Can forests think? Do dogs dream? In this astonishing book, Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be human—and thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world’s most complex ecosystems. Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting direction–one that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.
About the Author CANADIAN, EH
Eduardo Kohn is an associate professor of anthropology at McGill University and winner of the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize.
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Review
"What’s so welcome about Kohn’s approach is that he walks a tightrope with perfect balance: never losing sight of the unique aspects of being human, while refusing to force those aspects into separating us from the rest of the abundantly thinking world."
(Times Literary Supplement)
"How Forests Think is an important book that provides a viable way for people educated in Western philosophy to approach indigenous animism without being credulous or inauthentic. It is refreshing to read a book of this intellectual caliber that takes Runa stories seriously and enters into dialogue with their claims using the tools of Western philosophy."
(Anthropos)
"[Kohn] pushes the reader to step out of an anthropocentric view and re-evaluate how humans can interpret the world. Indeed, the author stresses that the field of anthropology has been too short sighted and has not yet fully explored how other beings constitute what it is to be human."
(Space and Culture)
"How Forests Think is a remarkable book. Eduardo Kohn uses language that captures your attention and makes you want to say “no” until, sometimes reluctantly, you will see what he wants you to see. Do forests think? No, of course not. And yet, in the way that this ethnography unpacks what that question means, the reader comes to understand that they do."
(American Anthropologist)
"...this study seduces at once by its methodological seriousness, the quality of its writing, and its construction. Indeed, the style is both rich and accessible, offering us clear—and often picturesque—explanations for complex concepts, using an intelligent syntax."
(Current Anthropology)
"Kohn’s engaging and intellectually dynamic ethnography of the Runa and their relations to the world around them demonstrates that interrelations among people and dogs and forests, as just one example, play important, interactive and creative roles in the formation of human selves and their life histories. "
(Anthropology Now)Product Description
Can forests think? Do dogs dream? In this astonishing book, Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be human—and thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, Eduardo Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world’s most complex ecosystems. Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting direction–one that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.
From the Inside Flap
“A thinking forest is not a metaphor. Rooted in richly composted, other-than-symbolic semiotic worldings, this book teaches the reader how other-than-human encounters open possibilities for the emergent realization of worlds, not just worldviews. The semiotics in this well-wrought book are technical, worked, demanding, tuned to form and modality, alert to emergent properties, multinaturally and ethnographically precise. Thinking with the other-than-human world shows that what humans share with all living beings is the fact that we all live with and through signs. Life is constitutively semiotic. Besides all that, this book is a powerfully good read, one that changed my dreams and reworked my settled habits of interpretation, even the multispecies ones.” -- Donna Haraway, UC Santa Cruz
“I can only call this thought-leaping in the most creative sense. A supreme artifact of the human skill in symbolic thinking, this work takes us to the other side of signification―itself doubly manifest in what gets noticed and not noticed―where it is possible to imagine all life as thoughtful life. It has been done hand in hand with the Runa. It could not have been done without the delicacy of Kohn’s ethnographic attentiveness. However far along the track you want to travel with Kohn, you will see that the anthropological landscape has already changed.” -- Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge
“...A work of art... [and] an immensely refreshing alternative [for] philosophical anthropology.” ― Bruno Latour, Sciences Po
“Radically innovative and original [and] beautifully written.” ― Anna Tsing, UC Santa Cruz
“A remarkable aspect of [this book] is the complex – and often beautifully written – intermingling of subtle theoretical propositions with an even subtler ethnography.” ― Philippe Descola, Collège de France
“[Kohn] means to attach us again to the world we thought our thinking removed us from by showing us that the world too thinks. … I know dancers and painters who would groove to Kohn's expansion of self and thought and living, and I want to see the dances, paintings, films, buildings that come out of dreaming over this book.” ― Bookslut
“I can only call this thought-leaping in the most creative sense. A supreme artifact of the human skill in symbolic thinking, this work takes us to the other side of signification―itself doubly manifest in what gets noticed and not noticed―where it is possible to imagine all life as thoughtful life. It has been done hand in hand with the Runa. It could not have been done without the delicacy of Kohn’s ethnographic attentiveness. However far along the track you want to travel with Kohn, you will see that the anthropological landscape has already changed.” -- Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge
“...A work of art... [and] an immensely refreshing alternative [for] philosophical anthropology.” ― Bruno Latour, Sciences Po
“Radically innovative and original [and] beautifully written.” ― Anna Tsing, UC Santa Cruz
“A remarkable aspect of [this book] is the complex – and often beautifully written – intermingling of subtle theoretical propositions with an even subtler ethnography.” ― Philippe Descola, Collège de France
“[Kohn] means to attach us again to the world we thought our thinking removed us from by showing us that the world too thinks. … I know dancers and painters who would groove to Kohn's expansion of self and thought and living, and I want to see the dances, paintings, films, buildings that come out of dreaming over this book.” ― Bookslut
Top international reviews
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avik chatterjee
5.0 out of 5 stars Being non human by avik chatterjee
Reviewed in India on June 13, 2017
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What a non anthropocentric post human treasure ! Kohn should be a known property by now. Ponge connecting deleuze connecting haraway .
Cliente Amazon
4.0 out of 5 stars Nice reading
Reviewed in Italy on August 3, 2017
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Arrived in excellent condition. Book a bit complex, but with very interesting content. There is currently no translation into Italian.
David Rietti
5.0 out of 5 stars This is a major contribution to how we should view ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 2, 2016
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This is a major contribution to how we should view the World if we are all to survive! Read it !!!
Lorraine McColl
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2015
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Compelling reading from the first paragraph.
LEAVING THE BEST FOR LAST
Sevi
5.0 out of 5 stars Book Review- How Forests Think: Toward and Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013)
Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2014
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Eduardo Kohn’s book, How Forests Think (2013) is an inquiry on how to think beyond human as subject of anthropological study. Thus, it provides us with academic understanding of our strongly relational ties with non-human beings, which are constitutive in and for our presence in the world. In this study, ethnography is not an object, but a medium to comprehend multiple ontologies; hence, it is much different from traditional anthropological works, which mostly focus on cultural representations. Without giving up being “human,” the writer discloses how our “selves” are interwoven with other “beings.” In this sense, he offers us to approach the human and non-human as active agents in our thinking of anthropological study.
Kohn conducts his ethnographic fieldwork from 1996 to 2000 in Avila, an Upper Amazonian village in Ecuador. He uses ethnographic methods, such as participant observation and interviews, in addition to his linguistic analysis and epistemological explorations. Thus, I was expecting an ethnographic examination on culture, gender, or kinship structures in Avila. Also, I was wondering if he would theorize social, economic and political dynamics of the region in relation to the larger historical context. However, Kohn does not do what many of the previous ethnographies have aimed to do. Rather, Kohn criticizes human-centric approach of the Western anthropology by focusing on other-than-human beings, and he proves us the importance of studying human within a relationship with its surroundings. I will explain how.
Although his fundamental theoretical approach is based on semiotics and semiosis, Kohn does not see signs just as human affairs. In his account, signs are constitutive in life both for human and nonhuman beings (43). In drawing our attention to those signs, Kohn delicately interrogates how different “beings” relate to and communicate with each other. He calls this relationality “ecology of selves,” which he finds and formulates within the rainforest of an Amazonian village, where trans-species semiosis pervades and connects all living selves. A very good example of his idea of relationality is the example he gives about ants and blowing tobacco smoke in Chapter 2. Because rain starts when ants appear, people become able to impede rain by using tobacco, whose smoke prevents ants from coming out. Similarly, when Juanicu whistles like a siren, the flying ants understand as the call of their “mothers” and they answer by coming to the source of the sign (81). As a result of such communication, a relational world, where both human and animal coinhabit, is created.
However, Kohn’s book is not only about humans and animals. In Chapter 5, he talks about “perceptions” of cross-species. For instance, Runa puma, shape-shifting human jaguar, also has a perception of seeing things around himself. Whether Runa sees you as a human being or a piece of meat totally depends on Runa’s perception of you, as well as the way you present yourself before him. Therefore, you may or may not be eaten by the jaguar depending on your visual representation. In a similar vein, the Runa in their everyday life see the game animals that they hunt in the forest as wild animals, but they know that this is not their true manifestation. Hence, they do not eat, for instance, the spirit master’s chicken (178). In other words, people, Runa, and all other organisms in the forest use signs primarily to survive in this relational world.
Therefore, he draws our attention to the revolutionary potentials and scholarly possibilities of studying another type of anthropology, in which we open up ourselves to various "selves." His study converts Redfieldian notion of “worldviews” into different “worlds” of non-human beings. Kohn introduces us another world—a world where human and non-human melt into each other through semiosis of all life. Focusing on the potentials of thinking beyond human in anthropology, he provides alternative ways of thinking within scholarly language and unconventional ways of using ethnography. Kohn uses ethnography as a tool to explore the spectrum of forest, which seems larger than "little communities." However, my critic starts right there, as I would like to know more about ethnographic aspects of his work related to the Avila community. What kinds of people are able to relate themselves to the non-human selves of the forest was one of my curiosities while reading this book. How is their society organized in relation to their semiotic relationship with the world? What are their spiritual motivations and cosmologies? How does food function in this society where hunting is a fundamental phenomenon? Is there any relationship between their colonial history and their hesitation to use power upon other beings in their surrounding? I believe, in order to understand humans’ relationality with their surroundings, we also need to know such constitutive aspects of their lives. I would like to learn more about Avila community as human is already at the center of this book. Who else is going to talk about this, if not Kohn?
Moreover, I left confused about the distinction made in the book between living and nonliving forms. The writer says that patterned distribution of rivers or the recurrent circular shapes of the whirlpools are among the nonliving emergent forms in Amazonia, as they are constrained, and thus, they cannot flow freely as much as the water itself (159). However, within a new relationality, which is supposed to be developed in the new environment, they will be living in different ways and within different forms, even though they are constrained. Furthermore, he continues discussing whirlpools as simpler forms than the freer flow of water (166). However, I left wondering what makes the water free. Shall we still consider this flowing water as free, even there is a whirlpool on its way? Or, is the water also constrained affected by the whirlpool? What is the relationship between whirlpool and water? What is the relationship between water, whirlpool, and rubber trees? In order to understand “how forest thinks” as a whole, we need to understand this relationality in a larger context with more ontological explanations.
Yes, the language is tough, and it necessitates from the reader to have some background information on semiotics, ontology, and epistemology to the extent of postmodernism and posthuman critics. I do not think that the book is for the general reader, but inevitably an innovative contribution to anthropology with its writing performance. Just as a snowflake having a provisional form between present and absent, Kohn presents us a language whose form can change in any moment. His poetic language is robust yet also fragile—as if the words may rebel at any time and break apart in front of your eyes. He perfectly uses possibilities that are provided by the language, as another sign system. Among the non-textual ways of communication with the reader, the writer’s use of photography perfectly fits with the philosophical profundity of the text. I could not prevent myself from looking at the series of very well selected photographs over and over again.
Although his book is not considered as a traditional ethnography for the reasons that I mentioned above, since he opens up the scholarly work into dialogic epistemologies and provides multiplicity of experiences from an unconventional inter-species analysis of subject-object relationships, it must be considered one of the finest examples of critical ethnography.
---30---
IT REMINDS ME OF URSULA LEGUIN'S THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST AND LO AND BEHOLD I DISCOVER OUR COMRADE AUTHOR IS ALSO INFLUENCED BY URSULA LEGUIN'S NOVEL.
Introduction
Written in the glare of the United States’ war on Indochina, and first published as a separate book in that war’s dire aftermath, The Word for World is Forest is a reflection on invasion, exploitation and oppression, and on the necessity and cost of resistance.
Though short, the novel is far from slight. It brings into sharp focus several of its author’s enduring concerns, and draws on the same intellectual resources that illuminate her wider work: notably anthropology, anarchism, feminism and Taoism.
Characteristically of all Le Guin’s writing, it embodies the stubborn virtue of seeing with both eyes, in depth and in colour, without looking away from or ignoring uncomfortable truths.
At the time of the novel’s setting, some centuries in the future, Vietnam is history - a history well remembered by one of the characters, Colonel Dongh. The prevailing social system on Earth and its colonies is still some sort of state capitalism, by now the driver of an interstellar imperialism. Racism has mutated and evolved to the point where having recent African ancestry - rather than having no trace of it - is to the racist eye what makes one fully human. That venomous notion has been given its own cosmic inflation by the discovery that there are in reality more races than even the Victorians suspected: Homo sapiens has a common ancestry’ with a forerunner species, the still extant and annoyingly wise Hainish, who in the distant past settled many worlds, including Earth.
Also of Hainish (and of terrestrial) descent are the natives of Athshe, the world for which the word is forest. Gentle, tribal, matriarchal, and small, they are easy prey.
Just strong enough to be slaves, too weak to be a threat, their likely fate is extinction. The forests in which they live are being felled around them to clear ground for future settlement and to satisfy an insatiable yearning for wood, a luxury almost beyond price back on the deforested home planet.
If we read the tale at too literal a level, as some critics have done, this makes no economic sense. It is almost inconceivable that interstellar extractive exploitation across all those decades of light- years could be profitable. Such nit-picking can sensibly and safely be ignored. In the first place, we have no textual evidence that it’s even meant to make economic sense. Perhaps it’s a mere whim of businessmen- bureaucrats who have no need to profit on their very long-term investment.
Furthermore, in a world where the kauri trees of New Zealand were felled and sawn up to make (among other such vital necessities) decking for yachts, and where the elephant is being driven close to extinction for ivory trinkets, and the rhinoceros for the entirely bogus medical virtues of powder made from its horn, and so on (and on) and where Vietnam is still suffering grievously from the effects of the chemical defoliants dumped on it at the very time this book was being written… in such a world, one would think, a writer crafting a protest is surely permitted some small poetic license.
In the other great SF work to come out of what in Vietnam is known as the American War, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, the conflict is between equally powerful empires and is in the end revealed to be the result of mutual misunderstanding. No such reassurance rounds off The Word for World is Forest. The author’s sympathy is entirely with the enemy. The invaders from Earth are indisputably the bad guys and the rebellious natives are entirely in the right. But the novel’s revolutionary defeatism doesn’t fall into the trap of romanticising the revolt of the oppressed. The Athsheans are changed by the very act of fighting, new and strange to them; the world they win back is not the same as the world that was taken from them; and their fight is not fair, or discriminating, or by the rules. It is dirty and brutal and shocking.
That oppression corrupts the oppressors is well enough known. That resistance to oppression can profoundly change those resisting, and for the worse, is less widely recognised - particularly among those who give that resistance their sympathy and solidarity. The ennobling aspect of resistance - of standing up, of fighting back, of driving the invader from the homeland - is seen and celebrated. The corrupting aspect - the hardening of the heart, the acceptance of casualty and atrocity’, the replacement of the moral calculus with a cold-eyed calculation of advantage, of revenge and reprisal - is put out of mind, and sometimes for what seem the best of reasons. That too is part of the damage done.
Le Guin’s subtle Taoist dialectic of darkness and light does not stop there. The Athsheans’ world, we see and are told early on, is itself a failed and lost Hainish colony. Not only the hominids, but most or all of the planet’s species of plants and animals are descended from a biota transplanted from Earth a million years ago. In showing us as an alien jungle and as a benign environment what is after all a forest such as might have covered Europe and North America in the Pleistocene, the novel gives its readers from those continents some further cause for reflection. And in implying that the now wise and compassionate Hainish were themselves invaders and colonisers in the distant past, this tale of damage and destruction carries a small, secret seed of hope for a better future than it depicts.
Ursula Le Guin may be the SF writer most respected by the literary mainstream, the most studied academically, her work set texts in countless courses. She remains subversive, and her work dangerous reading, because it changes the reader and makes them look at the real world in a different light. This novel’s continuing relevance is a rebuke to our complacency’.
- Ken MacLeod
The Word for World Is Forest is a science fiction novella by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in the United States in 1972 as a part of the anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, and published as a separate book in 1976 by Berkley Books. It is part of Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.
The story focuses on a military logging colony set up on the fictional planet of Athshe by people from Earth (referred to as "Terra"). The colonists have enslaved the completely non-aggressive native Athsheans, and treat them very harshly. Eventually, one of the natives, whose wife was raped and killed by a Terran military captain, leads a revolt against the Terrans, and succeeds in getting them to leave the planet. However, in the process their own peaceful culture is introduced to mass violence for the first time.
The novel carries strongly anti-colonial and anti-militaristic overtones, driven partly by Le Guin's negative reaction to the Vietnam War. It also explores themes of sensitivity to the environment, and of connections between language and culture. It shares the theme of dreaming with Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven, and the metaphor of the forest as a consciousness with the story "Vaster than Empires and More Slow".
The novella won the Hugo Award in 1973, and was nominated for several other awards. It received generally positive reviews from reviewers and scholars, and was variously described as moving and hard-hitting. Several critics, however, stated that it compared unfavorably with Le Guin's other works such as The Left Hand of Darkness, due to its sometimes polemic tone and lack of complex characters.
I HAVE BOTH THE EDITION FROM 1976 AND THE ORIGINAL IN AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS (EDITED BY HARLAN ELLISON)
Download as PDF - Haus der Kulturen der Welt
https://www.hkw.de › intercalations4_the_word_for_world_is_still_forest
THE WORD FOR WORLD IS STILL FOREST
Contents
The Word for World is Forest 1
Excerpts from Ursula K. Le Guin
Mimetic Traps: Forest, Images, Worlds by Pedro Neves Marques
It Goes on Like a Forest by Dan Handel
The Mother Tree
by Suzanne Simard
with visualizations by Kevin Beiler
Life and Death of Data by Yanni Alexander Loukissas
Shannon Castleman: Tree Wounds
The Ancestral Tree of Plenty 96
by Abel Rodríguez
with Carlos A. Rodríguez
& Catalina Vargas Tovar
The Political Nature of the Forest: 125
A Botanic Archaeology of Genocide
by Paulo Tavares
Leaving the Forest
Eduardo Kohn in conversation
with Anna-Sophie Springer
& Etienne Turpin
Wildwuchs, or the Worth of the Urban Wild
Report by Silvan Linden
Sandra Bartoli: The Old Trees of Berlin’s Forests
Katie Holten: Tree Alphabet
Dear Reader-as-Exhibition-Viewer,
Borrowing its title from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1972 science fiction
novella, The Word for World is Still Forest is composed in these
pages as an homage to the forest as a turbulent and generative
multinature. Throughout this book, we invite you to join us in
traversing the mighty forests of Amazonia, Southeast Asia, and
the Pacific Northwest, arriving in the old urban woods of Berlin,
where this book was published. Moving from concepts of the
forest as a thinking superorganism to the linear monocultural
plantations and “concrete jungles” that threaten the life of global
forests, you will encounter trees as companions, communities,
entities, and providers; in other moments, they will appear as
expert witnesses, data stories, or resourceful ancestors. Whether
they occur as images, subjects, or architectures, the forests
of this world will beckon you to remember that their destiny
is entangled with yours. As in Le Guin’s original story, this book
contends that Forest and World are “two meanings and one.”
Le Guin originally wrote The Word for World is Forest in 1968
as a direct response to the geopolitical climate and environmental
violence of the American war in Vietnam. “1968 was a bitter year
for those who opposed the war,” she writes in the Introduction
to the 1980 re-edition of the book, adding, “The lies and hypocrisies redoubled; so did the killing. Moreover, it was becoming
clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and
grainlands and the murder of non-combatants in the name of
‘peace’ was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and
the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of ‘man.’
The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed
as inevitable as it was disastrous.”
The story itself is a tale of planetary colonization, resource
depletion, and enslavement, wherein a chauvinist, racist population of one planet—a deforested, naked Earth—conquers another planet rich in sylvan biodiversity and inhabited by a non-violent
forest people capable of lucid dreaming. Their decolonization
struggle is successful, but the cost of repossession is nothing less
than the cognitive seed of power, bloodshed, and murder.
The Word for World is Forest thus poses vexing yet necessary ethical questions about resistance, justice, and the fight for freedom.
Since we began to work on this volume in 2014, the relevance
of Le Guin’s description of militarized, ecocidal violence has only
continued to intensify. As we write, the world appears fundamentally if disproportionately split between those who believe
solely in hording the profits that they have amassed through
destruction, and those who insist that the decency and dignity
of living things cannot be so callously reduced to abstract transactions and shameless accumulation. In this perilous situation,
Le Guin’s “writerly resistance” reminds readers that science fiction
is a formidable intellectual resource for political imaginaries.
As editors, we see this paginated exhibition series as our own contribution to an insurgent social and environmental science fiction
that responds to the physical, climatic, and conceptual foreclosures of the Anthropocene. To relay the potency of Le Guin’s
words and amplify their relevance for contemporary struggles,
we invited the landscape architect and designer Elise Hunchuck
and intercalations designer Katharina Tauer to reimagine some
of the most compelling passages from The Word for World is
Forest in the pages that follow.
This homage to words and forests is followed by an essay
from Pedro Neves Marques about the particularities of Amerindian
multinaturalism that sharpens our sense of the forest as an
ontological multiplicity teeming with relations, perspectives, and
temporalities. That such forests and worlds are largely incommensurable with Eurocentric image-making technologies poses a
serious challenge to understanding and solidarity by demanding
that we learn “how to inhabit the space of the in-between, the
interval between ‘worlds’ in order to contribute to a decolonization
of the many worlds from the imposition of the ‘one world.’” This
book is an attempt to open up a space for these transformations.
Curator Dan Handel presents a paginated version of his
research on wood as a vital aspect of forest mythologies and a
driver of industrial resource management. By translating elements
from his previous exhibitions into this volume, Handel contributes
to a renegotiation of the metaphors and mechanisms that render the forest present in human habits of consumption, creativity,
and ideation. Canadian forest ecologist Suzanne Simard
examines how underground networks of fungi uptake nutrients
of salmon brought from sea to river to land by grizzlies and
wolves. Simard’s text summarizes her ongoing collaboration with researchers from various First Nations communities in British
Columbia to offer a defense of nature as a tangled web rather than
a taxonomical order. Accompanied by visualizations from
forestry researcher Kevin Beiler, this contribution makes a plea
for a more holistic approach to forestry science and urges us
to “fundamentally transform the modern scientific image of nature
as a resource.”
A reflexive essay on living collections by designer and ethnographer Yanni A. Loukissas unfolds alongside a remarkable series
of data visualizations. As an inquiry into the botanical data of
Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, his project Life and Death
of Data shows that in addition to the actual plant specimens of
this collection, their metadata are valuable indices of historical
events and local knowledge. As natural history institutions attempt
to redefine their role to more thoroughly address contemporary
ecological crises, Loukissas’s work is a poignant reminder for
curators to pay careful attention to the institutional and structural
parameters of their collections; as his project demonstrates,
there is a compelling narrative arc that connects historical practices
of collecting and contemporary issues of storage and preservation among digital systems and data sets.
Shannon Castleman’s photographs offer a closer look at
trees caught somewhere between life and death. By recording
the traces of incremental logging practices literally hacked into
the bark of teak forests in Indonesia, her series asks the viewer
to consider the consequences of subsistence livelihoods being
outlawed in favor of more profitable, large-scale agroforestry.
Remaining with the motif of the axe implicit in Castleman’s work,
we follow Nonuya knowledge-elder Abel Rodríguez (also known
as Mogaje Guihu) to the Middle Caquetá River region in the
Colombian Amazon. He shares an oral narrative conveying the
discovery and eventual felling of the Tree of Abundance,
which relays the origin of social, territorial, and ecological interdependency in the Amazon; at the same time, this mythological
narrative alludes to the beginning of labor, violence, and disease.
Rodríguez’s storytelling was transcribed and edited in collaboration with Carlos Rodríguez from the Tropenbos International
Colombia forest conservation group and the philosopher and
editor Catalina Vargas Tovar. It is intercalated with a selection of
Rodríguez’s drawings, including some which depict the annual
cycles of rainforest and river ecologies. By sharing this remarkable world as forest—normally conveyed by speech and
constrained by context—Rodríguez invites us to revel in the
deep history of the forest and its mythic architecture.
An understanding of the Amazon as an anthropogenically
cultivated multinature is further elaborated in the contribution
by Brazilian architect, urbanist, and activist Paulo Tavares.
His essay and richly annotated selection of archival photographs
and contemporary cartographies expose the “politics of erasure”
deployed by the Brazilian state against Indigenous peoples
and their lands in the twentieth century. Highlighting the hybrid
literacies required by resistance movements fighting illegal
logging, plantations, evictions, and development, Tavares shows
that genocide and ecocide are often two sides of the same coin
in struggles for land sovereignty. He also underscores the politically significant thesis that many forests of the Amazon region
are the result of Pre-Columbian domestication and cultivation
practices. By rendering Amazonia palpable as the living ruin
of an “‘expanded polis,’ within which humans and nonhumans
co-inhabit a common political space,” he infinitely complicates
any comfortable dichotomies of city, civilization, and culture
versus forest, wilderness, and nature. An interview with anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, based on his book How Forests Think
and observations from his fieldwork in Ecuador, explores the
philosophical implications of nonhuman thought. After a discussion about “thinking-with” multispecies semiotics, we conclude
our conversation with questions about how to cultivate a forestlike mindfulness even in non-forest ecologies—a provocation
that we hope resonates through many other contributions in this
book as well.
Calling attention to the precarious nature of urban trees,
we learn just how difficult these co-inhabitations are to maintain
through architect Silvan Linden’s report on the controversial
felling of “city trees” by the Parks Department of Berlin-Mitte
district. Here we discover that the Wildwuchs, or wild trees, were
accused by officials of threatening the safety of pedestrians
because they were not “proper” street trees. Landscape architect
Sandra Bartoli’s photo series “The Old Trees of Berlin’s Forest”
offers a lesser-known history of the ancient trees of the urban
forest known as Berlin Tiergarten; these photographs remind us of the quotidian ancestors in our midst and their histories, which
can no longer be taken for granted. To conclude, a stunning,
original typography of tree forms from artist Katie Holten’s About
Trees connects the paper of these book pages to their origins
by way of a semiotics of forests as words. Bringing together
poetry and prose, photography, storytelling, drawing, and exhibition making, as well as data visualization and remote sensing,
The Word for World is Still Forest attempts to relay something
of the confounding efflorescence of the worlds of forests through
words and images. If you get lost in the forest, authorities advise
that you stop moving and stay in one place to avoid confusion and
increase the chances of being rescued. We see things differently:
we suggest you stray far from paths cut by familiar habits and
explore some of the innumerable perspectives on and of the
forests that sustain this world.
We hope you will enjoy these words and forests and find among
them a renewed conviction that the loss of these worlds is nothing
less than the loss of the world.
Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin
Berlin & Jakarta, February 2017
2018 08 24
The World as Forest: bilingual exhibition guide
— digital version of our newsprint publication
Get here the exhibition guide for Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest that we’ve published at K. Verlag. It includes texts about the artists and works in the exhibition as well as statements from all three venue directors hosting the project. It also includes German translations of ANNA TSING‘s 2015 lecture “Earth Stalked by Man: A Feminist Approach to the Anthropocene” as well as an essay on Wallace by evolutionary biologist ANDREW BERRY. It also includes, in English, interviews with YAKA SHAWADAWA, a woman of the Arara people in the Indigenous territories of the Brazilian province of Acre, and a teacher and activist in this region, as well as with ZENZI SUHADI, Head of the Department of the Research, Advocacy, and Environmental Law of the ngo Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia (WALHI) in Jakarta.
German & English
72 pages
73 full-color images
Duo-tone on newsprint
Folded
ISBN 978-3-947858-02-6
72 pages
73 full-color images
Duo-tone on newsprint
Folded
ISBN 978-3-947858-02-6
2018 08 25
Thinking Like a Mountain (2018) by Alexander Hick
—double feature during our finnissage of The World as Forest
We are excited to screen Alexander Hick’s documentary essay film Thinking Like a Mountain about the extraordinary resistance of the Arhuaco Indigenous people of the high Sierra Nevada in Colombia tonight during the finnissage of the exhibition at Tieranatomisches Theater. The screening is the team premiere in Berlin after the film has only be screened once so far at Visions du reel in Nyon in the spring.
Screenings are at 21h00 and 23h00—first come first get a place, but please note that you need a ticket for the Long Night of the Museums that is also happening tonight throughout the city.
TWO GUYS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY WROTE THIS:
May 11, 2016 - PDF | In LeGuin's novel The Word for World is Forest 1. she presents a fictional forest that serves as a collective mind for its inhabitants living.
