#Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy

[fatehbaz]

When I say that forests think, I don’t mean it as a metaphor, nor am I referring to a culturally embedded belief. The claim is rather part of a diplomatic effort to convince you of the reality of things that can sometimes go unnoticed given the limits of certain metaphysical assumptions that form the axiomatic foundations for Western scholarly thought. By saying that forests think I mean that life is thought -- what we share with other beings isn’t so much [our physicality and] our bodies, but our capacity to think. Mind here refers to that process of learning by experience. Evolutionary dynamics, in this sense, are mental dynamics because they imply the ways in which a lineage, over time, [...] learns something about its environment. Wings, as they evolved, have come to increasingly represent something about the currents of air on which they glide, for those lineages of organisms that have them. This is an example of thought; it is a kind of intelligence. One could say, in philosopher Charles Pierce’s terms, that it is a “scientific intelligence.” [...] There are places in the world where this kind of mental dynamic is amplified -- places where there is more mind, more thought, places that exhibit more scientific intelligence. One such place is Ecaudor’s “mega-diverse” Amazon region. If lives are minds, these dense tropical ecosystems would be sites for the emergence of ecologies made up of an unprecedented multitude of minds, thinking an equally unprecedented multitude of thoughts.

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Eduardo Kohn. “Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy: Toward an Ecological Ethics for the Anthropocene” (2017).

[00arika00]

"Forests think." Eduardo Kohn, author of the book How Forests Think, discusses a kind of thinking, which he calls “sylvan," that is manifested by tropical forests and those that live with them. This mode of thought can provide an ethical orientation in these times of planetary human-driven ecological devastation that some call the “Anthropocene." He presents his work as “cosmic diplomacy." How Forests Think, which has been translated into several languages, won the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize and is short-listed for the upcoming 2018 Prix littéraire François Sommer. Eduardo Kohn's research continues to be concerned with capacitating sylvan thinking in its many forms. He teaches Anthropology at McGill University.

[maizeofloverp]

Full name: Cameron Casey

Age: 24

Birth date: February 1, 1993

Gender & pronouns: Cismale, he/his/him

Affiliation: Civilian

Occupation: None

Faceclaim: Dylan Sprouse

B i o g r a p h y »

For all intents and purposes, Cameron wasn’t supposed to be alive. Not because his family tried to bury him like a bad smell, but because his heart was just a little weaker than most others. Born on February first with an identical twin brother, the Childs family made the difficult choice of giving up their faulty child in a closed adoption to a pair of aristocratic lesbians who were more than willing to take on the responsibility of nursing baby Cameron back to health.

Miraculously (spitefully), he survived. Six surgeries and a new heart later, Cameron managed to grow up as healthy as an ox with a few minor complications. In the greatest display of gratitude to his parents and defiance to the universe, Cam sought after success to show to the world what it might’ve missed out on for trying to cancel him in birth.

To say that Cameron was intelligent would’ve been a massive understatement. Not only did he excel in academia, but he was also a musical genius. After picking up violin at six years old, Cam was dubbed a prodigy after a heart-moving rendition of Mozart’s Adagio for violin in E minor at his school’s talent show that cropped up in several papers across the United States, projecting him into momentary fame.

As he grew in age, so did the number of accolades and academic achievements that plastered the walls of his room, his shelves lined with a multitude of trophies lauding his hard-work and prowess in all fields across the board. There was little that Cameron couldn’t accomplish and it reflected in the way the whole world seemed fall to its knees before him as if in cosmic apology. Cameron was the kind of kid who grew up have their likeness immortalized in monuments and bronze statues and his mothers couldn’t have been more proud to brandish their very own princeling to debutantes all across Virginia. He was a king among peasants, but Cam didn’t find the same pride and satisfaction in his achievements as his moms did.

Loathe to admit that some part of his life wasn’t absolutely immaculate, Cam hasn’t been able to settle the discomfort in his gut that had been presence since he was a child. The life he chased was not his own, like he was fulfilling someone else’s destiny to be the poster child for poncy rich kids everywhere (as much as he enjoyed the recognition). Despite his extensive education and enriched childhood, Cam knew that there was something amiss and his obsession with discovering it alienated him from his peers and eventually, his family too.

Dubbed ‘a crazy artist’, Cam moved out and into an old abandoned factory on the border of Virginia and West Virginia after graduating from Yale with his masters in anthropology where the only things that kept him company were his dog, Bach, and constant existential dread.

It wasn’t until he received a strange message from a busty brunette with an impressive vocabulary named Jessica Little did Cam take interest in a small, muddy town in Illinois.

P e r s o n a l i t y »

Noble, charming and intelligent, Cameron, at first glance, was undoubtedly a politician’s son in some life, his breezy confidence and regal grace winning over the hearts of just about everyone he meets. Reigning over his peers under the guise of their benevolent leader with questionable diplomacy, Cameron is all about the long game when it comes to his approach to living. Convincing everyone that he was worthy of respect and admiration, what they don’t know is that his personality is nothing more than a shallow amalgamation of desirable traits designed to mislead people into believing that the person they’re meeting is in any way real.

There’s a darkness to Cam that stems from a vague and uneasy feeling of dissatisfaction with his life, as if some crucial part of him was missing. The scholar in him was born out of every morbid and eccentric thought he’s ever harbored about his purpose beyond the narrow scope of high-society. What had began as adolescent curiosity had festered over the years into an obsession that seemed to have no end in sight as Cameron continues to press the thresholds of society with concerning disdain and kick up dirt wherever he could in earnest hope of uncovering what was lost when the surgeons cut him open.

Played by Jackie

[astranemus]

The final observation about sylvan thinking is that it involves generality. Thanks to all the katydids that were not noticed there is now more ‘leafiness’ in this world. Not only are leaves that leafy but so too are some insects. Generality is a real property of the world — one that grows in the realm of life. Life proliferates generals. Through a process of constrained confusion living dynamics create kinds. Think of Jacob von Uexküll’s tick, the one that is ‘world poor’ because it doesn’t do a lot of differentiation. By not discriminating between humans and deer, indiscriminately parasitizing both, confusing them, it creates a kind — the kind of being through which, for example, Lyme disease might pass. The world, then, is not just a continuum waiting to be categorized by human minds and cultures.

This logic extends to biological concepts such as the distinction between individual and lineage. It may be that only the individual exists, but the lineage is the reality that makes that existence possible. Any individual katydid is only what it is by virtue of a lineage that temporally exceeds it. This is true also of the species. It too has this kind of general reality. In this regard, the species is not unlike the Amerindian concept of the masters of animals. A master of animals is a being that is the protector and general instantiation of the species in question. All hunting passes through this generality. Hunters dream with or about this domain of the general in order to connect with the individual that will become meat. This generality is real even if its existence is only instantiated in the forest encounter.

The reality of forest spirits, then, is on par with the reality of a species or lineage. Out of an ecology of selves there emerges an ecology of spirits — or gods — as well. And this reality is not reducible to ‘the social’. It is to this emergent spirit-life that we must also learn to attend. For these gods, or others like them, will be the ones who can orient us in the way that a kind orients an individual, and a dream orients the hunter. An ethical orientation for the Anthropocene must thus necessarily also involve a spiritual re-orientation. Spirits, gods, and souls are part and parcel of the sylvan thinking we need to inhabit once again.

Eduardo Kohn, "Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy: Toward an Ecological Ethics for Times of Environmental Fragmentation" in Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing