As both the problem and solution to so many questions that dog thinking rigorously beyond the human, the issue of anthropomorphism - the attribution of human qualities to other-than-humans - will continue to resonate in the environmental humanities. In this talk, Strange thinks about anthropomorphism not as an epistemological impediment but as a foundation of human cooperative sociality.
Using examples from human-macaque interactions in Singapore, he explores how anthropomorphism depends on cooperative intuitions that both conceal and reveal wider possibilities for relating. Anthropomorphism, he contends, both reveals the deep ways that humans anticipate a relational world and thus recognize the potential for relating beyond the species, but also shows why humans so often fail to recognize the relations on which our existence depends.
Bio
Stuart Earle Strange is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oslo. He is the author of Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (University of Toronto Press, 2021), and has published in journals including Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Ethnos, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Environmental Humanities.