Socioecologies of Nonhuman Minds in Relational Ontologies: A cross-Disciplinary Conversation

HAUCK, JAN; MEZZENZANA, FRANCESCA; TAVERNA, ANDREA S.; BARRETT, CLARK

San Diego

Congreso; American Anthro Association. Ecologies of Mind: Body, Self, and Person in Cultural Context; 2023

American Anthropological Association

The past years have seen an increase in research on human–nonhuman relations, not least due to the global environmental crisis and the desire to recalibrate the ways in which we relate to the nonhuman world. This research also aims to take seriously cross-cultural diversity in conceptualizations of and ways of engaging with nonhumans, including attributions of agency, personhood, Theory of Mind, or language to nonhumans, as well as whether these are potential objects of empathy, responsibility, and care. There are many open questions in this research. One issue is that the category of the nonhuman (or "other-than-human") is often underspecified. Most research is concerned primarily with nonhuman animals. But the category of the nonhuman may also include spirits or features of the landscape, especially in many Indigenous societies. Moreover, in these the categories of humanity and non-humanity do not describe fixed sets of entities with intrinsic characteristics, but are rather "conditions" (Descola 1996, 120) that are subject to change depending on relational configurations. Recent research in psychology comparing attributions of agency to different kinds of nonhumans in an Indigenous animist society to those of a US sample suggests that to do justice to observed cross-cultural differences we should not assume different folkpsychologies and rather that the non-Western participants are operating under a conceptual framework of "folkcommunication," where inference of agency is based on relationships and interaction rather than mental states (ojalehto mays et al. 2020). This roundtable brings together anthropologists and psychologists to discuss how to meaningfully engage cross-cultural diversity in conceptualizations of nonhumans, including questions of personhood, mind, agency, and morality, while taking humanity and nonhumanity as relational categories.