Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (2015)

21 June 2019, dusan

“This volume is the first to collect the most influential essays and lectures of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Published in a wide variety of venues, and often difficult to find, the pieces are brought together here for the first time in one major volume, which includes his momentous 1998 Cambridge University Lectures, “Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere.”

Rounded out with new English translations of previous works, the resulting book is a wide-ranging portrait of one of the towering figures of contemporary thought—philosopher, anthropologist, ethnographer, ethnologist, and more. With a characteristic afterword by Roy Wagner, elucidating Viveiros de Castro’s influence and engaging with his arguments, The Relative Native further cements Viveiros de Castro’s position at the center of contemporary anthropological inquiry.”

Afterword by Roy Wagner
Publisher HAU Books, Chicago, 2015
Open access
ISBN 9780990505037, 0990505030
vi+355 pages

Review: Eugene N. Anderson (Ethnobiology Letters, 2016).

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WorldCat

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Janine Randerson: Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art (2018)

21 February 2019, dusan

“An exploration of artworks that use weather or atmosphere as the primary medium, creating new coalitions of collective engagement with the climate crisis.

In a time of climate crisis, a growing number of artists use weather or atmosphere as an artistic medium, collaborating with scientists, local communities, and climate activists. Their work mediates scientific modes of knowing and experiential knowledge of weather, probing collective anxieties and raising urgent ecological questions, oscillating between the “big picture systems view” and a ground-based perspective. In this book, Janine Randerson explores a series of meteorological art projects from the 1960s to the present that draw on sources ranging from dynamic, technological, and physical systems to indigenous cosmology.

Randerson finds a precursor to today’s meteorological art in 1960s artworks that were weather-driven and infused with the new sciences of chaos and indeterminacy, and she examines work from this period by artists including Hans Haacke, Fujiko Nakaya, and Aotearoa-New Zealand kinetic sculptor Len Lye. She looks at live experiences of weather in art, in particular Fluxus performance and contemporary art that makes use of meteorological data streams and software. She describes the use of meteorological instruments, including remote satellite sensors, to create affective atmospheres; online projects and participatory performances that create a new form of “social meteorology”; works that respond directly to climate change, many from the Global South; artist-activists who engage with the earth’s diminishing cryosphere; and a speculative art in the form of quasi-scientific experiments. Art’s current eddies of activity around the weather, Randerson writes, perturb the scientific hold on facts and offer questions of value in their place.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2018
Leonardo series
ISBN 9780262038270, 0262038277
xl+233 pages

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Walter D. Mignolo, Catherine E. Walsh: On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (2018)

20 June 2018, dusan

“In On Decoloniality Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh explore the hidden forces of the colonial matrix of power, its origination, transformation, and current presence, while asking the crucial questions of decoloniality’s how, what, why, with whom, and what for. Interweaving theory-praxis with local histories and perspectives of struggle, they illustrate the conceptual and analytic dynamism of decolonial ways of living and thinking, as well as the creative force of resistance and re-existence. This book speaks to the urgency of these times, encourages delinkings from the colonial matrix of power and its ‘universals’ of Western modernity and global capitalism, and engages with arguments and struggles for dignity and life against death, destruction, and civilizational despair.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2018
On Decoloniality series, 1
ISBN 9780822370949, 0822370948
xiii+291 pages

Reviews: Sara Castro-Klarén (MLN, 2019), Sneja Gunew (Postcolonial Text, 2019), Kirsten Mundt (Cultural Studies, 2019), Laura Maria de Vos (Transmotion, 2018), Joe Parker (Society+Space, 2020).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (4 MB, updated on 2020-1-26)