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A review by seewah
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan
5.0
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet is a wondrous book. The anthology takes a multidisciplinary approach by weaving the social sciences and natural sciences together to postulate on how we can better live in a world that is increasingly damaged by the Anthropocene.
Mainly, we see a string of essays by anthropologists and biologists, though they are not limited by their field of study—indeed, the contributors (and editors themselves) are luminaries in the work that they do. Most, if not all, advocate for an untethered approach for re-visioning our planet, be it from using the Australian aboriginal’s worldview to interpret the ecology, to using the world of microorganisms to speculate about our very understanding of selfhood.
The editors, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, frame the book by theorising on two overarching concepts that reveal themselves through the essays: Ghosts and Monsters. In a novel manner, the book has no beginning and end. Instead, Ghosts and Monsters take the cover page of each side of the book and start from their respective sides before meeting in the middle. It is a fitting metaphor for the open-endedness of existence, and the multitudinous paths that life on earth can flow.
Ghosts takes ruined landscapes as its starting point and dissects the manner in which the spectres of these spaces (mostly caused by humans) continue to haunt in manners that we cannot see. On the flipside, and perhaps with a bit more hope, the various contributors also highlight how non-human beings (though not to be confused with a total absence of human influences) reinterpret, reconfigure and re-appropriate these ruinations to conjure up new meanings and ways of living. Monsters, on the other hand, reveals the symbiotic relationships and systems that are taking place all around us, most of which are invisible to the naked eye. In these essays is a common plea to actively recognise and learn from these networks.
Both serve up thick descriptions of their subject matters. It forces us to be intimate with the stories told, and to recognise the agencies of the various bacteria, salmon, times, worlds, trees and spirits that are brought to life through language. (To be clear, things are already animated. ‘Brought to life’ here refers to our homo sapien perspective of understanding the world around us.) When faced with an ecological crisis on a planetary scale, perhaps this kind of perspective is just what we need for strategizing our next few crucial moves.
I enjoyed Ghosts immensely. There is a certain lyrical quality when these ‘dead’ landscapes come to life again – first, in the actual temporal-spatiality the occurrences take place in, and second, from the rich, speculative writings of the various contributors. Almost every chapter left me ruminating on the possibilities for renewal despite the devastated state of our contemporary world. There is an air of tentative hope. As for Monsters, I found value in how the idea of symbiosis took the stage. The essays remind us that we cohabitat the earth with numerous other creatures, and elucidated the intricate and presently unknowable webbings that bind us all together. The only quip that I have is that, after a while, the writings end up being mostly factual accounts, and the way that the concept of symbiosis was put across became repetitive.
Funnily enough, my favourite pieces of writing in Arts of Living are the introductory chapters penned by the editors. With the introduction and elaboration of ‘ghosts’ and ‘monsters’, they construct a good schematic for analysis and provide relevant thinking tools for dissecting the messy epoch we find ourselves in. It would be useful and interesting to be able to apply the thinking here onto other regions of the world; there is a hint of that in this book, like with Nils Bubandt’s piece on the East Java mud volcano, and I am excited to see how such narratives can proliferate even more, especially by scholars and storytellers from those regions. In a sense, finding other kinds of worldings is also about looking at the millions of human cultures and cosmologies across space and time. It has confluences with the idea of decolonising the Anthropocene, but that’s a story for another day.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet is a symbiotic creation in itself, with times and things collapsing into one another. When contextualised against the anxieties of our rapidly declining planet, it is also, ultimately, a rallying cry pierced with urgency.
Mainly, we see a string of essays by anthropologists and biologists, though they are not limited by their field of study—indeed, the contributors (and editors themselves) are luminaries in the work that they do. Most, if not all, advocate for an untethered approach for re-visioning our planet, be it from using the Australian aboriginal’s worldview to interpret the ecology, to using the world of microorganisms to speculate about our very understanding of selfhood.
The editors, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, frame the book by theorising on two overarching concepts that reveal themselves through the essays: Ghosts and Monsters. In a novel manner, the book has no beginning and end. Instead, Ghosts and Monsters take the cover page of each side of the book and start from their respective sides before meeting in the middle. It is a fitting metaphor for the open-endedness of existence, and the multitudinous paths that life on earth can flow.
Ghosts takes ruined landscapes as its starting point and dissects the manner in which the spectres of these spaces (mostly caused by humans) continue to haunt in manners that we cannot see. On the flipside, and perhaps with a bit more hope, the various contributors also highlight how non-human beings (though not to be confused with a total absence of human influences) reinterpret, reconfigure and re-appropriate these ruinations to conjure up new meanings and ways of living. Monsters, on the other hand, reveals the symbiotic relationships and systems that are taking place all around us, most of which are invisible to the naked eye. In these essays is a common plea to actively recognise and learn from these networks.
Both serve up thick descriptions of their subject matters. It forces us to be intimate with the stories told, and to recognise the agencies of the various bacteria, salmon, times, worlds, trees and spirits that are brought to life through language. (To be clear, things are already animated. ‘Brought to life’ here refers to our homo sapien perspective of understanding the world around us.) When faced with an ecological crisis on a planetary scale, perhaps this kind of perspective is just what we need for strategizing our next few crucial moves.
I enjoyed Ghosts immensely. There is a certain lyrical quality when these ‘dead’ landscapes come to life again – first, in the actual temporal-spatiality the occurrences take place in, and second, from the rich, speculative writings of the various contributors. Almost every chapter left me ruminating on the possibilities for renewal despite the devastated state of our contemporary world. There is an air of tentative hope. As for Monsters, I found value in how the idea of symbiosis took the stage. The essays remind us that we cohabitat the earth with numerous other creatures, and elucidated the intricate and presently unknowable webbings that bind us all together. The only quip that I have is that, after a while, the writings end up being mostly factual accounts, and the way that the concept of symbiosis was put across became repetitive.
Funnily enough, my favourite pieces of writing in Arts of Living are the introductory chapters penned by the editors. With the introduction and elaboration of ‘ghosts’ and ‘monsters’, they construct a good schematic for analysis and provide relevant thinking tools for dissecting the messy epoch we find ourselves in. It would be useful and interesting to be able to apply the thinking here onto other regions of the world; there is a hint of that in this book, like with Nils Bubandt’s piece on the East Java mud volcano, and I am excited to see how such narratives can proliferate even more, especially by scholars and storytellers from those regions. In a sense, finding other kinds of worldings is also about looking at the millions of human cultures and cosmologies across space and time. It has confluences with the idea of decolonising the Anthropocene, but that’s a story for another day.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet is a symbiotic creation in itself, with times and things collapsing into one another. When contextualised against the anxieties of our rapidly declining planet, it is also, ultimately, a rallying cry pierced with urgency.