Book Section
Umut Yıldırım

War-torn Ecologies

Human and More-​​than-​Human Intersections of Ethnography and the Arts
In: War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 1–25
Open Access
Umut Yıldırım’s introduction combines the genres of literature review and commentary. It re-examines contemporary works on posthuman life to articulate ecological life-and-death politics within the context of colonial, imperial, and genocidal mass violence, and their entangled environmental legacies and actualities. A dissident repertoire of anthropological and artistic research is offered, which examines the ecological impact of war through the perspectives of human and more-than-human actors whose racialized and geographically regimented lives endure and counter ongoing environmental destruction.
Keywords: Arts; Ethnography; Genocide; More-than-human relations; More-than-human memory; Occupation; Political aesthetics; Resistance; War
Rights: © by the author(s). Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Part of War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments Containing:
Foreword / Françoise Vergès
War-torn Ecologies: Human and More-​​than-​Human Intersections of Ethnography and the Arts
Mulberry Affects: Ecology, Memory, and Aesthetics on the Shores of the Tigris River in the Wake of Genocide
Who’s Afraid of Ideology? / Marwa Arsanios
Note the Ghosts: Among the More-than-Living in Iraq / Kali Rubaii
Great Sand: Grains of Occupation and Representation / Nadine Hattom
Hide Your Water from the Sun: A Performance for Spirited Waters / Jumana Emil Abboud
Of Goats and Bombs: How to Live (and Die) in an Explosive Landscape / Munira Khayyat
Title
War-torn Ecologies
Subtitle
Human and More-​​than-​Human Intersections of Ethnography and the Arts
Author(s)
Umut Yıldırım
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-27_1
Description
Umut Yıldırım’s introduction combines the genres of literature review and commentary. It re-examines contemporary works on posthuman life to articulate ecological life-and-death politics within the context of colonial, imperial, and genocidal mass violence, and their entangled environmental legacies and actualities. A dissident repertoire of anthropological and artistic research is offered, which examines the ecological impact of war through the perspectives of human and more-than-human actors whose racialized and geographically regimented lives endure and counter ongoing environmental destruction.
Is Part Of
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
19 September 2023
Subject
Arts
Ethnography
Genocide
More-than-human relations
More-than-human memory
Occupation
Political aesthetics
Resistance
War
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language
en-GB
page start
1
page end
25
Source
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 1–25

References

  • ‘Feral Atlas Collective’, Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2019 <https://bienal.iksv.org/en/bienal-artists/feral-atlas-collective> [accessed 30 March 2022]
  • ‘Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011’, The Museum of Modern Art, 2019 <https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5084> [accessed 1 April 2022]
  • Allen, Jafari Sinclaire, and Ryan Cecil Jobson, ‘The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties’, Current Anthropology, 57.2 (2016), 129–48 <https://doi.org/10.1086/685502>
  • Açıksöz, Salih Can, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqr1b4n>
  • Berg, Ulla D., and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, ‘Racializing Affect: A Theoretical Proposition’, Current Anthropology, 56.5 (2015), pp. 654–77 <https://doi.org/10.1086/683053>
  • Bessire, Lucas, and David Bond, ‘Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique’, American Ethnologist, 41.3 (2014), pp. 440–56 <https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12083>
  • Bourriaud, Nicolas, ‘Curator’s Statement’, Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2019 <https://bienal.iksv.org/en/16th-istanbul-biennial/curator-s-statement> [accessed 30 March 2022]
  • Corrigan, Lisa M., Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496827944.001.0001>
  • Coulthard, Glen Sean, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816679645.001.0001>
  • Critchley, Simon, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso Books, 2007)
  • Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, ‘Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence’, in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso Books, 2017), pp. 225–40
  • Gordillo, Gastón R., Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376903>
  • Graeber, David, ‘Radical Alterity Is Just Another Way of Saying “Reality”: A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5.2 (2015), pp. 1–41 <https://doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.003>
  • Haraway, Donna J., When Species Meet by Donna Jeanne Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
  • Haraway, Donna J., ‘Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble’, in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. M25–M50
  • Hustak, Carla, and Natasha Myers, ‘Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters’, Differences, 23.3 (2012), pp. 74–118 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892907>
  • Jobson, Ryan Cecil, ‘The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019’, American Anthropologist, 122.2 (2020), pp. 259–71 <https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13398>
  • Karaca, Banu, The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021) <https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823290208.001.0001>
  • Kohn, Eduardo, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) <https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520956865>
  • Kwek, Dorothy H. B., and Robert Seyfert, ‘Affect Matters: Strolling through Heterological Ecologies’, Public Culture, 30.1 (2018), pp. 35–59 <https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-4189155>
  • MacLeish, Kenneth, and Zoë H. Wool, ‘US Military Burn Pits and the Politics of Health’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly Critical Care Blog, 2018 <https://medanthroquarterly.org/critical-care/2018/08/us-military-burn-pits-and-the-politics-of-health/> [accessed 24 March 2022]
  • McKittrick, Katherine, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
  • Muñoz, José Esteban, The Sense of Brown, ed. by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478012566>
  • Myers, Natasha, ‘Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds: A More-than-Natural History of a Black Oak Savannah’, in Between Matter and Method, ed. by Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 73–96 <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003084792-5>
  • Puar, Jasbir K., The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372530>
  • Rancière, Jacques, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, trans. by Davide Panagia and Rachel Bowlby, Theory & Event, 5.3 (2001) <https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2001.0028>
  • Rancière, Jacques, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010)
  • Rubaii, Kali, ‘Birth Defects and the Toxic Legacy of War in Iraq’, Middle East Report, 296 (Fall 2020) <https://merip.org/2020/10/birth-defects-and-the-toxic-legacy-of-war-in-iraq-296
  • Simpson, Audra, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376781>
  • Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Sophia, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503610903>
  • Starn, Orin, ‘HERE COME THE ANTHROS (AGAIN): The Strange Marriage of Anthropology and Native America’, Cultural Anthropology, 26.2 (2011), pp. 179–204 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01094.x>
  • Todd, Zoe, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word For Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 29.1 (2016), pp. 4–22 <https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124>
  • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) <https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873548>
  • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt, ‘Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20’, Current Anthropology, 60.S20 (2019), pp. S186–97 <https://doi.org/10.1086/703391>
  • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou, eds, Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2021) <https://doi.org/10.21627/2020fa>
  • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson, eds, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
  • Vansintjan, Aaron, ‘Going beyond the “Ecological Turn” in the Humanities’, Entitle Blog — A Collaborative Writing Project on Political Ecology, 2016 <https://entitleblog.org/2016/03/01/going-beyond-the-ecological-turn-in-the-humanities/> [accessed 26 July 2019]
  • Vergès, Françoise, ‘Wandering Souls and Returning Ghosts: Writing the History of the Dispossessed’, Yale French Studies, 118/119, 2010, pp. 136–54
  • Vergès, Françoise, ‘Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial?’, in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso Books, 2017), pp. 72–82
  • Weston, Kath, Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw43n>
  • Yıldırım, Umut, ‘Resistant Breathing: Ruined and Decolonial Ecologies in a Middle Eastern Heritage Site’, Current Anthropology, forthcoming

Cite as: Umut Yıldırım, ‘War-torn Ecologies: Human and More-​​than-​Human Intersections of Ethnography and the Arts’, in War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, ed. by Umut Yıldırım, Cultural Inquiry, 27 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 1-25 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-27_1>