The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
... Stakeholders often rely on anecdote to illustrate the costs and benefits of different management alternatives (e.g., Evanice, 2017), and simultaneously challenge each other's claims by arguing that stories are not a valid source of data (e.g., Cotton, 2022). These arguments overlook theory that supports individual and shared stories as important sources of information on human-nature relationships (Gould et al., 2014;Silko, 1981;Tsing, 2015). ...
... Gathering stories as data confronts multiple complications. These include the need to develop trust between researcher and participants (Tsing, 2015), insideroutsider dynamics (Boglioli, 2009), and the impacts of researcher identity on participant responses (Adu-Ampong & Adams, 2020; Chiswell & Wheeler, 2016;Holmes, 2021). Community-based approaches can address many of these challenges and therefore are used in many natural-and social-science contexts (McKinley et al., 2017;Sullivan et al., 2009Sullivan et al., , 2014, including speciesscale studies of human-coyote interactions (Drake et al., 2021;McKinley et al., 2017;Weckel et al., 2010;Wine et al., 2015), participatory action research (Lopez-Garcia et al., 2021;Milich et al., 2021) and research with youth participants (Cahill, 2007;Skelton, 2008Skelton, , 2013. ...
... Our experience with story data suggests a new way environmental valuation may be able to build understanding across difference-a long-standing goal for conservation (Isacs et al., 2023). Storytelling is a way to co-create meaning and facilitate understanding across difference (Silko, 1981;Tsing, 2015). We experienced this firsthand as we read these stories from our perspectives as researchers and residents of Vermont. ...
The ecosystem system services framework has potential to help clarify wildlife management challenges at the single species scale, but existing methods struggle to capture the complex values and tradeoffs at play in human–wildlife interactions. We worked with community scientists to gather and use stories (n = 150) as a source of ecosystem services data about living alongside eastern coyotes (Canis latrans var) in rural Vermont, United States. Our a priori ecosystem service assessment showed that human–coyote interactions can have simultaneous positive and negative human well‐being impacts at both the sample scale and for individual interviewees. Our research identified emergent themes that lent insight into how interviewees justified different kinds of relationships with coyotes. We applied a tradeoffs lens to evaluate three policy options based on their potential to mitigate ecosystem disservices and maximize ecosystem services from human–coyote interactions. We found that ecosystem services assessment rooted in a dataset of stories revealed policy‐relevant understanding of value conflicts and alignments at the sample scale without overshadowing the nuances of individual interviewees' experiences.
... O "pensar-com" cria a possibilidade criativa de novas epistemologias da vitalidade, encontrando caminhos para que as subjetividades transindividuais (Simondon, 2015) possam entrar na discussão sobre as mudanças de orientação exigidas pelo Antropoceno. Em vez de reafirmar as antigas geobiopolíticas de controle e governança como solução, precisamos reconhecer que as crises ecológicas contemporâneas -que ocorrem em ambientes perturbados pela irrupção das relações capitalistas de produção e consumo -exigem a simbiogênese (e o devir-com) para identificar novas formas de (co)existência em aliança com outros seres e entidades (Tsing, 2015). ...
... Desse modo, me interessa indagar de que modo esses relacionamentos corresponderiam a novas formas de tornar visível a sociomaterialidade da taltuza, indo além de sua adscrição a valores negativos como o de "vertebrado praga", e suscitando uma outra expressão de encontros, por exemplo, com as "microvitalidades" do solo. Me detenho para identificar as artes de notar dos "taltuceros" ("arts of noticing"), nas palavras de Tsing (2015), e a interdependência multiespecífica que (re)configura a composição sociomaterial do território a partir dos vínculos ambíguos entre esses atores locais. ...
... Ao tentar descentralizar essa abordagem positivista, na direção de uma crítica multiespécie, é possível perceber que o tratamento do "feral" corresponde com modos de relacionamento baseados em mecanismos de alienação, transformando as redes de vitalidade em conglomerados de ativos móveis que se deslocam através do sistema de produção capitalista, desarraigando seres e entidades de seus modos básicos de subsistência (Tsing, 2015). Anna Tsing observou que "a alienação cria possibilidades para que as "máquinas de replicação" 3 funcionem adequadamente. ...
A análise crítica da (co)habitabilidade multiespécie pode contribuir de maneira inovadora à agenda contemporânea dos Estudos sobre Desenvolvimento Rural. Ao trazer novos atores sociais para a discussão sobre a des/re/composição material dos territórios, a Perspectiva Antropológica Multiespécie destaca como as modulações transindividuais e múltiplas que emergem do situado estão reconfigurando a participação de diversos atores (humanos e mais-do-que-humanos) em fenômenos territoriais cada vez mais complexos. A tese apresentada examina as redes vitais que constituem um território de (co)existência em San Gerardo de Oreamuno (Cartago, Costa Rica). A pesquisa foca nos relacionamentos entre humanos e as populações de coiotes (Canis latrans) e taltuzas (Heterogeomys heterodus) que (co)habitam na localidade. O objetivo é compreender como esses vínculos, fundamentados em práticas e valores territoriais, estruturam a vida cotidiana, indo além dos elementos econômicos, institucionais e de mercado. Do ponto de vista teórico, a tese propõe diálogos entre a Pesquisa Antropológica Multiespécie e a Perspectiva Orientada ao Ator (POA) para revelar as vitalidades que contribuem para novas potencialidades no desenvolvimento territorial. Ao prestar atenção aos relatos organizados pelas vitalidades mais-do-que-humanas e questionar as abordagens prescritivas do desenvolvimento, enfatiza-se a importância dos agenciamentos e das capacidades performativas que envolvem esses seres nos processos situados de desenvolvimento. Essa perspectiva vai além das interpretações que veem o ideal desenvolvimentista como uma arte exclusiva da gestão burocrática conduzida por governos e mercados. O estudo empírico das dinâmicas sociomateriais no território, presente nesta tese, oferece interfaces analíticas que avançam em uma nova epistemologia da vitalidade. Alguns conceitos teórico-metodológicos são delineados para explorar criativamente como as narrabilidades outras-que-não-humanas provocam o surgimento de novas formas de compromisso e resposta. Esses conceitos destacam as provocações e a proatividade trazidas por outras vitalidades e entidades, bem como a maneira como elas afetam e são afetadas pelo caráter contingente e sempre inacabado das redes de relações em que participam. Argumenta-se que há uma ampla variedade de relacionamentos que, embora significativos para os processos de desenvolvimento territorial, não adquirem o caráter de “questão pública”. Muitas interações entre humanos e espécies silvestres estão ligadas a problemáticas do desenvolvimento,
mas frequentemente não são abordadas pelas narrativas antropocêntricas dominantes. Portanto, essas formas de encontro se tornam relevantes para entender como as práticas sociomateriais situadas mobilizam e (re)configuram as potencialidades do desenvolvimento. A tese destaca a importância de reconhecer e valorizar os relacionamentos multiespécie para promover um desenvolvimento territorial mais inclusivo e sintonizado com os diversos mundos de vida que compõem a vida territorial e suas constantes transformações. A tese evidencia, por último, como a Pesquisa Antropológica Multiespécie em San Gerardo de Oreamuno permitiu identificar práticas de (co)existência que expressam configurações territoriais inéditas. Essas práticas destacam a importância do que pode ser chamado de “ecologias de proximidade”, as quais suscitam formas regenerativas de encontro e intensidade afetiva, vislumbrando a aliança e a cooperação entre diferentes organismos e expressões vitais.
... In this brief overview of ecological anthropology, I also highlight the work of anthropologists attentive to more-than-human relationality, involving animals, plants, things, digital technologies, and places (Collu, 2020;Dave, 2023;Govindrajan, 2018;Ingold, 2000Ingold, , 2021Ingold, , 2022Kohn, 2007Kohn, , 2013Latour, 2005;Tsing, 2013Tsing, , 2015. Engaging with non-human animals and their ways of knowing has allowed anthropologists to transcend the concept of culture as studied in sociocultural anthropology: "An ethnographic focus not just on humans or only on animals but on how humans and animals interact explodes this closed self-referential circuit" (Kohn, 2007, p. 5). ...
... Engaging with non-human animals and their ways of knowing has allowed anthropologists to transcend the concept of culture as studied in sociocultural anthropology: "An ethnographic focus not just on humans or only on animals but on how humans and animals interact explodes this closed self-referential circuit" (Kohn, 2007, p. 5). These authors tend to push against the view that human beings live in a "conceptual world" as proposed by Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 27). 2 Instead, they offer a view of human beings as "becoming" through their entanglement or affective engagement with other humans and the more-than-human world (Tsing, 2015; see also Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). What interests me in particular is the relationship between ecologies and "psychic life," a term used to refer to how perceptions emerge through one's engagement with the world, and how thoughts, memories, and emotions are shaped by this process (Bergson, 2012). ...
... My ethnographic work with Jerome reveals that people are also opaque because we cannot know what they are like in another environment. As Anna Tsing (2015) asserts, the effects of encounters and entanglements are unpredictable; they are "happenings." If I had only known Jerome in the Covid-19 facility, or if I had seen him once in the psychiatric ER after he tried to commit suicide, only a fraction of who he is would have been available to me. ...
Through a longstanding collaboration, psychiatrists and anthropologists have assessed the impact of sociocultural context on mental health and elaborated the concept of culture in psychiatry. However, recent developments in ecological anthropology may have untapped potential for cultural psychiatry. This paper aims to uncover how “ecologies” inform patients’ and clinicians’ experiences, as well as their intersubjective relationships. Drawing on my ethnography with Jerome, a carriage driver who became my patient in a shelter-based psychiatric clinic, and on anthropological work about how psychic life is shaped ecologically, I describe how more-than-human relationality and the affordances of various places—a clinic and a stable—influenced both Jerome’s well-being and my perceptions as a clinician. I also explore how these ecologies shaped our different roles, including my dual roles as psychiatrist and ethnographer. In the discussion, I define ecological factors, describe their implications for clinical practice, and suggest how they could be integrated into DSM’s cultural formulation.
... Проблема же предстояния и про тивостояния во встрече, в столкновении с другим видом заключается в том, что мы не всегда умеем ее замечать, удивляясь и по-исследовательски, и по-человечески . Искусство приметливости [Tsing 2015] отчасти показывает путь расконтекстуализации мира не-человеческих субъектностей, которые сгустились вокруг нас и которые пора начать «узнавать» . ...
... Эколог и писатель Олдо Леопольд, оказавший большое влияние на американское природоохранное движение, начал свою классическую книгу «Календарь песчаного графства» (A Sand County Некоторые наиболее успешные примеры можно найти среди исследований, посвященных не животным, а другим существам. См., например:Tsing 2015].Almanac, 1949) с истории о январском таянии снега . В первой главе книги Леопольд так описывает луговую полевку: «Эта мышка -добропорядочная гражданка своего мирка и твердо знает, что трава растет для того, чтобы полевки собирали ее в стожки, а снег выпадает, чтобы полевки сооружали укромные пути от стожка к стожку»[Леопольд 1980: 16] . ...
Studies of more-than-human sociality in general, and multispecies ethnography in particular, are becoming an increasingly popular trend in global (social, human, and transdisciplinary) scholarship. In the current forum, researchers from various disciplines discuss the advantages, limitations, and challenges of this trend. They also share their thoughts on why multispecies research has (or has not) an appeal in Russian academia and what the future may hold for it. The discussion addresses the key issues of the origin of this trend and its distinctive vocabulary; the subject and object problem; the search for an appropriate methodology and elaborating a scholarly narrative; interdisciplinarity and the relationship between political activism and research.
... From this perspective, socio-ecological problems are traced back to oppressive, alienating, socially as well as ecologically exploitative societal structures of domination, unjust power relations as well as capitalist imaginaries and modes of living (Brand and Wissen, 2018;Schlosberg, 2019). Fundamental societal change, it is argued, necessitates a thorough rethinking and emancipatory reconfiguration of established humannature relations embedding societies in their material preconditions and multispecies landscapes (Asara et al., 2015;Schlosberg, 2019;Tsing, 2015). While resilience and sufficiency might come into view considering unjust distributions of environmental vulnerabilities, the shift towards more sustainable nature-society relations is mainly expected to be driven by collective claims for autonomy, equality, justice, and emancipation (Bergame et al., 2023;Eversberg and Schmelzer, 2018). ...
In the social sciences literature, experimentation in civil society as in food co-ops, urban gardens, repair cafés, or sharing platforms is widely considered as promising to address mounting socio-ecological problems. But is this confidence justified at a point in time when fundamental change is more urgent than ever? After all, these forms of experimentation have a history that reaches back to the very beginnings of environmentalism. Why should they trigger a comprehensive socio-ecological transformation today, if they have not done so in the past? For academic confidence in transformative change through experimentation to be plausible, at least one of two conditions would have to be fulfilled: either academic accounts plausibly demonstrate that the meanings and functions of present experiments fundamentally differ from those in the past. Or these accounts convincingly show that societal context conditions today are much more favourable for transformative change through experimentation than in the past. To assess whether or to what extent at least one of these conditions is fulfilled, we pursue a comparative analysis of past and present discourses on eco-political experimentation in civil society and a conjunctural analysis of current context conditions for transformative change through experimentation. Our findings suggest that neither the criterion of substantial difference nor that of favourable context conditions is fulfilled. For this reason, the current academic trust in transformative change through experimentation, arguably, remains implausible. Hence, we caution against spreading hope when doubt seems in order, for unwarranted narratives of hope may come with an unintended side-effect: ‘sustaining the unsustainable.'
... Community, attachment and love may be found even in capitalist ruins, as may the pieces of planetary histories. 96 Such histories cannot be fully written without some recourse to the planetary. It is cumulative disruptions to the systems of the Earth that double back upon individuals and communities in floods and fires, rising oceans and temperatures as the planet is choked by greenhouse gases. ...
... Following Tsing's (2015) attention to life in the ruins of capitalism and "pericapital" practices such as salvaging as simultaneously existing inside and outside capital, we would like to conclude by inviting the reader to think about our re-enacted video store as a public infrastructure of re-storing. In this sense, the project entails a restoring as in repairing/retrieving something lost (the VHS medium and the video store as social site) and a re-storing as in a form of re-ordering and reallocation into an after-cloud imaginary of contemporary practices that are often extractive and exploitative. ...
... Multi-species ethnographies are one way that anthropologists seek to move beyond limiting western cosmologies of practice and inquiry (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010). Multi-species ethnographies are anthropological texts that assume multi-species agency rather than solely human agency in their understandings of socio-cultural environments (c.f., Tsing 2021). In other words, the anthropologist seeks to perceive and analyze the subject of interest from a more-than-human perspective. ...
Sustainability science researchers are increasingly interested in human–nature connection as a leverage point for societal transformation. Empathy has potential as a way to reconnect people to nature by building relationships among more-than-humans. However, current approaches to empathy with more-than-humans usually prefer sympathy and compassion. I argue that these approaches limit the potential of empathy when considering human–nature (re)connection. I use the established concept of social empathy (Segal 2011, 2018) to structure a new presentation of empathy with more-than-humans: ecological empathy. Ecological empathy, as presented in this paper, consists of two subcomponents: contextual understanding of more-than-human interdependencies and more-than-human awareness and earth system perspective-taking. From this new perspective, I suggest defining ecological empathy as a cognitive and affective ability, which allows for internal coherence across bodily separation in humans and their environment. Integrating literature from biophilia, deep ecology, embodied cognition and multi-species ethnography, I elaborate on ecological empathy with inspirational practices that can be advanced across a range of decision, policy and design environments to address human–nature (re)connection.
... Los bosques a los que mayormente tenemos acceso son próximos, se conforman de tres maneras. Están los árboles replicados que, iguales a sí mismos, ocupan extensiones de terreno de forma homogénea, como un monocultivo que deja poco lugar para otras formas de vida; y aunque a veces escondan sorpresas bajo sus ramas en forma de setas muy apreciadas, su esencia de plantación es ineludible, ecosistemas frágiles bajo formas de explotación extractivistas (Tsing, 2015). Están las huertas leñosas, esos cultivos en los que el fin no es la madera, sino el producto del árbol vivo: frutos y savias, desde las olivas a los aguacates, de la resina al jarabe de arce. ...
El bosque se ha establecido como un lugar de fuertes raíces en el imaginario de lo natural. Responde, a su vez, a una determinada imagen del santuario, como biotopo en el que la vida orgánica emerge en su forma original. El santuario protege y cura, y representa un lugar en el que se materializa un ideal, una utopía, una salvación. Paradójicamente el bosque es un producto histórico que juguetea con la idea de lo originario, y es mucho más que ecosistema. El bosque transita entre estados, formas y esencias. Iremos tras los rastros de la genealogía del bosque actual en la historia de España a través de tres estados y sus nombres: de la plantación al bosque, del bosque al parque, del parque al paraíso. Y en todos el árbol es plantón. La (re)forestación se muestra como el retorno a un estado de Naturaleza previo que ha borrado su historia.
... In fact, the reason behind all of this translingual playfulness is precisely the 'precarious' positions of the creators of the playful (Dovchin, Oliver, & Li Wei 2024). It seems very central to the concept of translingualism that it has had a focus on 'precarity' even if it has not been directly called by this name: that is, linguistic and communicative expressions formed by marginalised people experiencing precarious conditions, that is, 'life without the promise of stability' (Tsing 2015:2), negatively affecting both one's material and emotional welfare (Dovchin 2022). Translingualism, therefore, started as a bottom-up approach, related to ideas such as 'globalization from below' and 'language from below' (Pennycook & Otsuji 2015), to understand how marginalised language users in precarious conditions seek to break sociolinguistic norms in order to subvert dominating ideologies and linguistic boundaries to challenge the status quo (Li Wei & Zhu 2019). ...
Translingual knowledge allows sociolinguists to appreciate more ‘playful’ negotiation and the assemblages of linguistic, cultural, and semiotic resources for meaning-making. Yet, this very idea of ‘translingual playfulness’ should never lose sight of the subversive purpose of this apparent playfulness: to destabilise norms and boundaries. The reason behind all of this translingual playfulness is precisely the ‘precarious’ positions of the creators of the playful. In this article, I urge sociolinguists to think more carefully about how translingual playfulness may connect to precarity and argue that it is important not to construe playfulness and precarity as dichotomous or even as opposite ends of a spectrum but rather to view them as symbiotically (re)constituting each other. The idea of ‘precarity’, thereby, deserves much more attention than the representation of ‘playfulness’; that is, explicit/implicit translingual precarity needs to be revealed in translingual scholarship. (Translingualism, playfulness, precarity)*
... Since its introduction by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000, the term Anthropocene has been questioned by many humanities scholars for its appropriateness as a label given the generalisation involved in identifying 'Anthropos' as the geological agent of the massive changes underway. The debates have generated numerous counter-terms, with the 'Capitalocene' (Arons, 2023;Malm and Hornborg, 2014;Moore, 2016) being the alternative appellation that has gained the most traction in debates within the critical humanities; however, competing nomenclatures include 'Chthulucene' (Haraway, 2016), 'Necrocene' (McBrien, 2016), 'Plantationcene' (Tsing, 2015), 'Eurocene' (Grove, 2019) and 'Anthrobscene' (Parikka, 2014). In particular, postcolonial scholars have strongly interrogated the discourses of Anthropocene as prioritising a particular kind of European scientific knowledge production. ...
... En ellas germina la idea misma de que una forma de sociedad llega a su fin, o al principio de un fin. La literatura al respecto -especialmente anglosajona-no ha dejado dudas al respecto: 'Fin de una civilización' (Scranton 2015), 'Fin del mundo y las ruinas del capitalismo' (Tsing 2015), 'Fin del hielo y la disrupción climática' (Jamail 2019). ...
El artículo describe diez tesis sobre la transformación socio-
cultural que venía aconteciendo en Chile antes del estallido social, para
luego explorar en la forma como ellas se relacionan con los eventos
desencadenados en octubre de 2019, y en cómo se han desarrollado
hasta el presente. Todas las tesis apuntan a que Chile experimentó
profundas y aceleradas transformaciones antes del estallido. Se sugiere
que la comprensión de las movilizaciones no se agota en el curso de
la economía ni tampoco en la lógica del sistema político y sus actores.
Más bien, antes del estallido se vivieron profundos cambios —crisis de
confianza institucional, aumento de la percepción de injusticia social,
nuevas orientaciones normativas, polarización moral y digital, pérdida
de horizontes de futuro e incapacidad de enfrentar la violencia—
que también marcaron el rumbo de los eventos de octubre. Estas
transformaciones culturales se agudizaron en muchos casos por los
eventos posteriores que vivió la sociedad chilena, especialmente la pandemia del COVID-19 y los procesos constitucionales fallidos. El artículo concluye con la paradoja de que, entre el voluminoso caudal de cambios socioculturales que hemos enfrentado, terminamos percibiendo que nada cambia, porque aquello que desearíamos que cambie permanece igual.
... Working with living others broadens temporal existences. Tsing (2015) reflects on progress as the temporal frame we humans are embedded into; as a driving beat that pushes us in a forward march that prevents us from looking around and from hearing temporal patterns that never fit in the progress timeline. Along these lines, working with living others allows experiences that overcome hegemonic and (exclusively) linear temporalities, while concurrently expanding perceptions of space. ...
In this essay I draw on my art research and installation ‘Earthly Bodies, Subterranean Rhythms’ to posit assemblages as ecologies: platforms where specific agencies and interactions occur at different scales, including microscopic levels. Based on documentation images of my creative process, I delve into my experience exploring sculptural building and creative possibilities in more-than-human collaboration. This research involved observing subterranean bodies and temporalities, rhizomatic growth and mycorrhizal interactions as well as working in interspecies cooperation with oyster mushroom mycelium and wheatgrass roots. As spatial practices, architecture and sculpture have developed specific building methods. I expand on assemblage, the building method I worked with, seeking to articulate three lenses: sculptural, material and philosophical. Technically, an assemblage is a piece made by bringing together disparate elements. In this case it consisted mainly of ceramics, different earthly substrates, mycelium spawn, soil and seeds. Borrowing from Bennet’s ‘Vibrant Matter’ (2010) and Tsing’s ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ (2015) I reflect on living sculptures as interspecies assemblages: spaces of collaboration, cooperation and contamination between living and non-living bodies, matter and forces, human and more-than human agencies. From this perspective, assemblages are more than the sum of their parts as they have the capacity to re-make and transform us through encounters. A polyphony of worlding processes makes the collective architecture we live in: our shared world. Working in interspecies assemblages may enable more respectful and enjoyable ways of collective dwelling.
... Serendipity must not be understood as passive, but to the contrary, requires from the ethnographer to sense and notice and sieve opportunities [21]. ...
This paper introduces "Synthetic Interlocutors" for ethnographic research. Synthetic Interlocutors are chatbots ingested with ethnographic textual material (interviews and observations) by using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). We integrated an open-source large language model with ethnographic data from three projects to explore two questions: Can RAG digest ethnographic material and act as ethnographic interlocutor? And, if so, can Synthetic Interlocutors prolong encounters with the field and extend our analysis? Through reflections on the process of building our Synthetic Interlocutors and an experimental collaborative workshop, we suggest that RAG can digest ethnographic materials, and it might lead to prolonged, yet uneasy ethnographic encounters that allowed us to partially recreate and re-visit fieldwork interactions while facilitating opportunities for novel analytic insights. Synthetic Interlocutors can produce collaborative, ambiguous and serendipitous moments.
... Anna Tsing's work The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins illuminates how mushrooms function as a symbol of interspecies interdependencies. 25 The mushroom sprouts in landscapes that have been considerably changed and/or damaged by humans and the very ecology are shaped by the human and non-human interface. ...
Xiaomogu (The Little Mushroom) is a combination of post-apocalyptic sci-fi and male-male romance. In recent years, Chinese-language science fiction has received significant academic attention, while few of them attended to its intersection with romance narration. Simultaneously, literature concerning Chinese online romance fiction, including danmei studies, is still emerging, yet few of them examined the internal heterogeneity, for example, diverse subgenres within danmei. This chapter illustrates how Xiaomogu, as a queer/wild, functions to offer alternative formulations of epistemology that refuse the orderly impulses of modernity and present radical queer potential. Through textual analysis of this queer story, I suggest that the queer/wild love in Xiaomogu is generated in the process of embracing the disorder, and embodied and embedded in the material-discursive continuum in post-Anthropocene where posthumous humans are posthumans infected and transformed by the very mushroom Anzhe. Then, I interpret Anzhe as a queer/wild subject and examine how the acceptance of Anzhe among humans signifies the refusal to submit to social regulations, and desires for a disordering, wild and boisterous future. Through discussing the queer/wild alternative future offered by Xiaomogu, this chapter sheds light on the radical as well as complex explorations embodied in the heterogenous Chinese danmei cultural ecology where various participants work together to interrogate the heteronormative modernist ideologies in the Anthropocene and to offer alternative queer/wild futures. Simultaneously, Xiaomogu and many other eclectic and innovative danmei stories also constitute an organic part of queer Chinese-language literature, which exemplifies the great momentum of queering/querying the fixed and stale anthropocentric heteronormative ideologies.
... P.S. Regarding your notes on acknowledging the problem of time and omnitemporality in Edmund's phenomenology and speaking in the name to reveal the unnamable: Is it itself deconstructable, or unintentionally but essentially self-present to the deconstructive approach? (Hird, 2009;Povinelli, 2016;Tsing, 2015). ...
This article examines the role of memory and remembering in qualitative research, proposing a reflective practice where memories serve not only as a backdrop but as active participants in shaping inquiry. By revisiting and engaging in remembering, we, as qualitative inquirers, forge deeper connections with subjects, encompassing the human, the natural world, and the more-than-human. Drawing inspiration from Bridges-Rhoads et al.’s invitation to explore “readings that rock our world,” we extend this metaphor to memories that challenge and invigorate our academic and personal perspectives. We interrogate the types of memories that compel us to rethink our approaches to qualitative inquiry and recognize the often-excluded voices and narratives that emerge from personal and communal histories. Through a heartfelt compilation of love letters addressing people, objects, travels, and moments, this article champions the inclusion of marginal and overlooked memories within academic discourse. These narratives serve as points of departure for inquiry, challenging the boundaries of what is deemed academically valuable, legitimate, and legible. We extend this invitation to our readers to engage in a collective re-imagining and remembering of research practices, emphasizing the significance of memory work in shaping our way of being qualitative researchers and doing qualitative research.
... Matt Huber writes that "the question of value is at the center of our global ecological crisis" (Huber, 2018, p. 148). Within capitalocentric socio-economic systems, valuations of natures and their "natural resources" are often defined in capitalocentric terms of material use and extraction (Braun, 2003(Braun, , 2006(Braun, , 2008(Braun, , 2015Bakker, 2005;Bingham & Hinchcliffe, 2008;Castree, 2014;Gibson-Graham et al., 2015;Hesketh, 2016;Kosek, 2006;Lowenhaupt-Tsing, 2015;McCarthy & Prudham, 2004;McKibben, 2007;Proctor, 2013). Naturebased recreators 2 offer valuations of natures that take a different form. ...
On United States public lands, large-scale structural capitalocentric valuations are at odds with the embodied non-monetary valuations expressed by nature-based recreators. Valuing United States Forest Service lands through a capitalocentric lens does not account for the more-than-capitalist (MtC) valuations occurring within these sites, and has facilitated large-scale selloffs and reduction of these lands for commercial and extractive purposes. Capitalocentric valuations often fail to express the local, embodied, and intimate valuations of nature in these spaces. These lands are covered by the US public lands multiple-use mandate which defines recreational access as equal in importance to that of natural resource extraction. However, in practice, recreational and non-extractive (ie. non-monetary) access is not well represented in valuation methods, and its true value is not reported and recognized as equally valuable against corporate and national capitalocentric monetary valuations. So recreational, non-monetary, and local valuations of US public lands are un-accounted for or under- represented in large-scale structural valuations of US public lands. This article argues that nature-based trail recreators actually value US public lands via non-monetary visceral value – valuation strategies that are rooted in intimate and embodied interactions with nature – directly challenging the strictly monetary value given to these lands by national and corporate entities. The article develops the concept of visceral value in MtC valuations, using the embodied experiences of nature-based recreators using USFS trails. Rescaling the assessment of value to the site of the individual recreator body directly confronts capitalocentric urges to universalize all used, usable and potential resources into monetary, extractive, production or labor use-values.
... Further to this, Tsing (2015) has shown how following nonhuman trajectories and seeking out interspecies contaminations can reveal more discrete, textured and far-reaching perspectives on capitalism. The crux of these interpretations is that one must probe what nature does for capitalism, rather than fixating on human conquest and questions of what capitalism does to nature (Moore, 2016, 36). ...
In spite of hardships, and encroaching systems of intensive capital-oriented farming, many livestock rearers in the Northwest of England choose to produce organically. When maximal productivity isn't at the forefront of decision-making, it opens up cosmological questions of how and why they choose to farm this way, and poses ambiguities regarding how species relate to one another in a context that still demands the instrumentalisation of life. Research took place over a month spent living and working on an organic dairy farm. In this space of mitigated discipline, where long-standing use-relations have rendered cattle dependent on the sovereignty of human dominion, organic production gives rise to a number of co-dependencies that see power and control reoriented through modalities of care. What emerges is a site where conscious acts of 'working with' subvert the most acute modes of extraction and objectification, and aid the formation of a common, coeval world. Care, intimacy, conviviality, all of these exist within the organic ideology as a way of resisting capitalism, and yet they are also the means through which extraction operates. Incorporation into nonhuman social orders, affective communication, the nurturing of idiosyncratic selves into 'good workers'; these are all formed from, and conducive to kinship, but they are also vital inroads to cooperation and commercial output. What at first appears as tension, between companionship and instrumentality, largely coheres both practically and cosmologically.
... In the arena of contemporary technological discourse, the concept of "calibrated resistance" emerges as a provocative counterpoint to the prevailing narrative of 4. The intersection of calibrated resistance with posthumanist philosophy and the concept of the "more-than-human" world [13]. ...
... Some topics studied by Environmental Humanities which are relevant for conservation are environmental history (Cronon 1983(Cronon , 1996bAdams 2004;Watt 2017), ways of thinking and meanings of extinction (Van Dooren 2014; Dawson 2016; Heise 2016), concepts of wildlife and ex-situ/in-situ conservation (Braverman 2014(Braverman , 2015(Braverman , 2018Lorimer 2015), living-with and becoming-with non-humans and multi-species entanglements (Haraway 1991(Haraway , 2003(Haraway , 2016Fijn 2011;Van Dooren 2012Tsing 2012Tsing , 2015. ...
This PhD explores the politics of pewen tree (Araucaria araucana) conservation in Chile and how these are shaped by different understandings of nature and human-nature relations. Embedded within the political ecology of conservation and informed by relational approaches from environmental humanities and ontological politics, the thesis explores these debates through an in-depth example from a less widely researched field, namely tree conservation. Pewen is an iconic tree in Chile, with the highest level of legal protection. It is present in the temperate rain forest of Southern Chile and Argentina, and it can reach 50 meters high and more than 1000 years old. For Pewenche indigenous peoples, pewen is a sacred tree and a basic means of subsistence, mainly, but not only, because of its nutritious seeds (i.e. piñones). The research is based on qualitative methods: interviews with government officials, ecologists, geneticists, and Pewenche; participatory observation in workshops and meetings; field visits to pewen forests with relevant actors; and a review of policy documents, public letters and newspapers. Fieldwork was conducted between 2017 and 2018, when two key events took place: the national reclassification of pewen conservation status and the start of the Pewen National Conservation Plan. The analysis unfolds through three sections. First, it explores the politics of pewen reclassification demonstrating how the process was shaped by cultural and political meanings ascribed to species status in the assessments. Second, it explores the relationships between Pewenche and pewen as a process of becoming-with, showing how a local pewen ontology is enacted from the interaction between Pewenche and pewen in ways that challenges dominant conservation dichotomies. Third, it develops an analysis of the ways in which different human-nature relations shape pewen conservation, comparing three approaches to this (ecologists, geneticists and Pewenche) and examining how these are embedded in unequal power relations.
O artigo apresenta uma leitura do Antropoceno como o tempo das catástrofes e da intrusão de Gaia, conforme a concepção de Isabelle Stengers. Em seguida, discute as limitações da literatura face aos problemas ecológicos do Antropoceno, seguindo as impressões de Amitav Ghosh, para quem a produção literária contemporânea oculta os desastres ecológicos e os desafios políticos resultantes do aquecimento global e de seus corolários. A partir disso, o artigo demonstra como o livro Croire aux fauves, da antropóloga francesa Nastassja Martin, pode ser considerado uma literatura que reflete sobre o Antropoceno, por meio do registro autobiográfico da autora e das considerações teóricas sobre a comunidade even, população indígena do Ártico russo. Com base na narração do episódio verídico central do livro, em que a autora foi atacada por um urso nas montanhas de Kamtchátka, na Rússia, sustenta-se que a obra está estruturada em uma composição híbrida: há, por um lado, a combinação entre autobiografia e relatório de pesquisa, e, por outro, a mescla de narrativa trágica com literatura especulativa. O hibridismo formal do livro está relacionado à dicotomia entre naturalismo e animismo, segundo o antropólogo Philippe Descola, de modo a demonstrar como a oscilação entre essas duas correntes de pensamento limita, primeiramente, a interpretação de que o ataque do urso à autora pode ser compreendido sob a ótica naturalista do acidente e do trágico. Em segundo lugar, essa ambiguidade abre caminho para uma interpretação sob a perspectiva imanentista do evento, a partir daquilo que a autora denomina de pragmática animista.
Formułując jakiekolwiek stwierdzenie na temat kultury wkraczamy w obszar metafizyki — namysłu nad całością substancjalnie traktowanego bytu. Tym samym każda teoria kultury ma charakter metafizyczny lub przynajmniej z fundamentu metafizycznego wyrasta, co wciąż warte jest przemyślenia. Wprawdzie Karl Popper rozdzielił teorię i metafizykę granicą falsyfikowalności, jednak podkreślał równocześnie wagę i znaczenie horyzontu metafizycznego dla uprawiania nauki. Nieco podobną drogą podąża Mścisław Wartenberg w swojej koncepcji metafizyki hipotetycznej. Warto powrócić do tej propozycji, aby zastanowić się nad metafizycznym charakterem współczesnych, możliwych teorii kultury.
This research article outlines a provocation for diverse and experimentally open, situated approaches to exploring care and caring. The diversely positioned authors discuss this idea using the subject of soil, in the place and context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Little is known about the diversity of ways that everyday people value, or, have caring relationships for/with soil, among a plethora of research that positions soil ‘care’ around, for example, commercial food production, waste-sinking, or property land value. To study diverse care in relation to soil, as with many relational subjects, requires equivalent diversity in the ways in which we might explore it. Here we outline the basis for diverse, situated methodologies that necessarily lead to a diversity of methods. This paper looks at the methodological imperatives that lead to exploring care, and discusses a variety of methods that generate different forms of ‘data’ with different forms of representation of that care. We observe that to holistically observe care relations with soil requires a diversity of methodologies, inherently ontological and epistemological – worldmaking. We discuss situated and enactive, affective approaches of Kaupapa Māori enquiry, monitoring and arts-based approaches to ‘measure’ soil care taking place, in place, and contextualise this with our own author positionality. We discuss this suite of experimental, reflexive, affective and responsive ways to measure soil care that are contingent on that being cared about, for, with and by, and which reciprocally give care.
Posthumanism, simply put, shifts the focus of research and politics away from humans; like Chakrabarty’s (2000) call to ‘provincialize Europe’, it pushes humans to the margins. The challenges posed by human destructiveness, environmental degradation, climate change, population growth, resource scarcity, urbanization, diminishing resources, our treatment of animals, as well as major shifts in technology and communication present a range of ethical and political concerns to which posthumanism responds by decentring the human. While there are many strands to this thinking, for pragmatics it raises a central question: What would the pragmatics of communication look like if humans are either peripheral or even absent from the communication? Put another way, how can we understand communication if we decentre human language as commonly conceived, and instead look at humans and other animals, animals and other animals, humans and machines, machines and machines, animals and machines, and any of these in relation to other possible actants — plants, rocks, spirits, rivers, or forests? If pragmatics has always assumed human actors as central to its endeavour, what does this mean if humans and their language are provincialized? What might a more-than-human pragmatics start to look like? To pursue this, we will look firstly at the background of posthumanist thought and why it matters, and then focus on general issues for communication from this perspective, including ideas such as distributed language and communication.
Bethesda’s Fallout 4 is a popular installment in the established, well-loved video game series. The game’s post-apocalyptic setting exhibits the potential environmental ramifications of unchecked mass industrialism, pollution, and overconsumption of goods that result in widespread pollution and resource scarcity for players in the material world. Fallout 4’s immersive visuals and recognizable culture based upon the United States’ 1950s society create a gaming atmosphere emblematic of Raymond Williams’ structure of feeling in which players associate the catastrophic physical environment and social circumstances of Fallout 4 with the real-world’s conditions. Fallout 4’s settlement construction feature awards gamers agency in post-apocalyptic worldbuilding but also forces players to reconcile that they must rely on trash, debris, and discarded mass-produced goods to ensure settlers’ well-being and accumulate valuable equipment that enhances players’ success. While exploring the game’s map, players have the option to listen to songs from the 1950s and early 1960s—many of which have an upbeat rhythm while addressing nuclear radiation and bombs and serve as political commentary. Fallout 4 simultaneously displaces the positive nostalgia associated with the 1950s while highlighting environmental dangers contemporary audiences continually encounter.
Focusing on the survival video game The Long Dark, this chapter will read the aurora borealis as a heliotropic representation of the relations between technological development and environmental impact. The Long Dark is a survival-crafting sandbox that strands the player on Great Bear Island in the months following a solar flare that destroyed electronic and telecommunication infrastructures across the planet; the aurorae present throughout the game are the remnants of the disaster. Much has been written about the neoliberal imperatives valued by survival-crafting gameplay parameters, a genre whose ludic frameworks involve the negotiation of investment versus cost in a way that, argues Benjamin Abraham, represents “dynamics of industrial accumulation and life under capitalism” (Abraham, Benjamin. 2018. What is an Ecological Game? Examining Gaming's Ecological Dynamics and Metaphors through the Survival-Crafting Genre. Trace: A Journal of Writing, Media, and Ecology). Unlike other crafting games, however, the sense of precarity present in The Long Dark forces a thoroughly disempowered player to face urgent questions regarding the effect of neoliberal capitalist hegemony, ecological disaster, and the fragility implicit in the perception of environmental mastery conferred by technology. In order to conceive of this fragility, this chapter will employ the “heliotrope”—the metaphor of “sun and radiation as an invisible yet permeable sign of the Anthropocene” (DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene, Duke University Press, Durham, 2019)—to figure the aurora borealis of The Long Dark as an inflection point from which to critique, in the words of philosopher Frédéric Neyrat, the Anthropocene as an epoch where “nature as an independent entity and force has been overtaken by the techno-industrial power of humanity” (Neyrat, Frédéric. 2018. The Unconstructable Earth. Translated by Drew S. Burk. New York: Fordham University Press.). Ultimately, the auroral heliotrope offers a powerful metaphor with which to reckon with the Anthropocene thesis as well as the technologies that both enable it and are enabled by it, while illuminating alternative modes of interacting with nature beyond the affordances of technological infrastructures.
The Stephen F. Austin Experimental Forest is the site of the first ADA-compliant US Forest Service project in Texas. Offering information about the history of forest management alongside information on Pineywoods ecosystems, the interpretive trail raises questions about how access is framed across “natural” and “built” environments as well as how distinctions between nature and culture operate within US environmental imaginaries. This article draws on feminist, posthumanist, and disability studies to conduct a close reading of the interpretive trail as text. It tracks the trail’s approach to disability access as well as its presentation of forest ecology, analyzing how the ableist logic of capitalist commodification underwrites the management of multispecies actants in the woods. I read against the grain of the trail in search of feminist, crip, posthumanist configurations of interdependence and more fluid human–nature boundaries. I argue that cripping the Austin requires questioning the unevenness of disability access as well as the utilitarian ideas of nature presented on the trail while also imagining how we might access and relate to this postindustrial forest otherwise.
¿Dónde está el sujeto en la producción de vulnerabilidad en la salud ajena? ¿Cómo se organizan social y culturalmente los actores cuyas representaciones y prácticas producen dicha vulnerabilidad? ¿Y cómo se articulan esta y sus protagonistas con la toma de decisiones, la atención en salud y los cuidados? Para responder a ello, el autor acuña el concepto de “vulnerabilidad relacional”....
https://isco.unla.edu.ar/edunla/cuadernos/catalog/book/55
El presente volumen aporta miradas etnográficas y teórico-metodológicas diversas sobre la salud sexual y reproductiva en América Latina, desde la perspectiva de la antropología médica crítica, con contribuciones originales que contextualizan, problematizan y discuten con el concepto de vulnerabilidad estructural en este campo temático. Dicho concepto, propuesto en 2011 por Quesada, Hart y Bourgois, plantea entender cómo la posición que ocupan los sujetos en la estructura social, en función del género, la clase, la etnicidad, la ciudadanía, la orientación sexual o la generación, impacta de manera diferencial en su salud a partir de la articulación entre los determinantes sociales de la salud y la violencia estructural. La vulnerabilidad estructural ha sido incorporada a los circuitos de las ciencias sociales del norte y el sur global con notable éxito, pero sin ser cuestionadas sus limitaciones analíticas o problematizado su uso. Este libro es producto de un trabajo desarrollado durante varios años, cuyos orígenes se remontan al III Congreso de la Sociedad de Antropología Médica de la Asociación Americana de Antropología, que tuvo lugar en La Habana en 2020. Sus contenidos se centran en diversos contextos y poblaciones de México, República Dominicana y Chile, con alcances en otros países de América Latina.
https://isco.unla.edu.ar/edunla/cuadernos/catalog/book/55
Migrating reefs, unprecedented species assemblages, neophytes, toxicities, pollutants, aquatic ruins – The future of coral reefs in the Anthropocene is likely to look different from anything we have experienced so far. While the classic conservation debate on coral reef restoration still treats these ecosystems as “sick patients,” a radically different view of convivial conservation is beginning to challenge exclusive human control over these endangered habitats. Putting aside notions of natural “purity” and adopting a much more humble and highly interconnected perspective on marine habitats, we can begin to see reefs as transformative, sympoïetic and blasted seascapes for a convivial future. The discipline of biodesign has been primarily focussed on researching ecological relationships with regard to new materials and products. The emerging interest in shaping the multi-layered ecological relationships of habitats for other-than-human lives, however, is steering design practice towards terraforming or, in the case of marine environments, “aquaforming.” This paper argues for taking convivial conservation practices in marine environments as a starting point for the development of a new design methodology that focuses on the design of living systems in open environments: a proposed methodology called Sympoïetic Design.
Academic forum on multispecies studies, with 36 scholars from different countries and disciplines participating (in Russian).
Dalam laporan penelitian ini peneliti akan menyelami dunia Antropologi multi-spesies, dan melalui hal ini peneliti akan mengeksplorasi hubungan antara manusia dan harimau Sumatera di Kebun Binatang Kinantan, Bukittinggi. Harimau Sumatera terancam punah, karena hilangnya habitat, kerusakan ekosistem, dan yang paling penting adalah karena konflik manusia-harimau Sumatera yang memiliki intensitas yang tinggi. Untuk melestarikan harimau Sumatera sebagai spesies "liar" di kebun binatang, telah diberlakukan praktik-praktik yang dilakukan oleh keeper yang menyerupai praktik-praktik domestikasi dan mengarah pada cara- cara baru dalam berinteraksi dengan dan mempersepsikan spesies ini.
Pertama, melalui deskripsi kualitatif dan dengan pendekatan performative melalui metode animal focal sampling, peneliti akan menunjukkan bagaimana harimau Sumatera yang berbeda "diciptakan" melalui praktik-praktik interaksi, dan bagaimana sebuah pertunjukan alam liar hidup berdampingan dengan praktik- praktik domestik dalam populasi setan yang ditangkapi. Serta, Harimau Sumatera akan diketahui perilakunya berdasarkan pengamatan dari peneliti.
Kedua, peneliti telah melihat praktik pengembangbiakan yang spesifik dan bagaimana praktik pemberian makan, pengembangbiakan, dan pengurungan menjerat kehidupan manusia dan binatang. Peneliti juga telah mengeksplorasi berbagai cara untuk memberlakukan perawatan, dari yang dekat dan diwujudkan oleh keeper. Dengan berfokus pada keterkaitan praktik- praktik yang dilakukan dalam kebun binatang, tujuan peneliti adalah menggunakan deskripsi empiris untuk memperdebatkan jaringan hubungan dalam proses menjadi dan dunia yang sedang terbentuk, di mana dunia ini tidak tetap, tetapi dibuat melalui praktik-praktik manusia dan non-manusia.
The Post-Anthropocene continues to be treated as in the future, conjuring Post-Anthropocene pedagogies as something to imagine. Scholarship in this area is relegated to ‘futures scholarship’. ‘Living now’ means gathering together with our more-than-human elders, siblings and cousins to ‘do education’. Education, in this sense, means learning from the stories of our more-than-human and indigenous elders. This afterword places the book in a broader context: We are already in the Post-Anthropocene. Post-Anthropocene pedagogies gather us together, now, here, to use analysis of everyday artifacts for community development with our more-than-human elders, past, present and future.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.