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Paper short abstract:

Basing on my ethnographic research and using Blaser’s notion on a still ongoing colonial ontological war (Blaser 2014), this presentation asks how to take seriously a supernatural entity, a certain forest in Central Eastern European Hungary?

Paper long abstract:

Blaser (2014) argues that colonial violence manifests in an ontological war where non-western realities and natures struggle to be acknowledged against western makings of the world. Posthumanism is a part of the ongoing conflict. Blaser (2014) and Sundberg (2014) point out that the so far dominant, western type of posthumanisms tend to prioritise technological other-than-humans compared to (non-western) supernatural ones like spirits, to avoid ‘the taint of superstition, animism, […] and other pre-modern attitudes’ (Bennett 2010, p 53). This means that other, non-western kinds of worlds and natures face difficulties when making their way into posthumanist academic knowledge production. Combining decolonial authors from CEE (Tlostanova 2015, Koobak and Marling 2014) with decolonial posthumanist critique, my research deals with the possible existence of Other natures and their (supernatural) other-than-humans in the Hungarian countryside.

Hungary, and the CEE semi-peripheries are not far enough to be recognised and acknowledged as potentially different by and from the west, but many times get constructed as its handy inner Others or pathological region (Boatcă 2012), stuck in an underdeveloped past, in the constant need of catching up. This presentation asks what does this ambiguous, blurred Otherness mean for the supernatural entities of the Hungarian countryside? How do we recognise and acknowledge the possible existence of not-entirely western natures and worlds in the border zones of Europe? How should we approach, speak for, and let a forest speak for itself, which lays in mountains ‘colonised by the wrong (subaltern) empires’ (Morozov 2015), the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the Soviet Union?