Uncertain Allies? The place of indigenous metaphysics in posthumanist thought

Описание: The term ‘relational ontologies’ has a wide purchase these days, often used to cover anything that eschews a modernist binary between human and thing (subject and object, nature and culture etc.). Thus a new materialist metaphysics as espoused by Latour or Barad might be considered a relational ontology, as might many indigenous or ‘animist’ perspectives. Yet how comfortably do indigenous ontologies actually fit within the wider family of posthumanist approaches? Perhaps understandably, the critical impetus thus far has been geared towards undermining modernity’s pernicious great divides, as well as debating the finer distinctions between leading Western theorists such as Latour, Bennett, Barad, Deleuze, Ingold and the like. But much less attention has been paid to the specificities of indigenous metaphysical commitments, although they occasionally get drawn into new materialist rhetoric as potential allies. In this paper, drawing on the Inkas as a case in point, I will consider just how closely ancient Andean ontologies reflect the posthumanist Zeitgeist in the modern academy. Rather than trying to present posthumanism as either a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ lens through which to interpret the Inkas, I suggest that there are moments both of agreement and sharp divergence; and these are themselves very instructive for highlighting many implicit premises of posthumanist theory.

Darryl Wilkinson (University of Cambridge)