I am sorry to have been absent for so long. I have been hard at work! The following is the abstract to a just completed manuscript of mine that is currently under review:
Recent scholarship reveals that plants
exhibit qualities and abilities that are analogous to those possessed by humans
and other animals, and sometimes argues that they should be regarded and treated
not as objects and property but as subjects and agents, and in some cases granted
personhood. I explore this argument within the framework of the relation
between modern subjectivities and world society. I start by engaging discourses
on subjectivity and personhood, first generally and then with regard to nonhuman
beings, specifically primates who are held and used as experimental subjects in
research laboratories. I then outline a conception of world society that
includes nonhuman subjectivity within it. I next shift my attention to plants
to examine a comparable reasoning, relying on several current studies on plant
ontology and ecology to inform my substitution of plants for animals in a
global system of social relations. I conclude that the claims for plant subjectivity
and personhood have merit, and remain valid at the global scale, especially
within the contours and exigencies of the Anthropocene, the emerging geologic
era that calls for a reformation of human-environment relations. A key finding
of the study is that indigenous and pagan cultures, particularly those with
animist traditions, have long given plants a level of social recognition, and
that new scientific findings support them. I conclude that a reanimated
understanding of plants as subjects and persons calls for a model of world
society that is universally inclusive, extending beyond conceptualizations of
the social that are exclusively human.
No comments:
Post a Comment