Abstract
This chapter explores the relationship between anthropology and critical posthumanism, two lines of enquiry that proceed from the fundamental question: what is a human being? From seeds sowed by poststructuralism/modernism, an “ontological turn” in anthropology over the past several decades has decentered and expanded the disciplinary scope and its traditional subject – the human. Along with putting “the anthropos” back in question, longstanding dualisms such as nature and culture, subject and object, human and nonhuman have been subject to radical critique. After tracing influential developments in two key subfields, (1) indigenous multinaturalism and (2) multispecies anthropology, we explore the elective affinities between anthropology, phenomenology, and posthumanism. In the final section, we discuss the anthropolitical implications of critical posthuman perspectives, which open space for thinking and acting otherwise in the Anthropocene.
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Howard, C.A., Küpers, W.M. (2022). Posthumanism and Anthropology. In: Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M., John Müller, C. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42681-1_14-1
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