The work of Sophie Houdart and Olivier Thiery “Humains, non-humains”, which aims at “repopulating social sciences” (2), gives voice to many authors and thinkers who have worked on technical and unexceptional objects. Technical and man-made objects are also non-humans. We shall be discussing these issues while wondering about a widened democracy, Mixe rituals and the negotiations of the COP21 that aim at including the future generations. Therefore questioning the political representation of non-humans goes back to questioning the political representation of humans who were and humans to come. So the problem remains the same as for animals or rivers: these are voiceless groups.
Or rather, they were or will be human beings, but are dead or not living yet. We shall now turn to another kind of entities we will be writing about in this blog, and that are a little bit trickier to deal with: future generations and ancestors. This is what Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers call “cosmopolitics” and that we will be discussing here. Some of these gods, divinities or “natural” elements take sometimes part in the life of the polis through deliberation, invocation, protection or punishment. However there is not always a spirit linked to the non-human entity that is invoked or worshiped, and the river in itself can be spoken to and with. Some of these elements are associated with divine entities ranging from angels to gods and spirits: Poseidon is the god of the Ocean, as well as there are spirits of the mountains, the rivers, the forests. Because they are not so far from human beings, not for the sake of their animal condition.įurther from human beings, we can find the “natural” world itself: mountains, forests, the vegetal reign, the Ocean, the climate, the wind, the rivers, the Sun and the Moon, the planets, the sky. And interestingly enough, this “half-way situation” also applies to great apes that, because they are physically, socially and genetically the closest animals to human beings, are considered being given political rights. At most, they are still perceived as being in between, half way between Nature – archaism, chaos, heresy, superstition, animality – and Culture – modernism, order, monotheism or rationalism, humanity.
Obviously, we do know these people are human beings, but unless they have changed their way of living to adopt the western “civilized” one, and in case they still worship spirits of the forest or multiple gods, the doubt softly persists. When the conquistadors first arrived in Latin America, they were truly wondering whether the savages had a soul or not, meaning whether they were human beings or not. In our cosmology, named “naturalism” by Descola, which opposed strictly Nature and Culture (capital letters), indigenous and said-to-be “archaic” societies are also considered as “non-human”. This shows a slight and slow convergence to the widening of the human sphere of democracy to he non-human world. Tilikum, Katina and Kasatka are orcas working at Seaworld. In 2011, a lawsuit was filed at a federal court, declaring that Tilikum, Katina and Kasatka were “being held as slaves in violation of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution” (1). Indeed, we observe a rise in representation of non-human entities. Animals are not human, and have not had any right to speak until very recently. Let us start with what seems the most obvious: animals. Non-human entities are basically everything that is not human Hence the need to try to define, or at least make clearer, what non-human entities are, and what or who we are actually talking about here. So, this concept, idea or group of non-humans seems to be everything but obvious. However, if the online literature on that matter is wide and broad and probably very instructive, this is not what we aim at dealing with on this blog. When you google the phrase “non-human entities”, the first three pages of results send us to websites dedicated to ghosts, phantoms, witches, extra-terrestrials and other paranormal beings and their activities. “Non-human entities”: what or whom are we talking about? – An introduction
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