100. Rearranging And Reconstructing The Animacy Hierarchy
Siri Lamoureaux, University of Siegen, Germany; Meredith Root-Bernstein, CNRS UMR CESCO, Muséum
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
What beings, objects, living and non-living others do we relate to? While the ‘relational turn’ and its posthumanist forebears encourage attention to other-than-humans in material-semiotic ways, less attention is placed on what, how or why these others are relationally enacted. Why do deLaet and Mol love the Bushpump? Latour his Aramis? Tsing her Matsutakes or Myers’ molecules? In attending to ‘matters of care’, the subject-object split still haunts the way we carve out relations in our world and work.
We propose the notion of ‘animacy hierarchy’ (AH) from linguistics, to interrogate how humans, human ‘others’, and ‘other-than-humans’ enact worlds, choose metaphors, forge relations and care for beings. The AH is a tool for comparing how grammars encode nouns, cross-linguistically ranking humans < animals < plants < inanimates etc. the more interactive, sentient, autonomous they are - beings with whom we share ‘empathy’ (Langacker 1991), whether through benevolence or a ‘deadly hierarchy of life’ (TallBear 2019) . While certain biosocial features (e.g. sex/species) determine animates (e.g. Haraway’s dogs) to rank high, animacy is debated. AH encompasses various aspects - agency, personhood, subjectivity, liveliness - best theorized as a graded ‘relation’ between interaction, sociocultural values and materiality without universal semantics. We invite papers reflecting on how animacy is assigned, ordered or limited in various and partial manifestations or proposals for rearranging harmful hierarchies towards living well. From chatbots, to llamas or forensic evidence, what aspects of animacy manifest? What social responsibilities encourage animacies? Can animacy construct power relations differently from classic binaries? Can the AH be decolonized? Can post-colonial and feminist bodies and kin be animated?
