…“Are cultural anthropologists ready to shed their habit of using society and culture? (…) No, I don’t feel so. (…) It seems to me that many anthropologists wish to keep the human (…). There is a tricky problem here: concentrating around the human could mean either maintaining this character apart from other entities — the former beings of ‘nature’ defining
Tag Archives: The human
Multispecies vs Anthropocene
An earlier version of this post first appeared on the author’s site, Aesop’s Anthropology.
What just happened in Anthropology? In the 2013 annual meeting there were zero abstracts or paper or panel titles featuring the word “Anthropocene”; this year there were 64! Compare that with “multispecies,” which has held steady at between 16-23 invocations after it first made its appearance …
Élisabeth de Fontenay’s Without Offending Humans
Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights
by Élisabeth de Fontenay (trans. William Bishop)
University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 168 pages.
In the opening paragraph of Without Offending Humans, Élisabeth de Fontenay describes the first time she saw her mentor Jacques Derrida speak at the Collège de philosophie:
…I reacted, all things being relative, as Malebranche did
Remaking Local Biologies in an Epigenetic Time
Premise and Summary
This is a very provisional text,[1] part of a broader book-length research (forthcoming from Palgrave in 2015) on ‘political epistemology’, a construct I use to investigate the coproduction of epistemological facts and socio-political values in the history of the life-sciences (e.g.: how certain views of heredity, development, nature/nurture potentially favor certain political values and …
Human
One almost feels sorry for the human these days. After a heady flight toward near divinity, the figure has tumbled, Icarus-like, down from the intellectual firmament to a posthuman sea of forms, forces and flows large and small. Even anthropology (the very citadel of anthropos!) is now awash with multispecies mashups, circulating microbes and wandering genes, not to mention zombie …
Life Support
This is a conversation between Nick and Zoë. They cultivated this conversation especially for Commonplaces. Nick is an activist and writer who lives on ventilation. Zoë is an anthropologist and friend who does not.
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nick: They say that the fundamentals of life support and CPR are ABC (Airway, Breathing and Circulation). I say that my A and B are …