“Toward a Negative Zoology: Human Limitation and More-Than-Human Worlds”
Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz
“Toward a Negative Zoology: Human Limitation and More-Than-Human Worlds”
Wednesday October 16th
12:15-1:45 PM
Buttrick 306
My talk takes as its starting point Muhammad Asad’s observation in The Message of the Quran that human sense-perception is limited, and that there must be all kinds of nonhuman life “subtly interacting … in a manner beyond our ken.” From there, I speculate about multispecies worlds that nonhumans – dogs and ghosts, pigs and gods, cats and jinn – may be worlding without us. Drawing on contemporary ethological work on animals’ sensory worlds and a 10th-century Islamic epistle on animals’ capacities to worship the divine, I imagine multispecies webs of care and commitment unknown to us humans. I take such not-knowing as a starting point to decenter the secular fantasy of human mastery that underpins the Anthropocene. Riffing on the concept of negative theology, I argue for a kind of negative zoology, where the human is an onto-epistemological limit and the difference of the other – divine, animal – is unbridgeable. I offer that limit as an ethical and political opportunity to cultivate a different kind of multispecies livability than the ones we currently practice.
Co-sponsored by Climate and Environmental Studies and the Department of Anthropology