Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10745957
Aike P. Rots, Nhung Lu Rots
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the category animism has seen a remarkable resurgence in Western scholarship, capturing the interest of many anthropologists, scholars of religion, and philosophers. Some authors have argued that animism can provide a model for a new environmental ethics that acknowledges more-than-human agencies and interdependencies. However, the question remains as to how so-called animist ontologies can transform not only individual moralities, but also the extractivist economic-political structures underlying the current crisis. In this article, we assess some of these claims by examining an Asian ritual tradition that is arguably animistic, while also containing elements of Buddhism, Daoism, and ancestor worship: the worship of whales, widespread along the coast of South and Central Vietnam. Fishing communities here believe that whales are divine beings, incarnations of the maritime god Ông Nam Hải (Lord of the South Sea)—also known as Cá Ông (Lord Fish)—who rescue people in distress at sea. When fishers find beached whales, they offer them elaborate funeral ceremonies and enshrine their bones in local temples. Whale worship constitutes a way of relating to the physical environment, and rituals help people respond to problems such as coastal erosion and overfishing. However, there is no evidence suggesting that this particular animistic belief system has given way to environmentalist action, let alone induced systemic change. Animistic ontologies certainly have ethical dimensions, and they may provide ways for people to make sense of and cope with Anthropocenic crises, but that does not mean they teach people how to act sustainably. At the very least, that would require an active process of translation and adaptation.
进入二十一世纪以来，万物有灵论这一概念在西方学术界再度兴起，引起了许多人类学家、宗教学者和哲学家的兴趣。一些学者认为，万物有灵论可以为新的环境伦理学提供一种模式，承认超越人类的机构和相互依存关系。然而，问题仍然在于，所谓的万物有灵论本体不仅可以改变个人的道德观，还可以改变当前危机背后的采掘主义经济政治结构。在本文中，我们将通过考察一种可以说是万物有灵论的亚洲仪式传统，同时也包含佛教、道教和祖先崇拜的元素，对其中的一些主张进行评估，这种仪式传统就是在越南南部和中部沿海地区广为流传的鲸鱼崇拜。这里的渔民相信鲸鱼是神灵，是海洋之神Ông Nam Hải（南海神）的化身，也被称为 Cá Ông（鱼神），它能拯救海上遇难的人们。当渔民发现搁浅的鲸鱼时，他们会为鲸鱼举行隆重的葬礼，并将鲸鱼的遗骨供奉在当地的寺庙中。鲸鱼崇拜是一种与自然环境相关的方式，仪式有助于人们应对海岸侵蚀和过度捕捞等问题。然而，没有证据表明这种特定的万物有灵信仰体系已经让位于环保行动，更不用说引起系统性的变革了。万物有灵论的本体论当然具有伦理层面，它们可能为人们提供了理解和应对人类危机的方法，但这并不意味着它们教会了人们如何采取可持续的行动。至少，这需要一个积极的翻译和适应过程。
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10745979
Heather Davis
To describe the multiple, colliding temporalities of climate change I put forward the concept of petro-time. Petro-time asserts that time itself has been compressed through millennia to become fossil fuels, and then burned, resulting in climate chaos. In this essay, I take up one aspect of petro-time, the feeling of waiting. I articulate this feeling of waiting through the opera Sun & Sea (Marina) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, which explores the affective dimensions of climate change for those of us with the wealth and privilege that, so far, mostly shelters us from its worst effects. But climate change is always there, on the horizon, looming. This reality sits at the back of the brain, emerging in moments of relaxation as a “nagging malaise,” depicted in the opera through “insidiously pleasant melodies.” The tension that many of us experience in relation to climate change, where it cannot be sustained as the crisis that it is, instead blends into a background anxiety. I argue that waiting (for adequate policies, for climate relief) is felt differentially across the globe but that it also might provide a pause to recommit to climate solutions that don’t repeat the injustices of the past.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10746123
Jerome Whitington
This article looks toward nineteenth-century earth sciences with attention to their humanistic themes. In the early decades of the century, multiple lines of evidence concretized a humanistic experience of man as a finite being with a contingent and accidental planetary existence. Geological humanism refers to the way that themes of earthly existence routinely influenced the status and meaning of being human, culturally and within the sciences, with the collapse of Enlightenment aesthetics of symmetry, purpose, and order in the late eighteenth century. While earth sciences recast humanistic themes in empirical terms, by the latter half of the nineteenth century scientists also regularly articulated prophecies of secular extinction or demise that were resolved, but only partly, both with reference to a long-standing racial schema and through routine consolations that a planet modified by human activity would be a better earth. Coal played a particular role in mediating between earth and atmosphere, mineral and life, and matter and energy. This article details several of these secular consolations offered to popular audiences by prominent climate scientists to show that the earth was far from being understood as a stable domain of nature that could be taken for granted.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10746056
Andrea Marston
This article explores the uneven geosocial traces created by transcontinental and corporeal circulations of tin ore, metallic tin, and tin cans from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Although tin has no essential relationship to human life, I argue that the extraction, circulation, and consumption of tin have nevertheless contributed to the production of metabolic unevenness across continental space. Since the early industrial era, tin has been used primarily for food preservation, in which capacity it has nutritionally supported the metabolic processes (and labor power) of workers, settlers, and soldiers, among others. Tin canning technologies relied, in turn, on the relentless labor of tin miners, whose own metabolic processes were interrupted by the accumulation of mineral dust in their lungs. These histories have been archived as geosocial strata as both discarded tin cans and pulmonary fibrosis. Drawing insights from geophilosophy and both Marxian and toxicological approaches to metabolism, this article reflects on how inhuman forces and substances subtend not only life but also its disparate energies and exposures.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10746012
Caroline Ektander, Jonas Stuck
Redistribute Toxicity was a commissioned art piece created by visual artist Jonas Staal in close collaboration with environmental historian Jonas Stuck and curator and researcher Caroline Ektander, and later enriched by the knowledge and practices of seed librarian, artist, and activist Zayaan Khan for the exhibition The Long Term You Cannot Afford: On the Distribution of the Toxic at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin in 2019. Informed by historical research on the trade of hazardous waste between the two Germanys during the Cold War—with a particular focus on the landfill Vorketzin, which served as West Berlin’s primary hazardous waste disposal site during the division—the art commission asked us to consider what an act of redistribution of a toxic past could look like. Similar to other waste practices premised on systems of externalization, the one that transpired between a divided Germany resulted in an asymmetrical impact on human, animal, and plant lives populating the former East—effects that are till this day hard to account for. The research process generated a series of designs that exposed the various practical and ethical issues entangled with acts of retribution and helped shape a project that became less concerned with correcting the past and more committed to reconfiguring toxic relations in the present. The final installation design propagated seeds from the wetland vegetation surrounding the landfill. This wild vegetation had not only become implicated in Germany’s toxic history as silent witnesses but had also helped remediate the soils over time.
重新分配毒性》（Redistribute Toxicity）是视觉艺术家乔纳斯-斯塔尔（Jonas Staal）与环境历史学家乔纳斯-斯图克（Jonas Stuck）、策展人兼研究员卡罗琳-埃克坦德（Caroline Ektander）密切合作创作的委托艺术作品，后来又得到了种子图书管理员、艺术家和活动家扎扬-汗（Zayaan Khan）的知识和实践的充实，用于 2019 年在柏林 SAVVY 当代艺术中心举办的展览《你负担不起的长期》（The Long Term You Cannot Afford）：2019 年在柏林 SAVVY Contemporary 举办的展览 "The Long Term You Can't Afford: On the Distribution of the Toxic"。艺术委员会通过对冷战期间两德之间危险废物交易的历史研究--特别关注在分裂期间作为西柏林主要危险废物处理地的沃尔凯津垃圾填埋场--获得灵感，要求我们思考重新分配有毒过去的行为会是什么样子。与其他以外部化系统为前提的废物处理方式类似，分裂后的德国对居住在前东方的人类、动物和植物造成了不对称的影响，这种影响至今仍难以解释。研究过程中产生的一系列设计揭示了与报复行为相关的各种实际和伦理问题，并帮助形成了一个项目，该项目不再关注纠正过去，而是致力于重新配置当下的有毒关系。最终的装置设计从垃圾填埋场周围的湿地植被中提取种子进行繁殖。这些野生植被不仅作为沉默的见证者卷入了德国的有毒历史，而且随着时间的推移，还帮助修复了土壤。
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10746078
Jerry Zee
This article considers the collision of earthly and monetary phase shifts. It situates itself in Richmond, British Columbia, a seam where multiple and disparate processes of landing collaborate in the ongoing transformation and modulation of the earth’s surface. It poses a Chinese-funded construction boom on an island in western Canada as a geological formation, a physical outcropping at the collision of nineteenth-century Chinese terraforming labor and twenty-first-century flyaway Asian wealth. These collisions articulate fault lines in transpacific tectonic and geopolitical relations, even as the fluid dynamics of wealth and islands of impounded silt evince multiple figurations of Asian-ness. Through the juxtaposition of two permutations of land, economics, and racial formation across multiple centuries in the Fraser River Delta, I offer a notion of orogeny, the geological process of mountain building and crustal deformation, to attend to the earthmoving dynamisms of rivers, wealth, and Asian racialization.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10745968
Diana Pardo Pedraza
Demining has not been an exclusively human affair. Mine detection dogs have been indispensable in the work of detection and in the slow but essential effort to regain trust in mine-suspected landscapes. Famously renowned for their extraordinary sensory perception, physical strength, and mental traits, they are part of human-nonhuman units training and working together to perceive explosives’ odors. This article considers the role of these units, known in Colombia as binomios caninos, in the strenuous task of mine clearance. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic engagement with global and local humanitarian demining efforts in Colombia, it examines detection choreographies and daily interactions, proposing to think of their joint work in terms of sensory co-laboring. Bringing anthropological work on collaboration between worlds, sensory labor, and animal work into dialogue, this composite term foregrounds detection as labor and as a result of human-nonhuman cooperation. It also highlights the asymmetrical field in which these collaborators converge and the divergent desires, affects, and attachments that mobilize their participation in demining. Mine detection is conceptualized as a sensory task through which dogs and humans intra-act, both together and apart. Recognizing this partial connection allows us to rethink how humans and other creatures are ontologically reconstituted and how overlapping histories of warfare and humanitarianism, legacies of animal behavioral practice, and instrumental-affective interactions shape these reconstitutions.
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10746045
Jerome Whitington, Zeynep Oguz
What conditions of possibility have emerged for learning to live on a new earth? This special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities, critical Black studies, and geophilosophy to explore how emergent ways of becoming human are forged in relation to powerful earth dynamics, even while earth’s powers are constitutive of contemporary forms of domination. Geologizing Sylvia Wynter’s understanding of being human as a praxis, it proposes that earth as praxis (a) provides a diagnosis of the deeply embedded forms of power that have been materialized, over several centuries, in the earthly conditions of life itself; and (b) represents a critical potential for creating new ways to live on earth through the practical exploration of geosocial relations. We highlight three modes of earth praxis. Inhuman territorializations calls attention to the landscapes and earthy matter subjected to racializing and territorializing modes of power. In turn, such practices participate in the constitution of dehumanized, racialized, and dispossessed bodies and peoples. Becoming geological refers to the ways human forms of living have become shot through with earth system dynamics, mineralogical relations, and energetic possibilities, to the extent that people cannot be who they are without these pervasive anthropogenic geologies. Finally, planetary predicaments helps diagnose the politically vital and collective but deeply unequal and nonhomogeneous conditions of the present. Earth as praxis offers an analytical grip on emerging planetary earth relations that breaks with abstract, universalizing categories, and is capable of diagnosing the wide range of today’s violent, creative, and liberatory planetary practices.
学习在新地球上生活的可能性条件是什么？本专题以环境人文学科、黑人批判研究和地质哲学的学术研究为基础，探讨在地球的力量构成当代统治形式的同时，新出现的成为人类的方式是如何与强大的地球动力相关联的。地质学将西尔维娅-温特（Sylvia Wynter）对 "作为人的实践"（being human as a praxis）的理解引申为 "作为实践的地球"（earth as praxis）：（a）对几个世纪以来在地球生活条件中具体化的根深蒂固的权力形式进行诊断；以及（b）通过对地球社会关系的实际探索，代表了一种创造新的地球生活方式的重要潜力。我们强调地球实践的三种模式。非人类领土化唤起人们关注受到种族化和领土化权力模式影响的景观和地球物质。反过来，这种实践参与了非人化、种族化和被剥夺的身体和民族的构成。成为地质学指的是人类的生活形式与地球系统动力学、矿物学关系和能量可能性的关系，以至于没有这些普遍的人为地质学，人们就无法成为他们自己。最后，"地球困境 "有助于诊断当前具有政治生命力和集体性但极不平等和非均质性的状况。作为实践的地球》为新出现的地球行星关系提供了一种分析方法，它打破了抽象的、普遍化的范畴，能够诊断当今各种暴力的、创造性的和解放性的行星实践。
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Pub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10746023
A. R. Toland
Drawing on ideas from the history and philosophy of soil science, Fluxus performance, and queer-feminist STS, this article responds to a question posed by environmental researcher Hugo Reinert: “What modes of passionate immersion—or love, or intimacy—could a stone afford?” Situated in a fluid space between environmental humanities and artistic research, the Soilkin project develops a series of relational exercises to frame three basic propositions: (1) a non-normative, animistic understanding of geologic subjectivity could trouble accepted criteria for life on earth, leading to kinship with geogenic entities; (2) soil formation (pedogenesis) could be interpreted as a performative process of learning and becoming, rather than simply weathering and aging, with appreciable ontological implications; and (3) soil kinship is situated within a dynamic interplay of resistance and consent, demanding that the terms of reciprocity between humans and soils be mutually beneficial and appropriate to the slowed-down timescale of events in which soil-beings live and operate. The article integrates theoretical provocations with performative scores to expand and sensitize soil-scientific knowledge while, at the same time, contributing to multispecies scholarship on kin-making with geogenic and pedogenic others.
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