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    Nature on the move III: (re)countenancing an animate nature

    Sullivan, Sian (2013) Nature on the move III: (re)countenancing an animate nature. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 6 (1-2), pp. 50-71. ISSN 1715-6718.

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    Abstract

    Current market-based approaches to environmental governance for conservation and sustainability tend to disaggregate non-human natures into discrete units to which monetary value can attach, and release these new units into markets of circulating commodities through which they may accrue more ‘value’. As Bram Büscher and James Igoe describe and theorise in ‘Nature on the Move’ I and II, new techno-configurations of nature permit its agitated circulation in emerging environmental markets, and the gathering of more monetised value through proliferating product exchanges. The new ‘value entities’ with which these circulations are associated require abstractions of nature’s immanent vitality so as to manufacture and make commensurable tradable products deemed representative of nature health and harm. Through these de- and re-territorialisations of nature, ‘value’ may be created for some but arguably pathology is enhanced for all. These abstractions proliferate a nature that is distant and transcendent, at the same time as tuning out the communiqués of other(ed) sustainability practices and socionature possibilities. My contribution in this third panel of our ‘Nature on the Move’ triptych, then, is an experiment in bringing into the frame, conceptually at least, connective and ecological possibilities associated with animist ‘amodern’ ontologies. I develop ethnographic and theoretical explorations of what might be implicated ecologically and ethically by a milieu of immanent embodied ecologies, enfolded in an epistemological and ontological move of ‘becoming-animist’. ‘Becoming-animist’ is framed here as a normative subjectivity that refracts the current disconnective and virtualising impasse in both the theory and practice of socio-ecological relationships, and as such is worthy of intellectual, political and ethical engagement.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): nature, culturenature, animism, commodification, biocultural ethics, immanence, transcendence, value
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Depositing User: Dr Sian Sullivan
    Date Deposited: 12 Feb 2013 17:43
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:02
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/6092

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