{"id":471,"date":"2024-10-07T19:58:31","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T19:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/?p=471"},"modified":"2026-03-30T18:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T18:48:08","slug":"toward-a-negative-zoology-human-limitation-and-more-than-human-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/2024\/10\/07\/toward-a-negative-zoology-human-limitation-and-more-than-human-worlds\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cToward a Negative Zoology: Human Limitation and More-Than-Human Worlds\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayanthi Fernando, PhD<\/a><\/p>\n

Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cToward a Negative Zoology: Human Limitation and More-Than-Human Worlds\u201d<\/p>\n

Wednesday October 16th<\/p>\n

12:15-1:45 PM<\/p>\n

Buttrick 306<\/p>\n

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\u00a0there 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’ c<\/span>apacities <\/span>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<\/span>\u00a0livability than the ones we currently\u00a0<\/span>practice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Co-sponsored by Climate and Environmental Studies and the Department of Anthropology<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mayanthi Fernando, PhD Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz \u201cToward a Negative Zoology: Human Limitation and More-Than-Human Worlds\u201d 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\u00a0there must be all kinds…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":475,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions\/475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/religious-studies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}