Unicorns and Other Powerful Creatures: An Ethical Proposition for a Multi-Species Political Ecology

Speaker:
Dr. Laura Ogden

Speaker Title:
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Global & Sociocultural Studies Florida International University

Event Description:

Traditionally, and with reservations, cultural relativism has served as anthropology’s key ethical framework for research and theory, particularly in the United States.  While this Boasian legacy has provided the discipline with an important anti-ethnocentric politics, cultural relativism has left us little room for developing an ethics of human-nonhuman nature.  This paper considers how a multi-species anthropology, as suggested by recent scholarship in post humanism, locates our understanding of the human as contingent and in relation to other species and various material states of being.  This stance offers an ethical framework and politics of inquiry that I am calling a “multi-species political ecology.”  Using examples from my fieldwork in the Florida Everglades and in Chilean Tierra del Fuego, I offer a situated, contingent and relational approach to understanding the world-making power of people, other animals, and plants.  In doing so, I build upon Isabelle Stengers' call for "ecology of practices," and consider how a multi-species anthropology can contribute to an ethics of living in the world that resists the essentialisms of most environmental politics.  In particular, I am interested in how this framework allows us to reconsider the category of "human" as much as it does the divisions between nature and culture.

Sponsors:
School of Geography and Development