Paper short abstract:

Given the centrality of productive / reproductive thinking to the culture-nature dyad, a route through well known questions about the European Enlightenment underlines the point that changing ways of thinking about reproduction -- and kinship -- were part of an evolving concept of ‘nature’.

Paper long abstract:

If one is looking for diverse anthropologies, one is also looking for diverse biologies, and thus for diverse approaches to the reproduction of life. Some notions of 'symbiosis', for example, point to forms of generation than involve cross- species interdependency. Starting with the centrality of productive / reproductive thinking to the Euro-American culture-nature dyad, this paper picks a route through some well known questions about the European Enlightenment in order to underline the point that changing ways of thinking about reproduction -- and kinship -- were part of an evolving concept of 'nature'. With that came a great interest in the 'identity' of things, a freshly minted elaboration of medieval ideas of substance and essence. The English precursor to the Enlightenment in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the mark it left on the English language, bids us to look again at European (and other forms of) animism. The paper can do no more than pose the question of what kind of anthropologies one might find there. Nonetheless, English-speaking anthropologists might not be so perplexed about the future of the nature-culture dyad if it turned out after all to be less than foundational to their enterprise.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the analytic implications of a redistribution of the nature/culture divide by regarding the ways in which we are riven through with 'nature' and we live distributed existences outside of the body.

Paper long abstract:

Pragmatist philosopher Arthur Bentley wrote a wonderful piece entitled: The Skin: the Philosopher's Last Line of Defense. He argued that we it is a category error to assume that the 'self' is contained within this body sac. In this paper, I draw on recent work in science studies to explore the implications of this stance for a new understanding of nature/culture. I draw particularly on the emerging field of mereology (the study of parts and wholes) in order to characterize different potential new units of analysis.

Paper short abstract:

Regardless of the time symmetrical character of physical laws, physics has been dealing with nature where time proceeds but not regresses. This issue of time asymmetry in physics enables us to further understand of Viti Kambani, the largest religious-political movement in Colonial Fiji.

Paper long abstract:

Let's have a read at textbooks of physics and documents on Viti Kambani (see above) together. How these two become related seems not the matter of nature/culture contrast but that of different styles of thinking and practices. While physics for us, difficult as it is, basically consists of logically and empirically understandable ideas and practices, Viti Kambani remains incomprehensive even after taking 'Fijian way of life' into consideration. What especially puzzles us is a certain sense of time supposedly held by the participants.

Huw Price, an analytic philosopher, provides a helpful view for this point in examining 'bilking argument' which blocks backward causality. This argument turns out to be ineffective where past events for present actors are epistemologically inaccessible. Despite that Price's advocacy of retrocausation is derived from his inadequate interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that 'bilking argument' calls for critical comments on itself, the 'inaccessibility' of past should be one of crucial elements for approaching Viti Kambani.

For further discussion, a compelling idea introduced 60 years ago by a Japanese physicist, Satoshi Watanabe, needs to be analyzed. He explored Bayes' theorem to the point that nature for physics is predictable but not retrodictable. This paper will develop Watanabe's idea and reveal how nature has been structured by 'time-less' laws and time assymetrical practices in physics. Then Viti Kambani appears in autonomous field detached from physics based reasoning.

Paper short abstract:

Through what forms of affinity is it possible to apprehend stone? Drawing on recent fieldwork in China, Iceland, and Scotland, this paper explores some sites of indifference, animation, and process in relation to stone as both object and substance.

Paper long abstract:

Through what forms of affinity is it possible to apprehend stone? Drawing on recent fieldwork in China, Iceland, and Scotland, this paper explores some sites of indifference, animation, and process in relation to stone as both object and substance. Ranging across what might be considered loci of difference, it also poses questions about sites, capacities, and analytics.

Paper short abstract:

The practices toward animals among the G|ui hunter-gatherers in the Central Kalahari inspire fundamental reflection on the border between human and non-human agents. This presentation examines personified animals in myth, taboos on eating meat, messages from birds, and metamorphosis.

Paper long abstract:

The term 'animal borders' implies double meaning; the border between human and non-human animals, or what demarcates the former, according to different intentional stances toward the latter. No sooner is the habitual thought of hunter-gatherers labeled as 'animism' than a sharp-cut distinction separates 'them' from 'us.' The practices toward animals among the G|ui hunter-gatherers in the Central Kalahari inspire fundamental reflection on animal borders, as well as on nature-culture dualism. The G|ui have an inventory of narratives illuminating the origin of human-animal relationship. Most of mythical characters are personified animals living as hunter-gatherers. An invisible agency denoted by a verb !nare, translated as "be affected," permeates the G|ui everyday life, invoking influential effect that extends not only to humans and/or animals but even to inanimate objects. Complex code of food regulation, the most significant of which is the taboo on several species called sumo (meat for elders) is associated with this effect. According to an oral discourse, a boy, violating the taboo on sumo, had fallen into 'madness' (dzuadzura) to imitate the cry and flapping of kori bustard. The G|ui, projecting communicative expectation toward animals, pay peculiar attention to the messages from a lot of ornithic species. These ethnographic evidences confirming the continuity of the G|ui personhood with animal existence further implicate the potentiality of metamorphosis into each other. The last point resonates with Deleuze and Guattari's <devenir> (becoming). In conclusion, as an empiricist, I will propose an ambivalent view on the "ontological turn."

Paper short abstract:

Amazonian Runa relations to forest beings suggest that “forests think.” This is neither a metaphor nor is it a culturally bounded claim. Engaging with those who think with forests reveals the thinking properties inherent to forests as well as the sylvan properties inherent to thought.

Paper long abstract:

Forests think. This is neither a metaphor nor is it a claim specific to any "ontology." What happens to social theory -and the human- if we take this claim seriously? Thought emerges with life; it is not restricted to humans. The tropical forest of the Upper Amazon, one of the world's most complex ecosystems, amplifies the way life thinks. In the process it makes over the thoughts of those who engage with its living logics. Ethnographic attention to how the Amazonian Runa interact with the many beings that 'walk' the forests -animals, but also the dead, and spirits- renders visible some of the strange properties of living thoughts that are occluded by the ways in which our distinctively human ways of thinking have colonized how we think about thought. Allowing ourselves to think with and through forests permits us to craft conceptual tools from the world itself in ways that provincialize more distinctively human forms of thought. In the process our fundamental assumptions about context, complexity, and difference come into question, and so do the humanist forms of thinking we unwittingly take with us even when we seek to venture beyond the human. Here I explore how thinking with forests reveals a counter-intuitive "absential" logic that is central to living thoughts. Learning to think with forests is crucial if we are to hold open spaces where the sylvan thinking we share with all of life can flourish -a form of thinking that is under dire threat in this, our Anthropocene.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores co-existing delta infrastructures and ontologies in Mainland Southeast Asia. Delta infrastructures are not technical systems: they also embed different cosmological dimensions. The notion of delta ontologies captures the dynamic interplay between infrastructure and cosmology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores co-existing but contrasting delta infrastructures and ontologies in postcolonial Mainland Southeast Asia. As a landform shaped by river deposits, a delta is an intermediary place between land and sea. In the Western tradition of geomorphology and land reclamation, deltas have been viewed as manifesting the capacity of rivers to shape land, and as forces that extend the terrestrial world into the sea. In contrast, traditional "galactic polities" in Southeast Asia conceived deltas along the major rivers as extensions of the sea into land. As such, deltas were crucially important spaces for the overseas trade upon which these polities depended. Traditional forms of infrastructure and city planning, such as canals and houses on stilts, often characterized as amphibious, organized the deltaic landscape by focusing on the watercourses. Meanwhile, modern irrigation networks and flood barriers installed in the 20th century have 'terrestrialized' this amphibious landscape through infrastructure development centering on road networks and concrete buildings. In important ways incommensurable, these terrestrially and aquatically oriented infrastructures co-exist and intermingle in South East Asian deltas today. We argue that these infrastructures cannot be understood only as technical systems with different historical and political origins. In addition, they instantiate and enact different cosmological dimensions. The notion of delta ontologies aims to capture the dynamic interplay between infrastructure and ontology.

Paper short abstract:

I develop an ontological analysis of the multiplicity of nature-cultures, noting the different dualising or nondualising tactics that contrast modern science and other regimes. I also discuss the subject positions that characterise different regimes, and implications for anthropological practice.

Paper long abstract:

My analysis of nature-cultures begins in science studies with Kuhn's argument that scientists within different paradigms inhabit different worlds. I offer an ontological interpretation of this: science should be seen as finding islands of performative stability in the flux of becoming rather than unique truths. These islands have the further attribute of mastery. They put us in command of nature: the telos of science is to make the world more dual. I note that other modes of being also have a dualising character but without the telos of domination, producing instead worlds that include nonhuman agents with possibly superhuman powers. Importantly, access to such worlds typically entails a 'technological' decentring of the human subject away from the modern controlled and calculating subject position (which is itself integral to science). I discuss the problems of anthropological method inherent in this observation. Finally I note that yet other modes of being abstain entirely from this dualising telos. Taoism and Zen undercut modern dichotomies in a direct awareness of becoming and uncontrollable emergence. Returning to the west, adaptive approaches in the arts, science and engineering likewise stage nondualising modes of being. The paper concludes with 'antipsychiatry' as an important site for anthropological exploration as a zone of open-ended performative experimentation in nature-cultures and selves.