Paper short abstract:

This paper explores human-environment relationality and intercarnality, and discusses situated knowledges in the context of Baltic pre-Christian mythologies as alternative genealogies for an affirmative ethical futuring of human-environment relations.

Paper long abstract:

In „The Spell of the Sensous” David Abram critically analyzes the dominating human-environment relationship, and highlights an animist relationality as a potential alternative. His proposal suggests the necessity of an ontological shift in thinking and living environments and considers recognition and analysis of historical and indigenous knowledges, in context with a potential revitalization of relations and approaches supposedly already lost. In my paper, I build upon this stance by exploring pre-Christian Baltic mythologies and elemental knowledges as viable alternative genealogies for an affirmative ethical futuring of human-environment relations. Employing an interdisciplinary genealogical approach between folklore, history and philosophy allows arguing for the presence of history within lived materialities today, thus, approaching revitalization of alternative knowledges in the context of remembrance of what is “already there”. Thus, I explore the potential of employing situated knowledges as vehicles for unearthing the felt sense of environmental embeddedness of the self and human-environment processuality and entanglement at the intersection of ecophenomenology and critical genealogy. With this, the paper mobilizes the genealogies of the past for a reevaluation and reinvention of the concept of environment as something that is not only around us, but also an extension of us and within us on an experiential as well as an analytical level.