Paper short abstract:

Posthumanism accepts human emergence in the surrounding environment as part of that environment’s ‘becoming.’ Anthropologists, past and present, grasped the need for this perspective. In this way, morals cannot be ‘separate’ from the emergent becomings of environment; they too, are environment.

Paper long abstract:

"Ethicality is part of the fabric of the world; the call to respond and be responsible is part of what is. There is no spatial-temporal domain that is excluded from the ethicality of what matters" (Barad 2007, p. 182). To perceive the universe thus, disallows the fragmenting divide between nature/culture and closely follows Bateson, Steiner, and Ingold in their wayfaring anthropology.

Bateson warned against attempts to control what is not understood, and of dismissing as lesser, all that is not human (2000, pp. 268-269 & 468). Steiner argued against the notion of individualism and against logic as the only path to knowledge (Steiner 1999, p. 240 & 295). Ingold wants anthropology to recalibrate humans into the universe's unfolding (Ingold 2010, p. 3).

Posthumanism is a call to accept human emergence in the surrounding environment as part of that environment's emergent 'becoming.' Talking humanities lingo, the particle physicist Barad, aligns quantum insights into the reality of matter with human matters.

I argue this aligns with a moral anthropology, past and present.

Barad, K 2007, Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press, Durham & London.

Bateson, G 2000, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.

Ingold, T 2010, 'Anthropology Comes to Life', General Anthropology, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1-4.

Steiner, FB 1999, Franz Baermann Steiner: Selected Writings Volume 11: Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilisation eds J Adler & R Fardon, Berghahn Books, New York & Oxford.