User:RD/9k/How Forests Think (Q618)
Main entries
- How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013)
- How Forests Think (2013, edition) -> University of California Press
Motifs or claims
- it is hard to speak of what it was, dense and difficult / forest dense and powerful [?] -> apparent purpose of the text: to take the indescribable awe of South American forests and make them describable
- an anthropology beyond the human / an anthropology of life -> this is actually explained in the footnotes as basically a product of the constraints of university research. "anthropology" refers to the author going to South America to do anthropology, but doesn't necessarily refer to the content of the current text as "anthropological studies"; "beyond the human" refers an approach which discusses other subjects than humans but does not abandon the study of humans. so, there are still subtle problems with this book, but they aren't as bad as the title made it sound like they were. the logical problems largely come from the constraints of universities artificially dividing research into specific fields and making experts be experts on highly specific fields they then become forced to inappropriately interpret other fields through.
- material semiotics (Law, Mol) -> this apparently refers to something? sounds like an oxymoron to me but apparently there are like stacks of books on this already.
- Jaguars identify thinking people / Jaguars understand a distinction between living minds and inanimate objects; this is to vaguely imply that predatory animals practice respect or empathy for thinking Subjects of other species -> within the first few sentences of the book, you can see the final conclusion being carefully smuggled in behind claims that look smaller but due to their rhetorical purpose are actually bigger claims than they appear to be.
- Jaguars identify thinking people / Jaguars understand a distinction between sapients and inanimate objects / When jaguars decide which animals are meat and which animals are watching them, they make this decision because they first made a decision on which objects are thinking minds and which objects are not; this is to vaguely imply that predatory animals practice respect or empathy for thinking Subjects of other species ->
this proposition is so... biased. it is clearly trying to get to this conclusion that animals can decide to be prejudiced or not because prejudice is an inherent characteristic of the universe. but that doesn't make any sense, because if this proposition was really true as formulated, animals would have to be able to choose to stop eating meat ever again like in Kimba the White Lion, or Animal Farm. aside from the fact cats in particular cannot physically do that and be healthy, it isn't something you see them try to do either. but why not? if this proposition was the way things really worked you'd half expect that carnivores in nature actually would have decided to abolish themselves. if jaguars know that other living beings are thinking Subjects in the same way we do, then why don't they just.... stop eating meat at their own peril whether or not it brings them disease just because it's Right? they aren't deeply complex beings like humans, even despite all animals having complexity of their own, so they wouldn't lose much by sacrificing themselves as individuals if there's any chance they could have herbivores as children. human beings have gradually evolved over their existence, becoming able to digest milk or in any event noticing they can and taking advantage of it (it's notable not every population of humans has). so it's actually not so far-fetched to imagine that if predators Decided to stop eating meat you might see them evolve past that artificial constraint on them and continue to exist in a new form. so where is this entirely plausible evolutionary possibility? why hasn't it happened yet?
I know this book is somewhat literally the result of humanities students (that was explicitly mentioned in the acknowledgements) inappropriately mining the natural world for metaphors for human society, and then presenting those as an actual ontology about ecosystems with a straight face without realizing that all metaphors are not automatically true in both directions. but I still have to grill them on the literal results of their metaphors because I think it's really interesting and instructive. - Jaguars understand a distinction between living animals and dead animals -> most people probably wouldn't dispute this much.
- referring to wounded animal as "it" or "that" in a world where all Animals are usually referred to as "them"
- Looking outside the boundaries of anthropology requires not just looking at nonhuman beings to understand humans, but looking beyond life -> the first part of this makes a lot of sense at least on its own, but as for the second part, you lost me.
- Our social theory — whether humanist or posthumanist, structuralist or poststructuralist — conflates representation with language -> lol. I was flipping through trying to find a footnote and then my eyes stopped on this splendidly backhandedly-true statement. it sure does! I can't disagree.
- relatum / relata (plural) / term or entity that is defined by its relationships to other entities
I am.... going to mine these footnotes for important motifs just so I don't have to flip to the end of the book to read them again. - creatura (Bateson 2000)
- to feel tsupu
- becoming worldly (Donna Haraway 2008) / inhabiting unprecedented and more hopeful emergent worlds through a practice of attention to human and nonhuman beings that stand beyond[?] us (Kohn, chapter 1)
- Much as sounds are arbitrarily bound to ideas, in the symbolic event [?] a radical[?] discontinuity is introduced between culture and nature (Marshall Sahlins 1976)
- If we recognize that all signs "do things" [?] we no longer need a performative theory to explain it (Austin 1962) -> what?
- A mechanistic [?] logic is only possible when there is already a whole self outside the machine that designs or builds it (Bergson 1911) -> he really quoted Bergson. though to be fair quoting him doesn't mean it's positive
it's funny how after my first exposure to Henri Bergson was a terrible misunderstanding of relativity I can never take him seriously and I'm always like, "wait! stop!" every time somebody quotes him so we can be perfectly clear that the dude who doesn't have a modern understanding of time or causality is the one being quoted. - Thirdness [?] tends to be seen only as a human symbolic attribute rather than a property inherent to all regularity in the world (Keane 2003)
- "I think therefore I am" loses its sense (and feeling) when it is applied to the plural or to the second or third person -> you know... that's a cool one. I'm going to have to reread (=read) the chapter this is actually in but I think I can see it a bit already. 'he thinks therefore he is' definitely hits differently, yeah. it immediately feels less substantiated or provable (if we first assume "I think" was provable). in my mind that just means putting the statement in the third person actually brings it closer to being falsifiable and reliable because it throws the unobservable stuff out. but when you put it in the plural? do you mean like "we think" or "I's think" (I duplexed-into-several-people-acting-separately-in-parallel)? I am not sure what kind of plural this is.
- Structures of domination are given their effectiveness through brutal moments of secondness, but the specific manifestations are not what power actually is (Peirce, Butler)
- A human being lives in term of meanings [??] they must construct in a world devoid of intrinsic meaning but subject to physics (Rappaport 1999)
- the centrality of telos as a product of the "enchanted" [?] living world (Kohn; not in Jane Bennett 2001)
- Actors (acting entities) are relationally linked to each other in webs, which is to say that they make each other be in the same sense that words cause other words to have meaning / Entities give each other being / Entities enact each other (Law & Mol 2008) -> they tried so hard to say this three or four ways to make it clear and it only makes less sense each time
- attempts to reconcile anthropological and economic theories of value with Peircean ones (Graeber 2001, Pederson 2008, Kockelman 2011)
- the logical properties of hierarchy (Bateson 2000)
- Late Soviet socialism provides one such example [of...?]; because the officially endorsed discursive form was disconnected from any indexical specification [what?], an invisible self-organizing politics toward unclear ends filled up and took over official discursive forms (Yurchak 2006/2008, Kohn 2008)
- We live in a gift economy with the future selves we might come to be -> maybe I just don't understand what a gift economy is but that does not sound right to me. it feels to me like it trivializes labor and how utterly, hopelessly impossible it can feel to actually finish what you want to leave for your future self. especially if it's something you "have to do to get to another level of things" or "need to do to grow", but even if it's something you "want to do", just trying to "leave that gift" and end up somewhere better the next day can take everything out of you including all your happiness, and you can fail at it and not have finished, and just feel like, I'm in pain, I can't finish this thing I have to do, what am I going to do. and just trying to develop and function can almost feel as if it's an illness you wish you could get better from for how much it hurts.
I think part of it is that there is a bias here toward defining interactions with other people as interactions with your future self. when.... those aren't equivalent. it really is possible for the thing you give yourself and the thing that an interaction with someone else gives yourself to be different things.
Subjective themes
- indigenous biases / Tribal populations cannot be biased -> the motif of presenting the experience of tribal or indigenous populations as a universal human experience or implying it is when also showing cases where it clearly isn't.
modern anarchism is positively riddled with these and it never wants to admit it, often because "it couldn't possibly do any harm". well, that isn'ttrueaccurate. indigenous biases are unlikely to lead to some sort of imperial control over other populations, but that isn't the only form of harm that exists. there can also be harm done just by, out of any particular context of where it came from or what countable culture it came from, showing people the wrong model of something. I've had to sit through all sorts of instances of Third-World countries presenting wrong models of LGBT+ people and occasionally wrong models of U.S. ethnic minority movements and dismissing these things as "unimportant" just because "they're a distraction from solving imperialism" — all of it leads to First World minorities kicking up a backlash against Third World countries as 'immoral' and becoming more imperialist. so I'm not going to let you go around presenting wrong models of Lived Experience, history, or time, because I know where wrong models of things lead. I'm not sure what demographic subpopulation of people is going to get furious after you overwrite First World models of various things with uniquely indigenous ones and they don't fit current circumstances but there is going to be somebody.
Related
Animal Farm led to Zootopia
/ Animal Farm and Zootopia take place in the same universe -> unlikely to be literally true, but it's a very interesting thought experiment if you imagine Animal Farm happened first and Zootopia takes place hundreds of years later after some sort of color revolution scenario where animals that had once lived wild and then lived as livestock in some cases later evolved into Liberal-republicanism, "properly" worshiping police officers as the defenders of ethics rather than giving in to the temptation to make everyone workers in order to get rid of conflicts and put a big scary The Central Government in charge of building a new social structure.
Ideologies or fields
- / secular animism
- / structuralist linguistics
- / humanities, arts, and social sciences
- / ethics
- / speculative fiction
- / ecology
- / evolutionary biology