Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Bernardo Couto Soares
(University of Amsterdam)
Cormac Cleary (University of Edinburgh)
Ritti Soncco (CESIE)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Posthumanism
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel considers the ecologies, politics, and economies of a global capitalist regime that place nonhuman animals in positions of vulnerability, anxiety, and defiance. The engagement within human-nonhuman interactions with the potentiality of reconstituting knowledge, practices, and relations.
Long Abstract:
The Capitalocene (Haraway, 2016) shapes the relations of interdependence between human beings and other species and is greatly maintained by humanist Western-centered knowledge practices and politics that assume a universalistic “Gods trick” (Haraway 1988) over reality. Within this global regime, labor is more than just human, and globalization translates into Eurocentric networks of resources and intellectual capital. Within these recompositions and relocations of ecosystems, blasted landscapes (Tsing, 2015) translate into ecologies and economies violently collapsing into states of ruin and anxiety, but also of defiance of rules, as in the case of mushrooms growth in nuclear disaster zones (Tsing, 2015) and ticks prospering in areas of deforestation and climate change (Ostfeld, 2011; Pfeiffer, 2018).
Within lively capital (Haraway, 2008), nonhuman animals integrate the multispecies chain of factory farming, the pet industry, or veterinary health. But within biomedical practices, the engagement within human-nonhuman interactions have the potentiality for “thinking with care” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) as a relational force that resists moralistic visions. And even within the precarious conditions of a dairy farm, there is a possibility for the construction of different knowledge that question the human-animal divide, by acknowledging non-human language in cows (Leonie, 2019).
Our speakers are encouraged to consider possibilities of thinking and living in a multispecies world that defies dominant capitalist culture. Which relations and practices may be considered? Which knowledge production politics should be contested? How can we decolonize politics and science? What ethics are possible within a more-than-human living?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Katla Kjartansdóttir (University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines human/puffin narratives, which take part in breaking “traditional” human/non-human divisions within the context of museums, art and tourism. The main question is: Is the puffin an active agent in the Anthropocene, which takes part in contesting human-centred narratives?
Paper long abstract:
In our current times of ecological crisis, biodiversity loss and climate change the importance of breaking “traditional” barriers between humans and non-humans has increased. The “othering” of animals and how they have been represented within diverse human centred visual and material narratives needs serious re-consideration. In this paper the main focus is on human/non-human visual narratives and material representations, which take part in breaking these “traditional” divisions. In particular, I examine encounters between humans and the Atlantic puffin within the context of museums, art and tourism in Iceland. Among questions explored are these: How have human/puffin relations been displayed within the context of museums, art and tourism in Iceland? Can the puffin be seen as an active agent in the Anthropocene, which takes part in contesting human-centred narratives? In the examination, presented in this paper, I use a combination of research approaches to analyze material gathered through semi-structured interviews with museum staff, digital ethnography and visual methods to study museum webpages and digital/visual representations of diverse human/puffin relations within and beyond museum walls. Several works of Icelandic contemporary artists, which have been engaging with human/puffin relations in their works, will also be taken into consideration.
Edda Starck (University of Aberdeen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the tensions between care and control in rewilding projects, where an ideal of multispecies autonomy and conviviality needs to be balanced with imaginaries of environmental health. More-than-human agents ignoring these imaginaries and their rules trouble the ethics of rewilding.
Paper long abstract:
Rewilding projects commonly advertise for a withdrawal of human management of ecosystems. Yet, those involved with them often find themselves caught in complex negotiations of care and control that come into existence around multispecies engagements. These are caused by the complex and paradoxical investment of rewilding projects in both an ethics of liberation from capitalist, anthropocentric rule over ecosystems, as well as in a narrative of ecological destruction in need of being mitigated, demanding the drawing of strict boundaries determining who is in- and excluded from 'healthier' future ecologies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with rewilding projects in Scotland, this paper explores how those boundaries (both physical and metaphorical) are inherited from capitalist histories and justified through appropriations of scientific terminology and concepts. But more-than-human actors seldomly share an active interest in our borders, fences, and rigid categorisations. Subsequently, the boundaries and rules of rewilding projects are continuously pushed against and breached by more-than-human agents: beavers leaving their allocated territories to enter zones where they are transformed from 'ecosystem engineers' to 'pests'. 'Native' birches seeding in peatbogs, where they are considered 'invasive'. 'Alien' larch trees becoming the favourite life-partner of rare red squirrels. Faced with this unruly behaviour and unapproved community-building, the ethical dimensions around rewilding practices are pushed to the foreground. I will explore this field of tension in which those involved with rewilding projects are required to balance their ethical ideals of multispecies autonomy and conviviality with a dependency on more-than-human labour to build imagined 'healthier' futures.
Olga Maltseva (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS)
Paper short abstract:
The research focuses on the experience interaction human with predators in the fishing and hunting societies of Eastern Russia. The natives have changed attitudes towards bears and tigers many times. The local predators have come a long way – from sacred, worshiped animals to endangered species.
Paper long abstract:
This research has been conducted in the Lower Amur region, in Eastern Russia, where local peoples have worshiped taiga predators, as a bear and a tiger, since ancient time. For Amur hunters and fishers, these animals were like mythical heroes, ancestors and patrons of their clans. The attitude to them was regulated by the rules and prohibitions that formed a set of the local environmental and ethical standards. The cult of taiga predators entered shamanic iconography, ritual and ceremonial activity, and become a part of the sacred sphere. It contained different spirits having the characteristics of physical nature that allows us to draw comparative analogy to the Earthly plane. Communicating with spirits that personified tigers or bears was based on the idea of “timing” animals, which originated within the community of Amur fishermen and hunters. The main animal-companions for them were dogs. Their hunting and transporting functions penetrated into the spiritual space. Dogs existed together with wild animals in some mythical episodes. For example, bears headed dog teams that carried away mortal souls, or main shamanic spirits-tigers helped shamans, "bringing, taking away" souls.
Industrial development of Eastern Russia has contributed to reducing the number of bears and tigers. Modern realities force the native peoples to reconsider their attitude to predators. It remains a dilemma for them: you need to treat wild beings as sacred animals, or manage their lives on a scientific basis.