crucially, as outlined above, the power inherent in leveraging shared resources through possession is constrained by the extent to which the participating agents are mutually vulnerable to, and thus make space for, each other in their shared expressions. In this sense, eco-possession is defined by human-nature composites speaking together.
Paper short abstract
This talk explores eco-possession in Polish forest politics, examining how activists speak for forests. It asks how humans can rebuild relationships with forests, fostering co-becoming and blurring boundaries between nature and culture, beyond merely representing the forest.
Paper long abstract
In this talk I wonder what the eco-possession mean in Polish forest politics, where the question of who (and how) speaks for the forest becomes urgent and contested. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that while humans must inevitably speak for forests, the deeper task is to cultivate relationships with them—relationships that force us to reconsider what it means to be human.
In the context of Polish forest politics, the spokesperson (Latour 2004) for forests is mainly forest activists. They often formulate their calls not in terms of giving forests a voice, but by emphasizing human needs associated with them. Although many perceive forests as entities in their own right, they recognize that such a narrative is politically ineffective. But is this narrative effective in the long run? Does it not replicate the dominant narrative in the Western world, which separates humans from nature?
I take up Kohn's (2013) argument that forests represent themselves, without the need to speak. The claim that we, as humans, are supposed to represent forests is, in a way, objectifying. Assuming that forests want to exist, we still refer to our human need. Therefore, the key question is not what the forest says, but what can rebuilding our relationship with the forest contribute to? In my work, I argue that more than the need for representation, we need stories and language in which people become with (Haraway 1991) and through relationships with other species, in which the boundary between nature and culture becomes blurred.
Paper short abstract
If eco-possession explores how natural environments possess the human, The Stormlight Archive asks us to consider how that possession might be consensual and even multi-directional. Depicting a pathogenic turned executive possession, the text argues for co-agential approaches to the world in crisis.
Paper long abstract
If eco-possession explores how natural environments possess and speak through human beings, the Stormfather and The Stormlight Archive ask us to consider how that possession might be consensual and even multi-directional. In The Stormlight Archive series (2010-) by Brandon Sanderson, the Stormfather is the consciousness of the planet’s recurring highstorms who forms a unique bond with one of its central protagonists, Dalinar Kholin. In doing so, the so-called Stormfather is choosing to possess and be possessed by Dalinar.
Drawing on Emma Cohen’s anthropological distinction between pathogenic and executive possession, I illuminate how Dalinar and the Stormfather’s relationship begins as an invasive, overwhelming pathogenic possession and shifts to a negotiated, oath-bound form of executive eco-possession - what the series calls the Nahel bond. In doing so, The Stormlight Archives demonstrates how co-agentic relations with ecological forces might be negotiated in a world under threat to accommodate the demands of both the human and nonhuman. Ultimately, the text confirms that both agents are required to change together in order to provide sustainable futures - but suggests a cataclysmic start may be necessary for a world in crisis.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores biblical narratives where nature speaks and acts—mountains clap, stones cry out, creation groans—as early accounts of eco-possession, revealing how natural environments assert agency within human consciousness and culture.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates biblical narratives as early accounts of what may be called eco-possession: moments in which natural environments do not remain silent backdrops to human experience but actively penetrate human bodies, minds, and communities. Passages such as Psalm 19, where the heavens “proclaim” divine glory; Isaiah 55, where trees clap and mountains sing; and Romans 8, where creation “groans” in labor, all present nature as an agent with voice, desire, and communicative force. These texts depict rivers, fields, stones, and forests not merely as metaphors but as participants in a shared communicative field, taking hold of human consciousness and articulating their own conditions. Reading these passages alongside Latour’s definition of agency—entities “make us do things”—and Haraway’s notion of naturecultures, I argue that biblical traditions already encode forms of possession in which humans are moved, spoken through, or taught by nonhuman environments. Eco-possession in these contexts differs from demonic or divine possession by foregrounding the entanglement of natural and human life, as well as the porousness of the human subject to ecological forces. Recognizing these scriptural accounts as testimonies to nature’s expressive agency expands the archive of possession narratives and invites new ethical and ontological reflections: What happens when the forest, the mountain, or the field speaks through us?
Literature:
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Paper short abstract
Water in Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales is no backdrop but an agent of destratification. Across four tales, seas, wells, and moats dismantle human hierarchies of class, morality, and identity, enforcing an ecological fatalism where order arises only through submission to nonhuman logic.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how water functions as an active agent in Joseph Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales, contributing to the field of econarratology. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of destratification—the undoing of rigid social and personal structures—it argues that aquatic elements in these narratives dismantle hierarchies of class, identity, and morality, revealing a stark ecological ethic.
Each tale demonstrates a distinct mode of aquatic agency. In “The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh,” the sea resists dynastic restoration, demanding submission to the monstrous and liminal. In “The Three Heads of the Well,” water acts as a moral-ecological machine, rewarding reciprocity and punishing neglect. In “Mr. Fox,” the moat embodies aristocratic stratification, yet its crossing collapses secrecy and exposes hidden violence. In “The Well of the World’s End,” the impossible task of filling a sieve with water opens a destratifying portal, compelling radical reciprocity with a frog whose demand for violent trust leads to renewal.
Taken together, these readings suggest that narrative resolution in folk tales emerges not from human mastery but from recognition of nonhuman agency. Water functions as a force of destratification that reorders human relations and encodes an ecological fatalism: order can only be restored by yielding to the logic of the nonhuman. This folkloric wisdom, far from archaic, resonates urgently in the age of climate crisis.
Keywords: Econarratology, Destratification, Nonhuman Agency, Ecological Fatalism, English Fairy Tales, Water
Paper short abstract
With reference to Emily Brontë’s (1818-48) writing about wind, this paper explores eco-possession as a permeability between human and non-human forms in light of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of ‘transcorporeality’ (2010) and Astrida Neimanis's (2017) notion of 'weathering' bodies.
Paper long abstract
What does it mean to be possessed by wind? With reference to Emily Brontë’s (1818-48) wind-swept poetry and to her novel, Wuthering Heights, this paper explores eco-possession not so much as a supernatural phenomenon as a permeability between human and non-human forms. Building on both Haraway’s naturecultures’ (2003) and Latour’s actor-network-theory (2005), it turns to Stacy Alaimo’s concept of ‘transcorporeality’ (2010) in order to explore how human embodiment is an effect of dynamic interchanges with the more-than-human world. But where Alaimo sees this permeability in terms of industrial pollution, Brontë’s writing, both in her narrative and lyric modes, imagines the transformative entanglements of bodies in nature, particularly with reference to ‘wuthering,’ that is to windy weather. For instance, in her poem, “I’m happiest when most away,” Brontë imagines eco-possession as an ecstatic dissolution of the subject: a transcorporeal body in a relation to forces of nature and especially the atmosphere: “I’m happiest when most away / I can bear my soul from its home of clay / On a windy night when the moon is bright / And the eye can wander through worlds of light – / / When I am not and none beside – / Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky – / But only spirit wandering wide / Through infinite immensity.” The paper turns, finally, to Astrida Neimanis’s (2017) notion of ‘weathering’ as a transcorporeal being-with nature: as an ecological ethics and aesthetics, as a way to weather the Anthropocene.