Cosmological thinking as it has been popping up in the humanities of late, offers some elbow room in the all too dominant, all too human modern ontology, or what John Law aptly calls the “One World World”. Finding its expressions perhaps primarily in anthropology and the study of non-modern ontologies, spearheaded by figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, and more recently Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Eduardo Kohn, it has found or refound its ways to other fields as well including philosophy, notably Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmological process philosophy; politics, as with Isabelle Stengers and in her wake Bruno Latour’s cosmopolitics; technics, with for instance Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics; but also the fields of cinema and literature where it sets out to open the way for non-representational sensibilities in attuning to more-than human worlds.

To register and receive the readings, please contact: h.h.kuipers@uva.nl

Readings:

Costa, Luiz, and Carlos Fausto. 2010. “The Return of the Animists: Recent Studies of Amazonian Ontologies.” Religion and Society 1 (1).

Graeber, David. 2015. “Radical Alterity Is Just Another Way of Saying ‘Reality’: A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 1–41. 

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. “Who Is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf? Some Comments on an Ongoing Anthropological Debate.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33 (1).