posthumanism; human-environment relations; anthropogenic climate change/Anthropocene; Kashubia; Stimmung (attunement); eco-affects and emotions; anthropology of art
Long abstract
What role does (critical) posthumanism play in the rediscovery of the ecological condition of human beings? I pursued this question in my research on Kashubia, located in northwestern Poland. This region is partially inhabited by a cultural community of about 500,000 Kashubs, an autochthonous Slavic people who settled in Pomerania as early as the 6th and 7th centuries. My posthumanist studies on Kashubia, transcend previous academic knowledge production on this region in that they do not ask what is Kashubian, but attempt to ethnographically describe concrete spatial-material assemblages and the human and non-human entities embedded in them in their potentiality and openness, in their multiple appearances and essences beyond stereotyping, essentialising, anthropocentric and dualistic attributions in the light of the Anthropocene. I have tried to think the abstract anthropocene processes in terms of concrete landscape assemblages, objects and materials, in terms of the concrete narratives of those human and non-human actors, in order to allow an empathy with, engagement with and attunement to concrete transformations audible in everyday life.