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Dialect Anthropol (2014) 38:387396 DOI 10.1007/s10624-014-9362-1
Unsettling anthropocentrism
Eileen Crist Helen Kopnina
Published online: 21 November 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract This paper provides a brief critique of anthropocentrism and introduces the papers of the special theme issue on non-anthropocentric conceptions of nature.
Keywords Anthropocentrism Human supremacy Worldview
In an article titled Robochop, The Economist reported a practical problem and its technological solution. The problem was that swarms of jellysh clogged up the pipes of a Swedish nuclear power plant on the Baltic Sea coast, forcing the plants temporary shutdown. The proposed solution involved utilizing an invention of a eet of killer robots that turn jellysh into mush. The devices known as JEROS (Jellysh Elimination Robotic Swarms) are designed to follow a lead robot and work in formation: They can apparently chop up to 900 km of jellysh an hour.1
The report raises an irrepressible question: Is there not something wrongeven deeply disturbingabout this picture?
Questioning anthropocentrism is far more than an academic exercise of debating the dominant cultural motif of placing humans at the center of material and ethical concerns. It is a fertile way of shifting the focus of attention away from the problem symptoms of our time (be these symptoms as far-reaching as rapid climate change
E. Crist (&)
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
H. KopninaThe Hague University of Applied Science, Johanna Westerdijkplein 75, 2521 EN The Hague, The Netherlandse-mail: [email protected]
1 The Economist, Robochop: An automated jellysh exterminator takes to sea. October 19, 2013.
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or as inconvenient as just jellysh jamming the machine) to the investigation of root causes. And certainly the dominant beliefs, values, and attitudes guiding human action constitute a signicant driver of the pressing problems of our day.
What does it mean to position anthropos in the center? The question might initially be broached in a non-anthropocentric way, by attending to who and what, as a consequence of human-centeredness, becomes displaced to the periphery. The displacements over the long course of history have been innumerable but might be grouped into two comprehensive categories: the ideational and material dislocations of nonhumans, subhumans,2 and wild nature into the fringes of earthly landscapes and human mindscapes alike....