To break with this world in destruction, we must also break with our ways of being, existing, and understanding nature and the human position within it. This is the proposal put forward by Andrea Staid in Being Nature.
With an agile, accessible prose grounded in rigorous thinking, this book shows that ideas such as “ecosystemic plurality” and “multispecies relations,” far from being primitivist illusions or science-fiction fables, are the foundations for building a social ecology capable of breaking with the nature/culture binary.
That division is what has allowed the environment to be turned into an externality, non-human animals into objects, and other humans into savages/animals. On this basis, an entire order of capitalist, colonial, and extractive domination has been constructed—an order that is the fundamental cause of the ongoing global ecocide.
Using anthropology and the rich experience of Indigenous peoples as a battering ram, Andrea Staid reminds us that not only is it possible to build other models of relationship with our surroundings and with other ecosystemic subjects, but that our collective survival undoubtedly depends on it.
For an inhabitant of the Amazon rainforest and for an Australian Aboriginal person, the distinction between what we consider natural and what we consider cultural makes no sense, because in their world everything is at once natural and cultural; human beings are nature, just like plants and animals—we are embedded in a web of interacting subjects.
For more information: https://viruseditorial.net/novedad-ser-naturaleza-andrea-staid/