"Thus, my intention is not so much to consider actions such as crafting, making, or doing as categories that would encompass a set of dissimilar practices (for example, synthetic biology and crocheting with coral and wool yarn (Roosth 2013)). To the contrary, it seems richer to start from the principle that making refers to a plurality of activities, each one having its own specific traits and shedding light on different aspects of life. The goal of this article is to offer a first look at this diversity by recalling that the notion of technique, which is quite vast, refers to a set of practices that are highly diverse and sometimes complementary but never reducible to one another. Techniques of the body, cognitive techniques, craftwork, construction, manufacturing, production, engineering, technology, artistic techniques, and bricolage are all activities that allow humans to intervene in the world, sometimes in order to modify their relations to other living beings using specific modalities." (Perig Pitrou, Life as a Making, 4)
"Seen in this light, a body can have multiple personalities, and then personality is a concept that is defined according to the practices and experiences after organ transplantation. Therefore, it is supposed that the organ and the body itself have an undifferentiated state before they are actualized as individual matter—a ‘pre-personalized state’ of the body. This state of the body as multiplicity, and materiality as well, can never be reduced to a specific social category. The gift relationship is experienced at this moment when the actors experience their bodies in their own ways, whether imaginary or material. The state of the body is not given in advance but emerges through the practices after transplantation." (Goro Yamazaki, "The Body with Anonymous Organs", 68)
(Translated from the keynote lecture at the Fear Conference in Toronto, 2007)Read more
"...I argued that the constitutive problem of Western modernity, namely, solipsism—the supposition that the Other is merely a body, that it does not harbour a soul like that of the Self: an absence of communication—had as its Amazonian equivalent the (positive or negative) obsession with cannibalism and the affirmation of the latent transformability of bodies—a total impregnation of the cosmos by subjecthood, a supposition-fear that what we eat are always, in the final analysis, souls: an excess of communication. Here I wish to suggest that the true equivalent of the indigenous experience of the supernatural are not our extraordinary or paranormal experiences (alien abductions, ESP, mediumship, etc.), but the quotidian experience, perfectly terrifying in its very normality, of existing under a State." (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, "Immanence and Fear",100)
De Antoni frames his experience of exorcisms and haunted places through his confrontation with the problem of whether or not spirits really exist, and whether this is a question of belief or not. He claims to be agnostic, but proposes we take these different worlds seriously, and try...Read more
Smart outlines how thinking through posthumanism through the case of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also known as mad cow disease) in Canada re-shaped the author and their collaborator's understanding of borders. Diseased cows posed no real threat to humans, but the outbreak still caused a...Read more
Hansen describes his process of encountering more-than-human becomings through Star Trek, and through the study of Eastern religions and their conceptualizations of the world. He offers examples from his fieldwork and lived experience in one of Hokkaido's dairy farming regions to emphasize the...Read more
An article in NatureCulture published in 2015.Read more
"Gradually, I learned how my hand movements could affect the cells. At the same time, my own body and my emotions were becoming affected by the responses of the cells. Onomatopoeia helped me to memorize and consolidate in my body a sense of the subtle differences presented by cells: in a synesthetic way, the mimetic words bridged my sense of hearing, sense of sight, and sense of touch. Through the learning process, I began to appreciate that cells are indeed living beings. Thus, the gestural effects of onomatopoeia enable the qualities of cells to enter into our body. Highly skilled iPS sommeliers seem able to use onomatopoeia to make fine distinctions between cell states and increase their sensitivity to the condition of cells." (Wakana Suzuki, "The Care of the Cell", 99)
"What I have been learning is that in spite of great effort, mechanism and mechanical analogies have failed to fully disenchant the life sciences. All kinds of enchantments, from animisms to anthropomorphisms, keep bubbling up (see Myers 2014 a; 2015). Indeed, life scientists in the fields of molecular biology and protein modeling have taught me how to see processes of signal transduction, the very molecular phenomena Melissa and I were discussing, not just as the traffic of information from the environment into a cell, but as a complex contact-dance between molecules propagating energies and intensities within and among cells (see Myers 2015). What if signal transduction is not merely a way of transferring ‘information’ from the environment into the cell, but is also a way of ‘transducing’ affects and energies through a body’s excitable cells and tissues?" (Natasha Myers, "Conversations on Plant Sensing", 48)
An article published in NatureCulture in 2017Read more