Browsing by Subject "Nonhuman"
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Item A Desire to be Otherwise: On Eco-survivalism(2018-04) Morehouse, ToddDrawing on two years of ethnographic field research conducted in an eco-survivalist community in central Vermont, this dissertation examines the ideological, philosophical, and political contexts of eco-survivalism and neo-primitivism. In particular, this research focuses on how the practices around which the community coheres––ones commonly relegated to a pre-civilizational past––shape community members’ understandings of past, present, and future human-environment relations. Toward this end, this dissertation explores three primary practices––lithic tool making, animal tracking, and herbcraft––and discusses how such practices are capable of fostering intimacy with, and knowledge of, the world. Through an interdisciplinary, multi-method, and speculative mode of investigation, the findings suggest that while there are many risks––both conceptual and material––associated with eco-survivalist practices, they nevertheless offer insights for addressing present environmental uncertainties and offer a potential set of strategies for navigating future environmental challenges.Item Environmental participation: immanence, cosmopolitics, and the agency of environmental assemblages.(2010-02) Nordquist, Michael AndrewOver the past fifty years, environmental issues have dominated political concerns of political actors around the world. Political theorists have begun to address these novel issues, critically analyzing the dramatic transformations of people's relationships with the environment. Yet much of this emerging environmental political theory relies upon an understanding of environmentalism where "nature" and "society" are conflicting, opposite terms: nature is a collection of passive, mechanical objects and processes that must be saved and protected by a society that consists of active, political human subjects. This predominant understanding of environmental questions restricts political participation to humans only, ignoring the activities of nonhumans involved in shaping political outcomes. This dissertation challenges the framework of understanding environmental political question through the lens of nature against society, human against nonhuman. The first chapter asks what it would mean to understand the activities of environments of humans and nonhumans as political, and by examining what a politics composed of environments looks like. In doing so, I question the centrality of the human being to politics, focusing attention on the attachments to nonhuman entities that make possible the activities of what have appeared to be discrete human political actors. The second chapter turns to the concept of immanence as a means of theoretically conceptualizing environments as actors composed of various beings. Drawing inspiration from science studies scholars Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, the third chapter develops the concept of "cosmopolitical practices" to represent a redefined politics in which the actions of environments can be theorized and exercised together. Cosmopolitical practices, the sets of activities involved in the political organization of a shared cosmos of beings of all sorts, offers an understanding of agency in which environments participate in the contested political practices that create our shared conditions of existence. The final chapter combines theoretical inquiry with critical analysis of contemporary debates around food, offering an empirical example of cosmopolitical practices in the constitution of resistant food networks. This dissertation reassesses what participates in political practices to force a rethinking of the untheorized activities that nonhumans contribute to seemingly human-only political projects.Item We Are All Related: Contemporary Native American Literature and the Nonhuman Turn(2019-07) Majhor, SamanthaExamining the period of Native writing after the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (1990) alongside the ‘nonhuman turn’ in current critical theory, I examine the centrality of nonhuman beings and indigenous object ontologies in fiction and poetry by Native writers. My research locates indigenous philosophies of materiality deployed in contemporary literary works published since 1990 by Native writers including Louise Erdrich, Susan Power, Frances Washburn, Orlando White, Tommy Orange, Tommy Pico, and Heid Erdrich. I argue that the period since passage of the legislation is defined by calls for repatriation and redress in answer to a long history of dispossession and demands a reading of the culturally specific responses and indigenous orientations toward the material realities presented in these texts. The indigenous ontologies envisioned in these works, while tribally specific, voice a broader orientation that disrupts the binaries between the human and nonhuman, the object and subject, and the discursive and material. While Native American and Indigenous Studies regularly articulates the centrality of broad cross-being kinship networks, I want to highlight a tribally-specific articulation of the expansive kinship networks and responsibilities that speak to notions of being. This interdisciplinary comes out of the sustained vibrancy in Native literary criticism and Native American and Indigenous Studies and, even as it builds on the most recent avenues of critical inquiry, it owes much to the calls for tribal specificity and a recognition of the centrality of self-determination and sovereignty in the past twenty years of NAIS scholarship.