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SCA Culture @ Large 2011
presents:
Dorion Sagan
(Science Writer)
"The Human in More Than Human: Interspecies Communities and the new 'Facts of Life': A Conversation with Dorion Sagan"
Organizer: John M. Hartigan (UT Austin)
Discussants: Myra Hird (Queen's University), Stefan G. Helmreich (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kim TallBear (UC Berkeley), and Augustin Fuentes (University of Notre Dame).
“Culture at Large” is a signature forum for the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the annual meetings of the AAA. This event featured a speaker from outside the discipline, who was engaged in discussion by two cultural anthropologists, a physical anthropologist, and a sociologist.
This year's featured guest was Dorion Sagan, a fascinating thinker, who has written and co-authored a range of books, including, The Sciences of Avatar: from Anthropology to Xenology (2010); Notes from the Holocene: A Brief History of the Future (2007); Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature (2007); Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (2003). In this forum, Sagan offers himself as a vector bringing the new biology to the anthropological community. As Earth's population doubled over the last 50 years, we are forced into ecological confrontation with the reality that "we" are more than human. Delving into the thermodynamic facts of ecology and the still too-little known, deep evolutionary drama that got us here, Sagan will sketch some road markers for acquiring the biological literacy necessary to understand the ecological realities that are forcing themselves onto human consciousness. Although its derivation from the Soviet science of V.I. Vernadsky is cryptic, ecothermodynamic thought has provided a rich source for theorizing, as well as transhuman master metaphors for philosophers from Bataille to Derrida. Sagan's talk linked to these by first providing the perspectival ground cultural anthropologists should acquire before they start theorizing.
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