NatureCulture

Steps to an Ecology of Spirits

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Comparing Feelings of More-than-Human, Immaterial Meshworks? by Andrea De Antoni (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto) deantoni@fc.ritsumei.ac.jp June 20, 2018 “So, do you believe in spirits?” I have been asked this question countless times, by my research partners in the field, but also by students, scholars at conferences, or even during random conversations in bars, regardless of my … Read more

The Tao of Multispecies Ethnography

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by Scott Simon, Ph.D. (Professor, School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, U Ottawa, Canada and Visiting Scholar, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan) ssimon@uottawa.ca July 23, 2018 It has been eight years since “multispecies ethnography” made its grand splash into anthropology at the New Orleans meeting of the American Anthropology Association and simultaneous special issue … Read more

Human-Microbe Entanglements

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Food Allergies in Japan and the UK by Emma Cook (Hokkaido University) cook@imc.hokudai.ac.jp July 4, 2018 In February 2014, as I was anticipating the start of hay fever season in Japan, I happened to turn the TV channel to a program that mentioned a particular brand of yoghurt that is said to mitigate hay fever … Read more

Contemplating the Robotic Embrace

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Introspection for Affective Anthropology by Daniel White (Free University of Berlin) daniel.white@fu-berlin.de June 20, 2018 The first time I held a robot in my arms I was overcome with a wave of sympathy. Pepper had arrived in our laboratory in a large box from SoftBank Robotics. Powered down and angled slightly forward, when I removed … Read more

From Mad Cows to Posthumanism

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Alan Smart (University of Calgary): “Posthumanism, as I use the term, means the ways in which we are entangled with non-humans, and which expand our capacities (although in other ways they may diminish them, as with disease).  Rather than being a feature of a future that is only now emerging, we have always been posthuman in this sense; indeed, the mastery of fire, cooking, language and other technologies is what made us into humans in the first place.”