What's happening with the "Religion and the Anthropocene" class, you may be wondering? Four sessions in, it seems to be finding its stride. Or at least the instructor is! Well, knock on wood.
Today's reading was Donna Haraway's short but dense essay "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin." (There was another reading, but we didn't get to it.) Haraway argues that the transitional period earth scientists are calling Anthropocene needs and deserves more names. She endorses capitalocenex (which dismisses the idea we're dealing with something "we" human did to ourselves, when it was a far smaller subset of human cultural and economic formations) as well as plantationocene (which focuses more on practices which extractively disrupt natural cycles and synergies, starting with the slave plantations of sugar and cotton of the New World), but argues we needs another name, too
for the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake
for which she proposes chthulucene,
after the diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and forces and collected things with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A'akuluujjusi, and many many more. “My” Chthulucene, even burdened with its problematic Greek-ish tendrils, entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.
Lots of wordplay here, lots of jargon, and a principled refusal to use language as business as usual. But the central idea is that the human cannot and should not be thought in abstraction from the rest of life, of whose prodigious and promiscuous combinations and collaborations we are (but) a part. From this vantage, the Anthropocene names and reinforces dangerous delusions of grandeur and species autarky. Geoengineers imagine crafting a more docile earth while humanists and Silicon Valley billionnaires plan a human future beyond this terrestrial setting, when what's needed is a reckoning with what it means to be alive, a symbiont among symbionts, a cyborg with the imaginative power to change our lives and relations to "make kin" of the other parts of life.
It's a heady brew, and entirely different from the dour alarm of the thinkers we've so far encountered. Haraway doesn't deny the damage - she insists on mourning lost species and ecologies - but insists also on the need for joy in life's continuing intricacy and interrelation. Religion, too? The goddesses she groups with her Chthulu aren't quite being offered for veneration, though wonder might be in order, and a little fear. All of these are affects missing from the lifeless wasteland of Scranton's dead civilization, and, while only drawing us deeper into the "trouble," they also offer hope and companionship for the journey.
I've long enjoyed reading Haraway's work, but this was my first time teaching it, and it's delirious fun. Connecting it to "religion" will be a stretch, but an enjoyable one.
Joy wasn't something I was expecting to encounter in this class, and of course it's bittersweet (to put it mildly) to be discovering our profound entanglement with more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman as we learn more each day how deadly the recent disturbances named by capitalocene and plantationocene are for so many, only getting worse as we deny and deflect. Our next readings take us deeper into the human cost of Anthropocene destruction of indigenous worlds and dehumanization of the bodies whose labor fueled the plantations, but we may find hope there, too, in the recovery of indigenous and transplanted ways of living with and for land.
Will religion be able to follow? Stay tuned!
Today's reading was Donna Haraway's short but dense essay "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin." (There was another reading, but we didn't get to it.) Haraway argues that the transitional period earth scientists are calling Anthropocene needs and deserves more names. She endorses capitalocenex (which dismisses the idea we're dealing with something "we" human did to ourselves, when it was a far smaller subset of human cultural and economic formations) as well as plantationocene (which focuses more on practices which extractively disrupt natural cycles and synergies, starting with the slave plantations of sugar and cotton of the New World), but argues we needs another name, too
for the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake
for which she proposes chthulucene,
after the diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and forces and collected things with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A'akuluujjusi, and many many more. “My” Chthulucene, even burdened with its problematic Greek-ish tendrils, entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.
Lots of wordplay here, lots of jargon, and a principled refusal to use language as business as usual. But the central idea is that the human cannot and should not be thought in abstraction from the rest of life, of whose prodigious and promiscuous combinations and collaborations we are (but) a part. From this vantage, the Anthropocene names and reinforces dangerous delusions of grandeur and species autarky. Geoengineers imagine crafting a more docile earth while humanists and Silicon Valley billionnaires plan a human future beyond this terrestrial setting, when what's needed is a reckoning with what it means to be alive, a symbiont among symbionts, a cyborg with the imaginative power to change our lives and relations to "make kin" of the other parts of life.
It's a heady brew, and entirely different from the dour alarm of the thinkers we've so far encountered. Haraway doesn't deny the damage - she insists on mourning lost species and ecologies - but insists also on the need for joy in life's continuing intricacy and interrelation. Religion, too? The goddesses she groups with her Chthulu aren't quite being offered for veneration, though wonder might be in order, and a little fear. All of these are affects missing from the lifeless wasteland of Scranton's dead civilization, and, while only drawing us deeper into the "trouble," they also offer hope and companionship for the journey.
I've long enjoyed reading Haraway's work, but this was my first time teaching it, and it's delirious fun. Connecting it to "religion" will be a stretch, but an enjoyable one.
Joy wasn't something I was expecting to encounter in this class, and of course it's bittersweet (to put it mildly) to be discovering our profound entanglement with more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman as we learn more each day how deadly the recent disturbances named by capitalocene and plantationocene are for so many, only getting worse as we deny and deflect. Our next readings take us deeper into the human cost of Anthropocene destruction of indigenous worlds and dehumanization of the bodies whose labor fueled the plantations, but we may find hope there, too, in the recovery of indigenous and transplanted ways of living with and for land.
Will religion be able to follow? Stay tuned!
