Non-Human Agency

Question 1

Cruikshank

Answer 1

• Do Glaciers Listen?
• Athapaskan and Tlingit sentient landscapes
• Glaciers act as actors, have gender
• Respond to their surroundings, listen and are sensitive to smell
• Interpret history
• Kinship terms extended to non-humans

Question 2

Latour

Answer 2

• Actor-Network Theory
• Agency neither in human ‘subjects’ nor in non-human ‘objects’
• Assumes that all entities in a network can and should be described in the same terms. The rationale for this is that differences between them are generated in the network of relations, and should not be presupposed.

Question 3

Gell

Answer 3

Splits agency into

• Primary (intentional) agency (people)
• Secondary (distributed) agency (things)

Question 4

Whanganui River

Answer 4

River in Newzealand

• Legal status of a person under a unique Treaty settlement
• Maori people have been fighting for more than 160 years to get the recognition for the river
• Sea, mountains and rivers have their own identities

Question 5

The Tree of Gernika, Spain

Answer 5

• Father tree, tree of life, lawgiver, guardian of liberty
• Socially and symbolically significant
• Replaced with it’s descendants when it dies/is damaged, in the same place

Question 6

Verdery

Answer 6

• Dead bodies have political life
• Stablise landscapes, freeze values, localize claims
• Materiality, thereness
• Don’t talk but have agency
• Identification with one’s own body

Question 7

Nur lights

Answer 7

-Gacko, Bosnia
-The dead talk
-Return of Refugees
?