Nonhuman agency in anthropology
positivist anthro
post-positivist anthro
STS would be better off if it could put the two into conversation
“Engineered Nature” – historic aspects of human-nature collaboration
What were thought to be ancient meadows in west now known to be deliberate burns by native Americans
Salmon population rose as humans density in�pacific northwest rises (stream sculpting etc.)
Clam gardens; sacred forests; rain catchment:
biodiversity grows with humans
Satoyama in Japan; Ginko in China shows species
saved from extinction by religious practices
Dogs adapted us as we adapted dogs. �18,000 to 135,000 years ago (so possibly co-evolved).
Marx identifies aspects of pre-capitalist naturecultures as a positive attribute
Under capitalism “For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.
Grundrisse (1861) [underline added]
Contesting western concept of the individual
Marx: 1861 pre-capitalist communal economies resulted in a communal self; the shift to capitalism created individualism
Weber 1905 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – Marx got it backwards. India did not develop capitalism due to Hinduism
Dumont 1976: India contradicts “individual” as “indivisible”-- hence “dividual”
Shweder and Bourne 1984: egocentric (western) vs sociocentric (nonwestern)
Englund and Leach 2000 “all persons are both dividuals and individuals in all societies”
Charles Taylor 2007 pre-capitalist is “porous self” vs “buffered self” in our disenchanted world
Deleuze appropriates “dividual” for control theory
Implication of nonwestern dividual
Strathern, Wagner, Mosoko: non-western has “fractal personhood”; dividual at multiple scales (person, family, clan, ethnic group, kingdom)
Fractal personhood include nonhuman persons
Substance-codes (“material-semiotic hybrids”) circulate in networks;
Personhood is a compressed network of circulation
Self-organization and swaraj
Kropotkin’s “mutual aid” was one of the first scientific descriptions of bottom-up cooperation in nature as a model for mutual aid in society.
His friend, anarchist Leo Tolstoy, developed novels and philosophy that translated these ideas into non-violent, spiritual terms, and wrote “A Letter to a Hindu” about using this basis for overthrowing colonialism. The letter was first published by a young lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi.
Gandhi blended these ideas with India’s fractal tradition of recursion. Gandhi used the term “swaraj” for the recursive loop of self-organization or self-control. Like Kropotkin and Tolstoy, he saw it as a principle that operates at all scales, from individuals to society as a whole.
When naturecultures become extractive
Shinto “ultranationalism”
German organicism and fascism
South African holism (e.g. Jan Smuts)
Staudenmaier and Biehl, Fascist Ecology: the ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents
Extractive forms of human-nature synthesis:
Justification of race-class hierarchy as natural order
Gender divisions as superior/inferior
Substance-codes obsessed with purity/impurity
Nativist ideology (and botany)
Cosmopolitics of autopoiesis
Generative forms: sympoiesis