9 Questioning a Posthumanist Political Ecology: Ontologies, Environmental Materialities, and the Political in Iron Age South India

Abstract

This paper examines the political ecology of an 80 km² region of central Karnataka, detailing how social relationships of inequality were linked with the production of a variety of meaningful places and environmental resources in Iron Age (1200–300 BCE) South India. Such analysis is then intersected with modern framings of inselberg landforms as spaces of “Nature,” demonstrating how such framings potentially silence humans in their environmental history and reproduce a nature–society binary that has substantial implications for the politics of land use and conservation today. In doing so, the paper critically considers the implications and limitations of a posthumanist political ecology that advocates nonhumans as “actors” that contribute to socio-political histories for understanding the politics of environmental production, both past and present.