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Burning Cities: A Posthumanist Account of Australians and Eucalypts
Citation
Franklin, A, Burning Cities: A Posthumanist Account of Australians and Eucalypts, Environment and Planning, Sage, S Elden (ed), London, pp. 243-272. ISBN 978-1-4462-0808-3 (2012) [Research Book Chapter]
Copyright Statement
Copyright 2012 Sage Publications
Official URL: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/refbooks/Book237215
Abstract
The posthumanist turn is now well established outside Australia (see,
for example, Haraway, 1997; 2003; Cloke and Jones, 2001; Jones
and Cloke, 2002; Latour, 1993; Pickering, 2000; 2001; Thrift, 2000a;
2000b) and is producing an account of agency in nature that is inextricably
intertwined with the social–cultural. We have yet to see this promising development
grafted onto Australian environmental studies – although some
authors in this field are edging towards this (see, for example, Bulbeck, 2004;
Plumwood, 2002; 2004) – and this paper is offered as a means of making
progress in this direction. In this paper I have deliberately chosen the most
mundane commonplace natural object in Australia, the gum tree, as my nonhuman.
If it can be demonstrated that there is a profound material relation
and subsequently a social relation between gum trees and Australian culture–
social life, the truth of which simultaneously cancels both nature and culture as
viably separate concepts, then the implications for Australian social sciences
and also for the life sciences are profound. Rather than feeding more
calls for the vaguely stated need for interdisciplinary collaboration (a project
that preserves the ontological division of labour as between the human and
the nonhuman sciences) I suggest that we commence a more symmetrical
programme of research. Work must begin on a sociology and geography of Australians not merely among themselves. Aside from these ontological
arguments and the case study that supports them there are some shards and
splinters of theoretical fallout resulting from this heresy that may be of interest.
The first is methodological and suggests that we do not start with a thing ‘to
be explained’, but instead, following Andrew Pickering’s advice in The Mangle
of Practice (1995), place ourselves in the action, in medias res or ‘in the thick of
things’ where the play or dance of agency takes place. The second concerns
the continued relevance of the long-established nature–culture, natural–social
dualisms on which most environmental studies are constructed, and also the
implications of this for thinking about environmental issues in Australia. If
we allow that gum trees are neither purely natural nor purely social but both –
what we might call a relational entity after John Law (1994; 1999) – then what
does this say about environmental discourses that endorse and seek to reproduce
(or restore) so-called primordial natures and about Tim Low’s recent
(2003) claim for a ‘new nature’ (in Australia)? The third concerns our understanding
of agency as it is used generally in sociology but also in actor-network
theory (ANT) and its later mutations and posthumanist writings. This paper
also supports those who argue that agency needs to be understood always as
an artefact of time: of social, ecological, and glacial times (Jones and Cloke,
2002; Macnaghten and Urry, 1998).
Item Details
Item Type: | Research Book Chapter |
---|---|
Research Division: | Human Society |
Research Group: | Sociology |
Research Field: | Sociology not elsewhere classified |
Objective Division: | Culture and Society |
Objective Group: | Other culture and society |
Objective Field: | Other culture and society not elsewhere classified |
UTAS Author: | Franklin, A (Professor Adrian Franklin) |
ID Code: | 76321 |
Year Published: | 2012 |
Deposited By: | Sociology and Social Work |
Deposited On: | 2012-03-05 |
Last Modified: | 2018-04-04 |
Downloads: | 0 |
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