scholarly journals Posthumanism, New Humanism and Beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Guillermo Díaz de Liaño ◽  
Manuel Fernández-Götz
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Valuable Alternative ◽  
New Humanism ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Societal Challenges ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Empty Signifier ◽  
Object Agency

In this paper, we analyse some of the issues associated with the posthumanist rejection of Humanism. First, we discuss some of the possibilities and challenges that New Materialism and the Ontological Turn have brought into archaeology in terms of understanding past ontologies and decolonizing archaeological thought. Then, focusing on the concept of agency, we reflect on how its use by some posthumanist authors risks turning it into an empty signifier, which can have ethical implications and limit archaeology's potential for social critique. The concept of things’ effectancy is presented as a valuable alternative to previous conceptualizations of ‘object agency’. While we acknowledge the heuristic potential of many posthumanist proposals, we believe that humanist perspectives should not be rejected altogether. Instead of creating rigid divides, we argue that elements of New Humanism, as recently defined by philosophical anthropology, can hold value when facing current societal challenges.

scholarly journals Archaeological Stratigraphy, Flat Ontology and Thin Description. A Note on (Inter)disciplinary Dialogue

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Staša Babić
Keyword(s):  
Social Engagement ◽  
Research Priorities ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Human Responsibility

Over the last decades, some archaeologists have adopted the approaches from philosophy and anthropology that may loosely be denoted by the term new materialism. The key assumptions are that archaeological investigation, regardless of the theoretical stance applied, has always been burdened by the modern mode of thinking and dichotomies such as nature/culture or subject/object, wherefrom stems the anthropocentric approach to the study of objects, primarily in respect to humans. It is suggested that the reality consists of a plethora of diverse elements, all deserving equal attention and all their existences being of equal relevance. Objects, animals, plants, all have the potential to act in a network of equal actors. A researcher must therefore respect the flat ontology, where none of the actors has primacy. The paper problematizes some of the (un)intentional implications of the ontological turn for the theory and practice of archaeology. First of all, the proposed flattening destabilizes the key disciplinary distinction – study of the human past through its material remains. The downplaying of the importance of human actions in the formation of networks of mutually equal actors at the same time downplays the human responsibility. In this way, various forms of inequality among humans as research priorities and the potential of social engagement of archaeology are neglected. Similar critique of new materialism is raised in the fields of philosophy and anthropology as well. This brings about the issue of interdisciplinary transfers of thin descriptions – selective adoption of concepts whose full implications remain neglected.

scholarly journals Both Like and Unlike: Rebirth, Olfaction, and the Transspecies Imagination in Modern Chinese Buddhism

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 364
Author(s):  
Lina Verchery
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Chinese Buddhism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Moral Cultivation ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

This essay considers the importance of the transspecies imagination for moral cultivation in contemporary Chinese Buddhism. Drawing on scriptural, theoretical, and fieldwork-based ethnographic data, it argues that olfaction—often considered the most “animalistic” of the human senses—is uniquely efficacious for inspiring imaginative processes whereby Buddhists train themselves to inhabit the perspectives of non-human beings. In light of Buddhist theories of rebirth, this means extending human-like status to animals and recognizing the “animal” within the human as well. Responding to recent trends in the Humanities calling for an expanded notion of ontological continuity between the human and non-human—notably inspired by critical animal studies, post-humanism, the new materialism, and the “ontological turn”—this essay contends that Buddhist cosmological ideas, like those that demand the cultivation of the transspecies imagination, present resources for moral reflection that can challenge and enrich current mainstream thinking about humanity’s relation to the nonhuman world.

The Musical Gift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Music History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Cultural Interaction ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Post War ◽  
First Time

The Musical Gift tells Sri Lanka’s music history as a story of giving between humans and nonhumans, and between populations defined by ethnic and religious difference. Author Jim Sykes argues that the genres we currently recognize as Sri Lanka’s esteemed traditional musics were not originally about ethnic or religious identity but were gifts to gods intended to foster protection and/or healing. Noting that the currently assumed link between music and identity helped produce the narratives of ethnic difference that drove Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983–2009), Sykes contends that the promotion of histories of cultural interaction, exchange, and respect for difference through musical giving has a role to play in post-war reconciliation. The Musical Gift includes a study of how NGOs used music to promote reconciliation in Sri Lanka, the first ethnography of the plight of musicians during the war in the Tamil-dominated north and of Sinhala Buddhist drummers in the south, and a theorization of the relations between musical gifts and commodities. Eschewing a strict binary between the gift and identity, Sykes claims that the world’s music history is largely a story of entanglement between these paradigms. Drawing on fieldwork conducted widely across Sri Lanka over a span of eleven years, The Musical Gift brings anthropology’s canonic literature on “the gift” into music studies fully for the first time, while engaging with anthropology’s “ontological turn” and the “new materialism” in religious studies.

(Re)Thinking Design with New Materialism: Towards a Critical Anthropology of Design

Somatechnics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-373
Author(s):  
Michaela Büsse
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Human Material ◽  
Design Theories ◽  
Critical Anthropology ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Human Centred Design

The article proposes an empirical and discursive understanding of design as engaging and intensifying uneven power relations. By affiliating with the ontological turn in anthropology, such re-defined reading of design acknowledges design's complicity with extractive capitalism while aiming to open up possibilities to think design otherwise. In recent years, inspired by the resurgence of materialism, abstract notions of design as mediating practice between human and environment have gained popularity. Yet, these more-than-human-centred design theories tend to obscure the material and immaterial infrastructures that still shape human and nonhuman realities. By utilising the example of sand's transformation into land and tracing its journey across sites, actors and continents, the infrastructures of planetary transformation – as well as what eludes them – are investigated. Turning matter into medium emphasises thresholds and ruptures in the human-material relationship and thus transcends both a socially constructed and material reading of reality. Through a historical and empirical relocation of the current more-than-human-centred design discourse, the research presented in this article aims to support the establishment of a critical anthropology of design.

scholarly journals Theory’s Method?

2021 ◽  
pp. 345-363
Author(s):  
Marianna Poyares
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Critical Social Theory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Ethnographic Methods ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Critical Social

This chapter addresses the use of ethnographic methods in critical social theory, and the assumption that such methods prove to be useful because they allow the researcher to be closer to ‘matter itself’. Instead, I argue for ethnography from within a framework of historical materialism and social critique, marking the difference between such ‘materialism without matter’, based on Marx’s ‘fetishism of the commodity’, and some strategies of New Materialism. My goal is to situate the uses of ethnography for a transformed consideration of the relation between theory and practice.

scholarly journals Applied Qualitative Data Analysis After the Ontological Turn

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis Marn ◽  
Jennifer Wolgemuth
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Qualitative Inquiry ◽  
Traditional Birth Attendants ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Birth Attendants ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Analysis Process ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Material Conditions

In this article we demonstrate the use and usefulness of new materialism as an analytic lens in applied qualitative inquiry. Intended as a possible entry point to applied inquiry after the ontological turn, we draw on Barad’s agential realism to analyze three existing transcripts of focus groups conducted with healthcare workers, traditional birth attendants, and mothers to explore the postnatal care referral behavior of traditional birth attendants in Nigeria. We describe elements of our data analysis process including deep reading, summoning of the inquiry, delaying the inquiry, attuning to glowing data, and writing. We explore how the research phenomenon enacted agential cuts that distinguished participants (healthcare workers, traditional birth attendants, and mothers) and relayed their participation in the focus group. We show how the inclusion of the mothers’ babies and the transcripts themselves made available some understandings at the possible exclusion of others. Our Baradian, new materialist analysis shows the inextricability of interview materials (things) and language (discourse) and demonstrates that all applied research is bounded and affected by its material conditions. As a point of entry, we hope our illustration sensitizes applied qualitative researchers to how research decisions, research materials, and research cultures produce what can be known and lived within and beyond the research encounter.

scholarly journals The dark side of the Empire: Roman expansionism between object agency and predatory regime

Antiquity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (378) ◽  
pp. 1630-1639 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Fernández-Götz ◽  
Dominik Maschek ◽  
Nico Roymans
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Object Agency

This debate piece offers a critique of some recent ‘new materialist’ approaches and their application to Roman expansionism, particularly those positing that the study of ‘Romanisation’ should be about ‘understanding objects in motion’—a perspective that carries important political and ethical implications. Here, the authors introduce the alternative notion of a ‘predatory’ political economy for conceptualising Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. The aim is to illuminate the darker sides of Roman expansionism in order to produce more balanced and inclusive accounts. Two cases studies—the archaeology of the Roman conquest and of rural communities—illustrate the potential of such a perspective.

We Cannot Say What the Human Is: The Problem of Anthropology in Adorno’s Philosophy of Art

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-102
Author(s):  
Kylie Gilchrist
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Human Potential ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
Jurgen Habermas ◽  
Axel Honneth ◽  
Advanced Capitalist

Abstract This article investigates a problem in Theodor W. Adorno’s thought: how can Adorno critique advanced capitalist societies for their dehumanizing tendencies while also refusing the possibility of defining the human? Motivating this inquiry is a renewed investigation of philosophical anthropology by thinkers like Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas, who explore positive theories of human limits and needs as the basis of social critique. As Adorno consistently refused to define the human on philosophical and political grounds, this article asks whether his work offers an unexamined alternative to philosophical anthropology’s revival. A reconstruction of Adorno’s position shows how Adorno displaces anthropological problems into his philosophy of art, where the principle of mimesis offers a potentially nonanthropological model of human potential. Yet it also reveals how Adorno’s refusal to directly interrogate philosophical anthropology leads him to implicitly prescribe a certain figure of the human, undermining the value of his resistance to anthropological definitions.

Sonic Generosity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Music History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
European History ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Jacques Attali

This chapter introduces the concept of the “musical gift” and locates its presence in Sri Lankan contexts. It also considers the historic relations between musical giving and the identity paradigm in European history, and the relations between musical gifts and musical commodities. Finally, the chapter considers writings in the ontological turn and new materialism in religious studies in tandem with writings on secularism to argue for a new narrative on global music history for music studies. Contra Jacques Attali and numerous other writers on the political economy of music, the chapter argues for the persistence of musical efficacy, enchantment, and giving in the modern world.

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