Gave my first presentation at the American Academy of Religion since 2016. I attended the past two virtually, but it's been years since anything I could imagine presenting on fit the topics in the year's Call for Papers. Even this year was a long shot, for the "Human Enhancement and Transhumanism" unit, who nibbled when I proposed a talk on "Human Enhancement in the Service of 'Making Kin': Donna Haraway's 'Camille Stories' and Posthuman Religious Futures." I thought it was probably because they didn't get many other proposals but it turns out Haraway is an interest of several of them. They even hosted her at the AAR held in San Francisco in 2011! The panel went well, but discussion defaulted to the group's usual concern - humans doing variously human things in service of variously strange human-transcending ideals. The older Haraway of cyborgs was right up their alley, but the new Haraway's suggestion that humans might dissolve the human in service of a broader kinship with animals didn't tempt.
For me it was a fun chance to think about "The Camille Stories," which have figured prominently in all my classes on the anthropocene, whether in connection with religion or humanities, but this time with an audience I knew would "get" religion. But this setting also helped me be more critical of the stories, which seem to me now to be shaped in quite religious - specifically Christian - ways. I'd articulated misgivings about the strange way in which humans in the stories helped themselves to the genes of other species for the syms (who are then fated to lead a life of shamanic service), even as the other species remain untouched. A strangely conservative reticence, coming from a champion of hybridity, but it becomes more troubling still when we learn that many of these species then, despite the best efforts of the syms and the movements they lead, go extinct. The only vestiges of these lost species are the syms themselves! It points toward a future in which nobody is human - but nobody is not human either, a strange return to the anthropocentrism it was trying to escape! And meanwhile, isn't this all disturbingly like a world in which settlers preserve the cultures of indigenous peoples they have driven to extinction?
The discussion helped me see that the Camilles, and indeed all the "syms," are sacrificial offerings to atone for human sins against other species. Nobody chooses to be one, so the syms' experience is more like that of Jesus (in his human form). But there is also a kind of divination going on: the non-human species are given a kind of immortality - surviving their own extinction - through absorption into the syms. All more than a little white savior complex, huh...
The "Human Enhancement and Transhumanism" crew were unfazed by this, being accustomed to encountering these kinds of religious resonances and reenactments in transhumanist projects all the time - and even perhap embracing them.
