Eduardo Kohn lecture: “Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy: Toward an Ecological Ethics for the Anthropocene”

 

From: Tuesday, February 27, 2018, 04:30pm

To: Tuesday, February 27, 2018, 06:30pm

Renowned anthropologist Eduardo Kohn gives a lecture on “Anthropology as Cosmic Diplomacy: Toward an Ecological Ethics for the Anthropocene." 

Forests think. This is neither a metaphor nor a cultural belief. There exists a kind of thinking, which I call “sylvan,” that is made exquisitely manifest by tropical forests and those that live with them. This kind of thought extends well beyond us humans and, in fact, holds our human forms of thinking. Thinking with the sylvan logics that thinking forests amplify can provide an ethical orientation –a mode of thought– that is adequate for these times of planetary human-driven ecological devastation that some call the “Anthropocene.” I here discuss three projects in and around the tropical forests of Ecuador whose goal is to capacitate sylvan thought. This research, which has brought me into collaboration with indigenous leaders and shamans, lawyers and conceptual artists, and even forest spirits and archaic pre-hispanic ceramic figures, has encouraged me to see my anthropological vocation as a kind of “cosmic diplomacy.” This form of diplomacy is “psychedelic” in so far as its goal is to make manifest the mind manifesting nature of the sylvan thinking on whose behalf it advocates. Another word for this kind of emergent mind is “spirit.” I here explore alternative “sylvan” means to give voice to the spirits among us, and I trace the challenge this poses for how we should think about what it means to be human.

Eduardo Kohn is the author of the book How Forests Think, which has been translated into several languages. It won the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize and is short-listed for the upcoming 2018 Prix littéraire François Sommer. His research continues to be concerned with capacitating sylvan thinking in its many forms. He teaches Anthropology at McGill University.

Location

Academic Building 2160
15 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08901

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