2014 Ecological epistemologies: delineating a concept

1 This paper is avalible in portuguese in: Steil, Carlos Alberto, & Carvalho, Isabel Cristina de Moura. (2014). Epistemologias ecológicas: delimitando um conceito. Mana,20(1), 163-183. Recuperado em 18 de julho de 2015, de http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-93132014000100006&lng=pt&tlng=pt. 10.1590/S0104-93132014000100006

Ecological epistemologies: delineating a concept Isabel Cristina de Moura Carvalho1

For over one decade now, we have been trying to understand the environmental question from the point of view of the human sciences, that is, as a phenomenon that has prompted unique social compromises and subjective dispositions in our society. Since the early 2000’s, we have been deploying the notion of “ecological subject” to describe a broad set of ecologically-oriented dispositions. This concept demarcates a space for the simultaneously subjective and objective constitution of beliefs, values, and behaviors. It refers to a social field marked by concern with the environment. As it is increasingly recognized as a socially legitimate arena, this field builds up the strength to generate processes of identification, beliefs, as well as ethic, esthetic and moral values, thus instituting its own imaginative horizon. The ecological imagination cuts across social life as a creative force, which redefines the landscape where we inhabit as well as our relations with other organisms and objects that dwell in that same world. At the same time, it changes common practices of environmental conservation, sometimes recently learned, into predispositions and attitudes that impose themselves on individuals and social groups as a habitus. This imaginative horizon is not exhausted however by the continual creation and reproduction of ways of being and living. It also shapes the ways in which we think and get to know the world. How we inhabit the planet is not separate from how we get to know it. The inextricable connection between the two incites us to read anew a group of contemporary authors from the analytical standpoint of what we call ecological epistemologies. Our claim is that this imaginative ecological horizon has been bolstering epistemological shifts within western thought. These shifts are calling into question a series of apparently insurmountable divides long present in the scientific field, such as those separating human experience from the world, and the world as objective existence from our knowledge of it. Ecological epistemologies: beyond representation The term ecological epistemologies as we propose it circumscribes a sub-field of contemporary theoretical-philosophical debates comprising authors from various disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds. What they have in common is an effort to overcome modern dualisms, such as nature and culture, subject and society, body and 11

Professora da PUCRS

2 mind, artifact and nature, subject and object.2 These authors put forth conceptual tools that bring to the fore the symmetries in relations established between humans and nonhumans in the environment. The concept of ecological epistemologies is therefore necessarily plural, inasmuch as it indicates less a single theoretical unit than an area of convergence between new horizons of understanding. These horizons are different from those sustaining the abovementioned dualisms, as well as assumptions about a human knowing subject standing outside of the world, of nature, who is autonomous in relation to knowable objects. Ecological epistemologies therefore stand in contrast to the representational perspective. They are based on a shared premise that the meanings, concepts, and abstractions that stem from knowledge do not make up a world apart from matter and things. To know is a skill acquired in our relation with the other organisms and beings that inhabit the same world as we do, rather than a human prerogative operating rationally in the restricted space of the mind. In this sense, it becomes impossible to dissociate mind and body, culture and nature, knowledge and experience. From the ecological point of view, in order to know it is necessary to immerse oneself in matter and in the world, by means of continual engagement with the environment. Against the imprisonment of knowledge within the human mind, ecological epistemologies bring to the fore the world’s materiality and autonomy, while simultaneously rethinking the status of reality. It was the assertion of this realist stance that led Bruno Latour to answer somewhat wittily to a question raised at a colloquium on the statute of reality held in Rio de Janeiro. His reply is registered in the title of one of the chapters of Pandora’s Hope (2001): “Do you believe in reality?”. For Latour, therefore, reality is not a question: it exists! Reality is taken here as the world’s material existence, beyond any form of human apprehension. It is our condition for existing, thinking, creating, and living. The surprise stems from the de-materialization enacted by a kind of semiotic reason that took meaning alone to be the subject of the human sciences, as if it could hover above the real as a world apart, inhabited exclusively by humans.

Ecological epistemologies in the horizon of new materialisms In our search for a philosophical horizon where to situate ecological epistemologies, we found in the so-called “new materialisms” a field of convergence allowing us to ascertain a series of approximations between the assumptions and concepts that are being formulated by this new wave in contemporary thought, and the perspectives on knowledge that we have been calling ecological epistemologies. A first convergence lies in their respective efforts to include in knowledge production the material foundations of life that have been largely left aside by constructivist idealism. Among these, we underscore Haraway’s notion of co-production between humans and non-humans (2003); Latour’s proposal of a socio-technical network connecting humans and non-humans in scientific production (2004); Stengers’ concept of ecology of scientific practice (2002); Leff’s notion of environmental rationality (2006); and Gibson’s concept of affordance (1979). These references have been key to our elaboration of the concept of ecological epistemologies. 2

3 Against the grain of divides (between matter and thought, body and reason) that are pillars of hegemonic modern science, the new materialisms establish matter and the body as operators of knowledge. This critique leads to the reformulation of historical materialism, underlining blind spots that, even though present in the analyses, were not taken into account due to the immaterial character that thinking assumed in western modernity. In order to build bridges between these two fields of debates – new materialisms and ecological epistemologies – it is worth referring to some of the considerations put forth in a blog written by a group of young philosophers with whom we have been engaging. The radical program of “social constructivism” could not help being faced with a “reminder” that constantly brought to surface notions of objectivity, body, and matter. In particular, there is a growing trend towards addressing the immanentist project of modernity by rethinking materialism – where the problem of what counts as “matter” becomes itself the object of philosophical effort (Materialisms website 2012). A second convergence, also part of our dialogue with the new materialists, refers to the symmetry between things and knowledge, humans and non-humans, historical and natural processes. In this point of inflection, we find the influence of thinkers such as the Mexican visual artist and philosopher Manuel De Landa, who has been working in the U.S. for four decades now, and the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar, who taught for many years in Colombia and also in the U.S.. Both emphasized symmetry as the key dimension in relations between humans and things, through concepts such as symmetric ontology (De Landa 2003) and symmetric alternative (Escobar 2007). As we worked on the notion of ecological epistemologies as a field of debates, we sought to incorporate these philosophical and anthropological notions as important contributions to the existential and epistemological repositioning of human vis-à-vis the other organisms that inhabit our world by sharing a common environment. The claim for a symmetrical ontology, formulated under the umbrella of the new materialisms, is predicated on an intensive effort to overcome both philosophical constructivism (which takes knowledge as a mental construction that operates according to its own designs, independently from its material foundation) and idealism (for whom knowledge is a representation of the real, processed through logical operations of abstraction and distancing from its empirical object). In contrast with these dominant ways of understanding the cognitive process, symmetrical ontology proposes a movement towards things, towards the real, the body, the organisms. 3 By the same stroke, the legitimacy of reducing cognitive processes to humans is called into question. The perspective of symmetric ontology requires, as De Landa affirms, that we consider as constitutive of the real the various temporalities of things, as well as the multiplicity of materials and elements that, even thought fundamental to their existence, elude the observer’s gaze: The real question is whether it is legitimate to have an ‘anthropocentric ontology’, that The ontological turn has prompted an object-centered philosophy – also called object-oriented ontology (Morelle 2012). In the social studies of science, Latour’s actor-network theory shares a similar orientation. 3

4 is, to draw the line between the real and the non-real by what we humans can directly observe. What makes our scale of observation, in space or time, so privileged? Why should we believe in the Mississippi river (as Andrew Pickering does) but not in oxygen or carbon (as he does not)? Why should we study things in ‘real time’ (that is, at our temporal scale) instead of at longer periods (to capture the effect of ‘long durations’)? (De Landa 2003: 8).

Symmetric ontology therefore opposes anthropocentric ontology, proposing yet another step in the direction of overcoming ethnocentrism. It is not just about recognizing cultural diversity and taking into account the point of view of a human “other”, but taking into account the point of view of non-human things and organisms that inhabit the world. What is at stake is the line demarcating nature from culture, which supposedly draws apart two opposed and incommensurable ontologies. By effacing that line, the new materialists recognize that non-humans are also open to the world, being therefore capable of penetrating the worlds of other beings. They eschew, in sum, Heidegger’s formulation that “the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, and man is worldforming” (1995:263), to affirm that the stone does have a world. If we concede that the stone does have a world, it becomes legitimate to put oneself “from the stone’s point of view”. Or yet, to ask what place humans occupy in the world of other non-human beings and organisms that share their environment.

Ecological epistemologies within the horizon of anthropology

The proposal of a symmetric ontology resonates in the anthropological field as the foundation for a radical critique of multiculturalism. If things and non-human organisms “have worlds” of their own, and produce a field of action along with other beings around them, it becomes necessary to broaden the horizon of relativism to include the point of view of non-humans. In other words, relativism extends beyond cultures, so as to include, in the condition of subjects of knowledge, those that have been objectified by the natureculture ontological dualism, and whose agency has been denied by epistemology. As Viveiros de Castro proposed, to this objectivist epistemology prevalent in Western modernity we may oppose Amerindian shamanistic thinking as an alternative form of knowledge. 4 In Western epistemology, to know is fundamentally a process of objectification whereby the subject constitutes or recognizes oneself in the objects that he or she produces. To this Viveiros de Castro opposes Amerindian shamanism, where “to know is to personify, to take up the point of view of that which must be known – or better, ‘whom’, because shamanistic knowledge aims at a ‘something’ that is a According to Viveiros de Castro, Amerindian shamanism’s inversion of the nature-culture polarity becomes easier to understand when the modern Western concept of culture is transposed to indigenous naturalism. In his words, “The translation of ‘culture’ into the world of extra-human subjectivities has as its corollary the redefinition of several ‘natural’ objects or events as indexes based on which social agency may be abducted” (Viveiros de Castro 2002:361). 4

5 ‘somebody’, an Other subject or agent” (Viveiros de Castro 2002:358). Thus, if in modern epistemology the Other takes the form of an object, in shamanism the Other takes the form of a person. Ecological epistemologies find in Amerindian shamanism a point of convergence for relativizing modern sciences’ procedures and protocols, which have been naturalized as pertaining exclusively to humans and universalized for all cultures.5 At the same time, both point to an epistemological ideal that, far from reducing the environment to a reified object lacking life or intentionality, goes in the opposite direction towards its subjectivation. The critique of modern science’s epistemological estrangement becomes even more radical in Tim Ingold’s work. He proposes a new paradigm that dislodges the researcher from his position of external observer of a world made up of fixed objects, and situates him in a convergence of material lines and flows that cut across and constitute him as generative unit of what we call world or environment. From this perspective, participation is no longer the opposite of observation: it becomes a condition for knowledge, just as light is a condition for seeing and touch is a condition for feeling through the skin (Ingold 2011:129). The world that is given to our observation is a world in motion. The observer does not look from a body that stands still as a bounded whole, apart from the flows of light, sound and texture present in the environment. It is by being traversed by these flows that the observer is able to get to know the world. As the abovementioned definition makes clear, this paradigm is about exploring another level of the “ecological invention” (Carvalho 2002). If the emphasis was previously laid on the ecological subject, now what draws our attention is the constitution of an epistemological topos, that is, a site where modes of knowledge founded upon the contemporary critique of normal science’s universalism have actively sought new avenues for valid knowledge, within a horizon of plural rationalities. This research direction emerges amidst a series of different theories currently being proposed by the various authors to which we have referred. They find a point of convergence in the search for ecological ways of understanding relations in the world.

Why epistemologies in the plural, and why ecological? Firstly, we must justify our usage of the plural. We refer to epistemologies in the plural because it is our assumption that it is possible to imagine fields of knowledge and ways of knowing that encompass a heterogeneity of formulations, theoretical paths, and communities of dialogue. This heterogeneity runs against the idea of one school of thought holding a corpus of truths in a particular field of knowledge, or even within an interdisciplinary field. It also disavows the view of a single methodology, shared by all The region of the theoretical-philosophical debate that we seek to circumscribe through the notion of ecological epistemologies has also been the object of important contributions from the social studies of science (Jasanoff 2004; Law & Mol 2002), studies dedicated to human/non-human relations (Sá 2013; Segata 2012), and ethnographies of art and aesthetics (Van Velthen 2003; Lagrou 2007). 5

6 these authors, defining a common modus operandi for the processes through which we have access to reality. Finally, even if some of these authors do sustain a continued dialogue among themselves – as is the case for instance with Latour, Stengers, and Haraway6 – in general they do not form a scientific community where ideas are being constantly exchanged regarding the contributions that each has to offer to the formation of the epistemological field. In other words, except for the abovementioned group of authors, the others belong to specific knowledge communities, and do not necessarily make up a purposefully articulated theoretical group or movement. We should thus remark that the efforts to identify a point of convergence between these authors stem less from their intentions than from our own project of putting together, as in a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces making up this whole that we call ecological epistemologies. When we refer to ecological epistemologies we are therefore bringing together epistemic reflections and theories that cannot be reduced to, or unified in, a deliberately organized collective movement. Rather, the notion indicates a certain convergence in terms of the ecological references these authors deploy to structure their respective ways of knowing. This leads to our second question: why ecological? As is widely known, the critique of modern science’s paradigm, founded upon the researcher’s externality vis-àvis the object he investigates, is not exclusive to ecological thinking. The latter joins in a larger critical wave coming from yet other areas of social life, which have been drawing attention to the limitations of sciences’ positivistic procedures for knowledge validation and truth production. Types of knowledge acquired through experience and engagement with the world, which were until recently classified as belonging to the realm of magic or subjective intuition, have been incorporated into many sciences as alternative but equally legitimate ways of apprehending reality. On the other hand, instances of truth certification external to the scientific field have multiplied in many societies, calling into question its monopoly over knowledge production during the last few centuries of Western history. The dissemination of an ecological ethics has fostered the emergence of a field of environmental rights,7 and shaped the consciousness of contemporary subjects. This has become an important asset for various social agents opposing science’s positivistic outlook, which bars from the epistemological scene those knowledges, beliefs, technologies and rituals that are lived as ways of immersing in nature and transcending

In 2006, for instance, Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers met in a panel called “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day”, held at Stanford University’s humanities center. The resumption of Whitehead by Stengers in “L’effect Whitehead”(1994), and later on in “Penser avec Whitehead” (Stengers 2002), triggered a critique of the humanistic tradition in science. What she calls “ecology of practice” porposes that the awareness of non-verbal communication in relations with non-humans should be taken into account in science and technology. Latour joined the debate with “What is Given in Experience? A Review of Isabelle Stengers”, and also the essay “Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts” (Latour 2002). The dialogue between Stengers, Haraway and Latour has been made public in the latter’s website, which showcases the collaboration of this group of authors in common networks and projects. 7 This issue is discussed in further depth in Steil and Toniol (2013). 6

7 the objectivity of the scientific method.8 Even though this assault on the epistemic foundations of Cartesian normal science is not exclusive to the environmental field, we claim that these movements have bred assumptions that resonate with an ecological sensitivity – or, as Enrique Leff would say, with an environmental rationality (Leff 2006). These assumptions may be synthesized in terms of two currents of epistemological understandings of the environmental crisis: i) one which associates the epistemological foundations of modern science with the causes of the environmental crisis; and ii) one which affirms ontological symmetry and recognizes the world’s agency, reality and materiality, regardless of human actions or representations. In what follows, we will consider these two assumptions, albeit not exhaustively.

Modern science’s epistemological foundations and the environmental crisis: critiques of the great divide

The separation between nature and culture as two opposed ontological domains defines what Philippe Descola called “the great divide”. The “dualistic edifice” deemed by Descola (2005) to be a fundamental product of modern thought would be now crumbling. This epistemic edifice, that we have inhabited as our own home for over three centuries now, would be damaged in its very foundations, as the ontological and structural separation between nature and culture tends loses its heuristic value and explanatory power for making sense of our place and fate in this planet. This is therefore both an epistemological crisis and the throes of a cosmology that can no longer find a secure foundation for sustaining the basic separation between nature and culture. Descola explicitly evokes the environmental crisis as harbinger of the end of this cosmology: The most evident sign (of this cosmological shift), and the one that mobilizes most forcefully the attention of both governments and citizens, is no doubt the growing concerns about the effects of human action on the environment. The very choice of the term environment over nature signals a displacement in perspective. In its most common rendition, nature was anthropocentric in an almost underground manner, inasmuch as it covered, by definition, an ontological domain defined by the absence of humanity – with no chance or artifice – while the environment’s anthropocentrism is clearly stated: it is Aristotle’s sublunar world, inhabited by Man (Descola 2005:97, free translation). This ontological divide has isolated humans from their environment, leading us to Dialogues between scientific and non-scientific knowledges, and critiques of truth’s monopoly over our understandings of reality, emerge from within and without the scientific field. In the latter, notable examples are phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 1971), modern hermeneutics (Gadamer 2012), Foucauldian studies, psychoanalysis’ abdication of science, feminist studies in the social sciences, and the ecological paradigm in anthropology (Tim Ingold 2000, 2010, 2011). In the interface between scientific and the political fields, it is worth remarking the New Alliance movement (Stengers 2002), which evokes knowledges that have been excluded from science’s truth regime. 8

8 believe that we inhabit culture as a domain independent from, and opposed to, nature. The environmental crisis has accelerated a perception of how the scientific ideology that prevailed during all these years operated as a cosmology shaping both our consciousness and the political organization of institutions undergirding modern society. At the same time, we realize that we have never been separate from the environment, neither do we have a different fate from that of the other organisms and objects that inhabit this planet. The ideological work of producing fetishes situated above the order of nature seems to have lost its effectiveness, thus making room for connections that never ceased to exist between humans and non-humans. Thus, the same organisms that previously appeared as pure reveal themselves to us today as hybrids. It was this context of knowledge production that led Bruno Latour to approach the problem of science’s crisis since its purges – rightfully asserting that we have never been modern (Latour 1994). The term ‘ecology’ can be found in the fields of anthropology and psychology as early as in the work of Gregory Bateson during the sixties and seventies. In particular, Bateson’s notion of ecological mind (Bateson 2000) sought to foreground the continuities not only between nature and culture, but also between mind and environment. His proposal breaks with the currents of behaviorism, functionalism and culturalism that were then hegemonic in England and the United States. His critique points at the limits of the scientific method shared by these theoretical currents, which had established as a necessary parameter for knowledge validation the externality of the observer in relation to his object, and of the mind in relation to the environment. The ecological attribute underscored by Bateson frees the mind from its skull prison, where it supposedly operated as a system locked within itself, and throws it into the environment, which becomes the effective site of knowledge. The mind thus changes from a representationproducing machine to a relational mediator with the world. Otávio Velho underscored this line of continuity between Bateson and ecological thinking in the following passage, taken from a discussion where he draws connections between Bateson and Ingold: Ecology – and with it, holism – has been in fact a key reference since Bateson. It is part of a discussion about another polarity, between subject and object. Assisted by MerleauPonty’s rendition of phenomenology (and notions of being and inhabiting the world), ecology seems indeed to lead to a displacement of the Cartesian subject, and with him, of the series of oppositions that includes the one between nature and culture. Ingold even speaks of a new “ecological paradigm” (Velho 2001:135).

Differences aside, it is possible to identify, as Velho did with Bateson and Ingold, some points of convergence and continuity between the authors referenced here, which allows us to situate them in the heterogeneous field of ecological epistemologies. In this respect, it can be said that they sustain a common critique of objectivism and of the externality of the researcher in relation to that which he observes during the process of investigation. Concurrently, they propose another path for science, characterized by the researcher’s immersion in the environment, which is lived as the dwelling of knowledge. In other words, it is not about adopting epistemologies free from the multiple contaminations of life, or research methodologies that secure our distance from a body

9 traversed by emotions and desires, or from a natural world that envelops and constitutes us. This epistemological quest counters science’s position as sole spokesperson for a subject of Reason, disembodied and out of this world. In the stead of the nature-culture divide critique, it calls into question other dualisms stemming from the same epistemic distribution, such as subject versus object, mind versus body, individual versus society, interiority versus exteriority. We resume ahead the question of this epistemic frontier’s origins, duration and effects on contemporary views. In sum, for these authors, science is no longer endorsed as the sole stronghold for truth, but appears as one regime of social production amongst others. It therefore loses its aura of being a privileged and untouchable forum, standing above all particularities and cultures as the only instance authorized to speak on behalf of a universal reason that is situated nowhere. As it descends from this holy pedestal, science becomes “human” and ecological, and joins in the transient and unstable world of things. It thus comes to share with other regimes of truth production the task and mission of validating knowledge. Once this Pandora box is open, not only other forms of knowledge are allowed to claim the legitimacy of their narratives and discourses about reality, but science itself becomes permeable to the heterodoxy of knowledges that has emerged from society during the last decades along with the ecological movement. These heterodoxies come both from the depths of the West itself – which has repressed other forms of knowledge in tandem with its effort to build the edifice of science as the exclusive home for thought – and from a mythical Orient, imagined as a mirror of the Occident. The latter has appeared as an answer to the exhaustion of reason, as well as to the disillusionment prompted by the unfulfilled promises of a modernity that is never fully accomplished. It was this kind of uncertainty, engendered by a science that reveals itself today as a god ex-machina, that exiled from the territory of truth other ways of knowing and acting upon the world, such as the arts, religion, and popular knowledges.

Affirming ontological symmetry and recognizing the world’s agency, reality, and materiality The epistemological stance for which we have been claiming the common terrain of ecological epistemologies leads to yet other shifts. Of these, we underscore those in the fields of ontology and cosmology. In ontological terms, as alternative knowledge forms emerge across multiple spheres of life as socially certified local epistemologies (Samain 2001), our experience of the world and our views on the nature of what is to be known also change. Similarly, the recognition of these epistemologies situates us in a universe that is different from the one implicated in the hegemonic scientific narrative. We could perhaps alternatively imagine that we inhabit concomitant universes. But we rather insist on the singularity of one universe, dynamic and constantly changing, which is experienced and apprehended in multiple ways by the organisms and beings that both inhabit and are inhabited by it. It is this condition – which situates us in the universe, within a vast field of classificatory possibilities in relation to other organisms, objects and beings – that allows

10 us to speak of modern cosmologies as an extension of scientific epistemologies into the social and political fields. In other words, we are pointing at the ideological and cultural function that scientific thought has performed in Western society during the last four centuries. In this sense, our critique is directed to an ideological, and often burlesque, perspective on science, rather than to the scientific field understood as a set of methodological and theoretical procedures for producing knowledge and technology. By recognizing that science produces cosmologies, we situate it in the field of imagination, side-by-side the organization and classification systems engendered by all other beings inhabiting the cosmos. From this perspective, science stands alongside culture as an invention we developed in order to be able to talk about the other and understand him from our own point of view (Wagner 1981).9 Thus, when the concept of “civilized” that we invented in order to differentiate ourselves from our “other” (classified as barbarian or “non-civilized”) is applied to our own science, we are forced to admit that, just as they do, we also produce cosmologies. While several of these cosmologies have been produced by the totemism of Australian aboriginals or the animism of Amerindians, as science is relativized the moderns’ rationalist cosmology appears as symmetrical and complementary to all other forms of knowledge present in the universe. A more radical step, such as that proposed by Tim Ingold, advocates that these forms of knowledge are not exclusive to humans, but can be extended to all organisms and materials that continuously flow into, interact with, and cut across each other to create and sustain life in the universe. From this perspective, all organisms share perception and action. We are thus led to envisage the possibility of other sources of meaning before and beyond culture.10 In other words, it is not about appropriating the environment through the mediation of culture in order to incorporate it into our web of human meanings, but about recognizing the singularity of perspectives held by different organisms as they come to inhabit the world. Against Heidegger’s phenomenology, which supposes an ontological difference between non-humans and humans, Ingold proposes absolute symmetry between them. In this sense, he deconstructs the premise that non-humans inhabit closed worlds while humans are open to the world and therefore able to understand the worlds of other beings. To counteract this view, Ingold resumes Merleau-Ponty and the metaphor of relations between painter and world. For the French philosopher, this relation is one of “continuous birth”, whereby the experience that the painter establishes with things and with the world he inhabits constitutes him as a painter as they are depicted on his canvass (Merleau-Ponty 1968). In Roy Wagner’s words, “an anthropologist calls the situation he is studying ‘culture’ first of all so that he can understand it in familiar terms, so he knows how to deal with and control his experience. […] He invents a ‘culture’ for people, and they invent ‘culture’ for him” (Wagner 1981:11). 10 As we stated previously, “Ingold’s cosmology reveals the world as lines interwoven in the horizon of a weather-world that encompasses the earthly sphere as well as the firmament. His interest is to understand the experience, common to all living beings, of being traversed by materials that constitute them as organisms – which, on their turn, are not bounded by bodily containers or specific identities. For Ingold, the experience of life is not lived from within a body that relates to other bodies as one object among others, but unfolds along with the flows of materials (light, sound, wind, liquids, textures, and so forth) that cut across them and dissolve the boundaries of their bodies, minds, and surfaces (Steil & Carvalho 2012:31). 9

11 Ingold’s assumption about a symmetry in knowledge that transcends culture or the human leads to another claim: when we talk about knowledge, we are talking about a creative process whereby skills shared with other organisms and beings that inhabit the same world as us are creatively incorporated. 11 His focus on action, which shifts our attention away from the subject or content of knowledge, is what allows him to advocate an ecological epistemology transcending the premises instituted by the great natureculture divide. As Ingold shows in his critique of semiotics, this divide has led us to imagine the world of culture as an autonomous space constituted as a non-place, apart from and in opposition to nature. This radical stance may be producing a new Copernican revolution in thinking towards an ontological turn.12 The symmetry attributed to knowledge processes, which we take as a core reference for ecological epistemologies, does not however presume the equality of all beings that inhabit the universe. The fact that we are all – humans and non-humans alike – submitted to the same creative process whereby we acquire and incorporate skills through continuous interaction does not discard differentiation. Much to the contrary: we differentiate ourselves as organisms precisely through the diversity of possible combinations of material flows cutting across us as well as the lines and traces that are imprinted in the environment as guides for our life trajectories. Ecological epistemologies therefore propose a way of enacting knowledge that, far from distancing us from the environment by objectifying the real, leads us to a closer engagement and immersion in the immediate and material world of experience. To know thus becomes not only an effort to imagine the world as it is imagined by other cultures, but also an opening to the possibility of extending experience to the multiplicity of imaginations by the other species and elements that share with us the adventure of living and existing in this universe. This stance suggests that cultural attributes and political rights that were hitherto imagined as exclusively human prerogatives be extended to other organisms, beings and landscapes in the environment. The scope of ethics is correspondingly expanded to include within its political and legal orders the diversity of non-human subjects and individuals that, three or four decades ago, were relegated to nature as specimens of the animal, vegetable or mineral kingdoms. In this sense, our claim is that the plausibility of ecological epistemologies is anchored in certain social practices that have been redefining the place of non-humans in social life. A revealing instance of this shift is the new status pets enjoy in contemporary families. By incorporating pets, families have changed from an exclusively human to an inter-species institution (Faraco & Seminotti 2010). As we have done in another occasion, it is worth recalling the debate between Ingold and the biologist Hutchins, expert in ants. When asked whether there is something specifically human that would distinguish us from other beings, Ingold answers categorically in the negative (Steil & Carvalho 2012:44). Thus, if Hutchins’ position is that the skills ants deploy in order to find food are constituted in co-evolution with a historical and cultural process, Ingold’s is that the cultural skills of humans are constituted in co-evolution with natural processes (Ingold 2010:14). 12 In this respect, we underscore the interesting debate on the ontological turn in philosophy promoted in 2012 by the Catholic University in Rio Grande do Sul, available at http://materialismos.wordpress.com/2012/10/03/a-virada-ontologica-na-filosofia--contemporaneaprogramacao-completa/. 11

12 In the field of public policy, animal rights have prompted the creation of laws and state agencies, such as animal protection codes, environment ministries, and animal welfare units. In the vegetable kingdom, trees emerge as subjects of rights in tandem with legal policies for the protection of native forests, being thus redefined as arboreal individuals with whom we negotiate urban expansion and remodeling. Similarly, in contemporary politics, wild animals count with spokespersons and social movements who fight for their conservation and represent them in national and international arenas, thus assuming a quasi-human status similar to that of pets. These and many other examples manifest the dilution of ontological frontiers between nature and culture, animality and humanity, environmental and human rights, as well as the more general movement towards the epistemological breaks we discussed here.

Final remarks Above all, what allows us to propose a shift in classical, universalistic epistemology and ontology towards local epistemologies – among which, ecological epistemologies – is the change in status of subjects of knowledge away from human exclusivism. This inflection towards including non-humans impinges on the deepest foundations of modern knowledge, as well as on science’s most basic pillars. Thus, if Gadamer (2012) claimed the recognition of the “dignity of things” as a condition for authentic dialogue, ecological epistemologies claim the “activity (agency) of things”. In the ecological epistemologies paradigm, the otherness of nature appears not in the form of a different, closed world. The point of departure for knowledge is no longer distancing and avoidance, but on the contrary, the subject’s engagement with the world and with the core of matter by participating and sharing in a common experience that pervades all beings and things that inhabit a same atmosphere. In psychoanalytic terms, what changes is the nature of the narcissistic bond. Human subjects are identified with all other living beings, that is, beyond a specific community of rights-bearing humans. Thus, the idea of an ecological paradigm at the level of thought seems to open up new avenues leading out of the stalemate in nature-culture relations, established in the horizon of modern sciences by the dualistic perspective that pits biocentrism against anthropocentrism. In other words, be it in political or in environmental terms, the question of symmetry emerges as central to knowledge production – no longer “about” but “with” the other. From this perspective, we could assert that ecological epistemologies oppose the idea both of diluting culture into nature and of assimilating nature into culture. It is, rather, about merging the histories – human and natural – that make all, non-humans and humans alike, co-residents and “co-citizens” of a same global and hybrid world. Considering that the tension between nature and culture has been at the core of modern epistemology, the path we travelled sought to map out some landmarks in a nonreductionist effort to operate from within this tension, reordering dualisms without relapsing into cultural or biological determinisms. By situating themselves on either one

13 side or the other, specialized contemporary knowledges carve a gulf between the sciences of nature and the humanities. This has led to reductionist and defensive stances, which will claim either the arbitrariness of culture or the order of biological necessity as explanatory matrixes for the real. The question remains however of how to deal with the “other”, be it by collapsing or reconfiguring it. This is not a trivial problem, and even if we agree that We Have Never Been Modern (Latour 1994), the epistemological question pervading modern thought remains as an enduring, open-ended tension. In Lacan’s terms, this tension constitutes what could be the Moebius strip of ecological epistemologies: where the debate unfolds at times on the front, at times on the back of the strip, passing at times by fusion at times by alterity, thus producing in each of these folds social, subjective, ethic, esthetic, and political realities of existence.

Wagner, Roy. The Invention of Culture. University of Chicago Press, 1981.