Eben Kirksey

Thursday, November 15, 2012

What is the Environmental Humanities?

A conversation with Thom van Dooren originally published in the new electronic journal, http://environmentalhumanities.org/

What kind of research and teaching do you do in the Environmental Humanities?
I am trained in the traditions of anthropology—a discipline that Alfred Kroeber regarded as “the most humanistic of the sciences and most scientific of the humanities.” In dialogue with lively conversations in the environmental humanities, my research is aimed at pushing animals, plants, and microorganisms from the margins of anthropology—where they were once just treated as part of the landscape, as food, or as symbols—into the foreground, alongside humans.

In the News

In September 2010 Eben testified before the U.S. Congress about massacres in West Papua.

He joined Indonesian investigative reporter Andreas Harsono in 2008 to publish "Criminal Collaborations", a peer-reviewed article about Indonesian military involvement in the murder of two Americans. This research started a lively discussion in the Indonesian media and sparked a series of media articles in publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the International Herald Tribune. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! invited Eben to discuss this research on her news show.

Research Interests

Eben studies the political dimensions of imagination as well as the interplay of natural and cultural history.

Writing in collaboration with Stefan Helmreich he coined the term "multispecies ethnography" to describe new approaches for studying contact zones where the lines separating nature and culture have broken down.

Eben first went to West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, as an exchange student in 1998. Later his study of West Papua's resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and the forces of globalization morphed as he discovered that collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of this dynamic social movement. Duke University Press published this study as a book, Freedom in Entangled Worlds, in 2012.

His latest book, an edited collection called The Multispecies Salon: Gleanings from a Para-Site, explores a series of entangled questions: Which species flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collide? What happens when the bodies of organisms, and even entire ecosystems are enlisted in the schemes of biotechnology and the dreams of biocapitalism? And finally, in the aftermath of disaster--in blasted landscapes that have been transformed by multiple catastrophes--what are the possibilities of biocultural hope? The Multispecies Salon is in production with Duke University Press for publication in 2014.

Recent and upcoming lectures

November 17th, "Multispecies Intra-Actions," Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco.

October 24th, "From Rhizome to Banyan," Indonesia Study Group, Australian National University, Canberra.

October 16th-21st, "Freedom in Entangled Worlds," book tour in Brisbane and the Gold Coast of Australia.

September 13th, "The Year of the Frog," Anthropology Seminar Series, University of Sydney, Australia.

April 19th-20th, "Justice", American Ethnological Society, Annual Conference, New York City.

April 12th, "Freedom in Entangled Worlds", George Washington University, Washington, D.C, 5:30-6:30pm, RSVP.

April 11th, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 1:30-3:00, Student Union I, Meeting Room 3B, free and open to the public. Campus map.

April 10th, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington, D.C.

March 26th, "Freedom in Entangled Worlds", Tufts University, Boston.

February 20th, Pacific Peoples' Partnership, Victoria, Vancouver Island.

February 17th, University of Washington, Seattle.

February 19th, 2012, "The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography", American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting, Vancouver

February 10th, "Reclaiming the Promise of Hope", Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania, Annual Meeting, Portland.

October 21st, "The Multispecies Familiars of a Common Ant" Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University

The Multispecies Salon

Blurring the boundaries between bioart and ecoart, Eben co-curated the Multispecies Salon an art exhibit that has traveled from San Francisco, to New Orleans, and New York City. Conversations at the Salon orbited around three interrelated questions: Which species flourish, and which fail, when natural and cultural worlds intermingle and collide? What happens when the bodies of organisms, and even entire ecosystems, are brought into schemes of biotechnology and dreams of biocapitalism? And finally in the aftermath of disaster—in a blasted landscape that has been transformed by multiple catastrophes—what are the possibilities of biocultural hope? At this show artists and anthropologists came together to reimagine the horizons of biological anthropolog y.