Joshua Sterlin

By examining the Western strain of the Horror genre, I explore the dynamics that define its central character as an ontological xenophobia that must be perpetually cleansed. Beyond a sociological account I suggest we take what it contains seriously as ontological explorations. With a focus on predation as case study, I analyze the genre as conforming to the gazing relation of the Naturalistic West regarding its reversal: Animism. I conclude with the possibilities that the Animist “bubbles” displayed in Horror fiction hold out for us to shift into a register in which we can build relational competence beyond our horror.

Environmental law remains grounded in a ‘one-world world’ paradigm. This ontological structure asserts that, regardless of variation in world-construing, all beings occupy one ‘real’ world of discrete entities. The resulting legal system is viewed as an independent set of norms and procedures regulating the ‘human’ use of the ‘environment’ by specifying allowable harm rather than adjudicating on mutually enhancing relations. This legal form fails to fulfil its purpose of prevention and remediation, and constitutes a significant barrier to overcoming world(s)-destroying conditions. As such, we take up the injunction for a ‘legal ontological turn’ so as to lay bare these assumptions, and to be able to move beyond their constraints into a renewed exploration at the intersection of vastly differing legalities. In dialogue with systems-grounded ecological jurisprudence(s), Indigenous legal thinking, and anthropological insight, we seek to ground future discussions towards building a truly earth-sustaining form of environmental law for all beings.

We do not live in the Anthropocene, but rather, the period of time defined by agricultural civilization. If we are to take this definitional question seriously, then the implications are immense for our understanding of not only our ecological predicament, but the entire narrative of our species, and therefore its hopes for future survival. Accepting the fact that our present era of mass extinction and climate change are the result not of something necessarily inherent to Homo sapiens as a species, but rather of a particular style of living and notion of a particularly singular human liberty, constrained to certain historical cultures, opens up space to consider already existent alternatives to what I am terming the Civilicene. It is indeed the fact that any other way of life, and conception of self, is framed as an "alternative" (Gibson-Graham 2008) which further reifies and performs the dominant position of the Civilicene narrative. If we are to de-centre our current way of life as teleologically inevitable, we must overcome this framing, allowing the expansion of both our cultural conception of the human being, and possible ways of life and nature-culture relations. Anthropology's raison d'être has in some sense always been the study of these "alternatives" and their Western construed "vulnerability" (which is itself a form of othering). The reason to turn to this discipline specifically in this time has been aptly summarized by Graeber (2004), who wrote that we must "look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities-as gifts" (p.12). This has not always been the orientation of the discipline, being itself steeped in Western notions of cultural superiority. However, the drive to compare the vast diversity of humankind has always been at the centre of anthropology. If indeed each culture, as Wade Davis described it, is a unique answer to the question of "what does it mean to be human and alive?" (2009)....