Taming the untamable

Although our systems of thought have long accustomed us to differentiate sharply between the human world of ‘culture’ and the animal world of ‘nature’, both sides of this very influential dichotomy are entangled in complex and indissoluble ways. The civet cat and its very special perfume—civet—provide a perfect example of this ‘merging’. The idea of taming the untamable, expressed in paintings of civet cats and textual sources, has been especially fruitful and became a promising preoccupation especially for artists like Joris Hoefnagel to enrich their work with an intellectual hybridity. The article shows how—in painting, perfume, and writing—nature and culture complemented one another, rather than standing in opposition. Owing to the animal’s odour, its mysterious nature, and debates about its (un)tamability, the image of the civet cat served as a focal point through which early modern Europeans wrestled with and redefined the realms of human and animal, of art and science, and of culture and nature.

The identification, logic and enlightenments of intra-urban place communities in China

Spatial agglomeration phenomena on the earth permeate in various fields of the natural and human world, yet their researches in human society are relatively few with the focus mainly on the economic concept of “industrial clusters”. Precise quantitative descriptions, in-depth logical analyses and proper application approaches for urban planning are lacked in various intra-urban spatial agglomeration phenomena. By using over 10 million POIs in the mainland China, 18 grid network models with two varieties of spatial relationships (co-location/adjacent) are constructed in this article. 23 typical place communities are extracted based on complex network analysis, and four types of agglomeration driving forces are summarized. A comprehensive demonstration displaying the application process of co-location/adjacent place matrices in auxiliary decision of the implanted place types is carried out with the example of the revitalization project of Taoxichuan Area in the city of Jingdezhen.

Robak i robactwo w twórczości Władysława Syrokomli

The aim of this article is to determine the frequency of occurrence of the terms “worm” and “insects” in the works of Władysław Syrokomla. An assumption is made that these themes have animportant function in the poet’s works, and that their occurrence indicates something of significance. The article considers both the functionality and repeatability criteria, which is the necessary foundationfor recording these items. The conducted analyses indicate that Syrokomla’s insects (regardless of whether they have a literal or metaphorical meaning) in most cases signal something evil. Sometimes it is an ordinary pest (insect) damaging plants, but more frequently the insect refers to the human condition, characterising it in three dimensions: as the worm of death, as the worm of internal suffering or as the worm of insignificance. In other cases, worms or insects represent curses or sin. The diversity of how such zoomorphic connotations are presented and applied deserves attention. Moreover, although the majority of them have long-established cultural and literary traditions, in Syrokomla’s works they gain a new context (for example, historical, folk or social). They indicate sensitivity to injustice and evil. The poet frequently presents the human world by analogy to the world of nature.

The Animistic Way: Contemporary Paganism and the Posthuman

This article aims to explore the affinities between contemporary Paganism and the posthuman project in how they approach the non-human natural world. On the one hand, posthumanism explores new ways of considering the notion of humans and how they are linked with the non-human world. On the other hand, Neopaganism expands this reflection to the spiritual domain through its animistic relational sensibility. Both perspectives challenge the modern paradigm where nature and humans are opposed and mutually disconnected. They instead propose a relational ontology that welcomes the “different other.” This integrated relationship between humans and the “other than human” can be understood through the semiotic Chora, a notion belonging to Julia Kristeva that addresses how the subject is not symbolically separated from the world in which it is contained.

No Longer Lost on the Human Highway:

In recent years, Canadian/US singer, songwriter, and author Neil Young’s production shows increased signs of environmental awareness, manifested in his promotion of biofuels, critique of genetic manipulation, biotechnology, and ecocide, as well as in his warm attitude to non-human animals. These issues are dealt with in detail in his recent memoir Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars (2015), as well as on his recently released albums such as The Monsanto Years (2015) and Earth (2016). While this interest in the natural world could be seen as a simple expression of a 1960s countercultural hippie world view, this essay will propose a different reading of the meaning of animals and the non-human in Young’s Special Deluxe by placing it in the context of human–animal studies and its critique of anthropocentrism. By reading the memoir’s representations of non-human animals in tandem with the emphatic role of the environment on Young’s recent albums, this essay argues that Young’s recent work reveals an increased concern for relationality and non-humans in human life and thus problematizes modernity’s insistence on anthropocentrism and human mastery over nature. Based on the critique of modernity and its anthropocentric hierarchies presented by human–animal studies scholarship (Haraway 2008; Armstrong 2008; Marvin and McHugh 2014), it is suggested that Young’s work foregrounds an explicit concern with the non-human world through its increasing focus on the relationality of the human and the non-human, and their mutual interdependence. The importance of non-human others, especially dogs, to the memoir’s narrator is addressed in detail, and the close transspecies relationship seen as an example of the emotional significance of non-human others in everyday life. Keywords: Neil Young, Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars, environmentalism, human–animal studies, anthropocentricism

Sympoietic Art Practice in Co-expressive Re-worlding with Hegel’s “Vegetal Subject”

“Sympoietic art practice”, construed as co-creative making-together-with plants, contributes to posthumanist discourse by forming cross-species partnerships which re-configure exploitative relations with plants. The posthumanist commitment of sympoietic practice to live equitably with the more-than-human world is inherently opposed to the tradition of anthropocentrism widely associated with Hegel’s idealization of reason and culture. But when Hegelian philosophy comingles with the radically different assumptions of sympoietic art practice in this exploratory paper, a co-expressive “worlding with plants” emerges. A transformative re-reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature reveals that the English translators have smoothed away the vibrant concept of a “vegetal subject” explicitly used by Hegel in the original German. The resulting interpretive fissure makes space for a creative scrutiny of human exceptionalism, humanist and posthumanist conceptions of plant subjectivity and human-plant relations. Our transdisciplinary article concludes with a performative knitting together and composting of shreds of Hegelian text with vibrantly participative strands of living couch grass.

Figures

Chapter 4 considers a central tool of poets—the making of “figures.” It brings forward the ways in which imagery can privilege the visual and yet maintain complex, multisensory dimensions that draw the reader into a bodily encounter. It discusses metaphors and similes as types of comparison that can be both conventional and unstable, in that they invite the reader to draw conclusions about analogous qualities that cannot be fully disclosed. Metaphorical language for the deity is discussed. While some biblical poems explain their use of metaphors and symbols, many do not. When figures are symbolic, they remain open, relying on the reader to complete their significance. This analysis underscores the way in which poems are embedded in ancient contexts and simultaneously remain open to new contexts. Personification and anthropomorphism are presented as ecologically rich modes for negotiating the human being’s relationship to the more-than-human world. This chapter ends with a reading of Psalm 65.

„Rasa czyli plemię”. Problemy z nomenklaturą u początku polskiej antropologii

“Race or Tribe”: Problems with Nomenclature in the Early Days of Polish Anthropology This article presents the early stage of shaping Polish terminology connected with the human science, the origins of man and differentiation of humankind in the period when anthropology only began to separate from natural history, and its representatives attempted to make the scope of their research clear and distinct. This process of organising the organic world within the classification systems created for this purpose, including divisions of the mankind on the basis of physical and cultural features of people, was accompanied by an effort to unify scholarly nomenclature and establish a “systematic language”. This was a slow and often chaotic phase because scholars did not object to inconsistent nomenclature at all. In works popularising knowledge and in journalism even more disinformation appeared.The notion of race was accepted as a superior category that was to show a complexity of terms reflecting the divisions of the human kind. This term, from the second half of the eighteenth century used in Western literature to denote individual physical types of man, in the Polish writings was little known and as a rule other notions were in common use instead. Plenty of meanings, diverse and arbitrary application of notions made it necessary to organise this chaos and explain the most typical categories that the Polish authors of the Enlightenment and Romantic periods started to apply in order to describe the diversity of the human world. „Rasa czyli plemię”. Problemy z nomenklaturą u początku polskiej antropologiiW artykule zaprezentowano początki kształtowania się polskiej terminologii związanej z nauką o człowieku, jego pochodzeniu i zróżnicowaniu, w okresie, kiedy antropologia dopiero zaczynała wyodrębniać się z historii naturalnej, a jej przedstawiciele próbowali doprecyzować zakres badanego przedmiotu. Procesowi uporządkowania świata organicznego w ramach powstałych systemów klasyfikacyjnych, w tym podziałów rodzaju ludzkiego ze względu na cechy fizyczne i kulturowe, towarzyszyło ujednolicenie nazewnictwa naukowego, tworzenie „języka systematycznego”. Jego powstawanie dokonywało się powoli, często chaotycznie za sprawą samych badaczy, którym nie przeszkadzała nomenklaturowa niekonsekwencja. Jeszcze większa dezinformacja panowała w pracach popularyzujących wiedzę i publicystyce.Za kategorię nadrzędną, która posłużyła do ukazania złożoności formowania się terminów związanych z podziałami ludzkości, przyjęto pojęcie rasy. Termin ten, używany w literaturze zachodniej do opisów odrębnych typów fizycznych człowieka od drugiej połowy XVIII wieku w piśmiennictwie polskim był słabo upowszechniony i konsekwentnie zastępowany innymi określeniami. Bogactwo znaczeń, różnorodność i dowolność ich stosowania zrodziły potrzebę uporządkowania tego pojęciowego zamieszania i wyjaśnienia najbardziej typowych kategorii, które służyły polskim autorom formacji oświeceniowej i romantycznej do opisów zróżnicowania świata ludzkiego.

Technology understanding in a more-than-human world

In this article, I wish to unfold the question: "what is technology actually and what characterizes our relation to technology?” and relate it to the technology understanding course, since how we think about and perceive technology, is arguably consequential for how we practice and conduct our lives and societies and for what we consider possibilities, problems, solutions and necessary actions. What I will argue is that we need to challenge a preferred and inherently humanistic and anthropocentric understanding of technology that sees technology as ideally a designed object subject to human control. This is an understanding that has dominated throughout enlightenment and modernity. However, my argument in this text is that it is both inadequate and problematic because it keeps us in a frame of thinking that perpetually reproduces the idea of technological solutions to problems.