{"id":18618,"date":"2016-03-08T12:26:48","date_gmt":"2016-03-08T17:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18618"},"modified":"2016-03-08T12:27:05","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T17:27:05","slug":"going-beyond-the-ecological-turn-in-the-humanities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18618","title":{"rendered":"Going beyond the \u201cecological turn\u201d in the humanities"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/entitleblog.org\/2016\/03\/01\/going-beyond-the-ecological-turn-in-the-humanities\/\" target=\"_blank\">Going beyond the \u201cecological turn\u201d in the humanities<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"entry-meta\"><em>Talk about the Anthropocene often has a tendency to rely on apolitical and colonialist assumptions. But the turn to ecology in the humanities will require acknowledging\u2014and, more importantly, supporting\u2014those peoples who have never turned their back on \u2018ecology\u2019 in the first place.<\/em><span id=\"more-3708\"><\/span><\/div>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<div id=\"attachment_3718\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" data-shortcode=\"caption\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-3718 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/entitleblogdotorg3.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/03\/ecological-turn.jpg?w=700\" alt=\"ecological turn\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Aaron Vasintjan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>There\u2019s a story about the time when Michel Foucault was accompanying his colleague, Jacqueline Verdeaux, on a car trip through the Italian Alps. As tourists do, they would often get out of the car at lookout points to observe some beautiful landscape. As biographer Didier \u00c9ribon tells it, the philosopher would then almost immediately walk back to the car, grumbling, \u201cmy back is turned to it\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Whether this was just an example of Foucault\u2019s cynical, dry humor or actually reflected his lack of concern for environmental issues is up for debate. Nevertheless, it\u2019s almost impossible to imagine any major intellectual today \u201cturning their back\u201d to the environment. While such concerns often took a backseat in 19th\u00a0and 20th\u00a0century humanities, these days, even the most modest dinner-table political argument will carry an ecological thread.<\/p>\n<p>Thomas Homer-Dixon\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.homerdixon.com\/2009\/06\/01\/the-newest-science\/\">prediction<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cecology will be the master science of the 21st\u00a0century\u201d is perhaps a bit excessive, but already carries some weight of truth. It may not be a \u201cmaster\u201d, but its influence in the humanities is now unavoidable\u2014thinkers like Slavoj Zizek, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour are celebrated precisely because they are able to put environmental crises into thoughtful perspective. Today, it seems like every humanities conference call-out starts with the sentence \u201cIn the era of the Anthropocene\u2026\u201d and the dish isn\u2019t complete without a few servings of \u201cmateriality\u201d, \u201cnon-human\u201d, \u201cnature-culture\u201d, and \u201coikos\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>This \u201cecological turn\u201d in the humanities\u00a0<em>could<\/em>\u00a0be academic fashion\u2014to be forgotten within a decade.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Going beyond the \u201cecological turn\u201d in the humanities Talk about the Anthropocene often has a tendency to rely on apolitical and colonialist assumptions. But the turn to ecology in the humanities will require acknowledging\u2014and, more importantly, supporting\u2014those peoples who have never turned their back on \u2018ecology\u2019 in the first place. Photo by Aaron Vasintjan. There\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12824,1208,234,12825,12826],"class_list":["post-18618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-aaron-vansintjan","tag-anthropocene","tag-ecology","tag-humanities","tag-thomas-homer-dixon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18618"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18620,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18618\/revisions\/18620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}