The Politics of Matter and the Matter of Politics

Catalog description

What is nature? What is culture? What kinds of practices and actors constitute what we call science? Who and what constitute the sphere we refer to as politics? A number of theoretical developments in cultural anthropology, political theory, critical geography, and feminist science studies have problematized the modernist ontological divide between Nature and Culture and a whole series of binary oppositions (such as objects/subjects, matter/form, bio/geo) that follow from it. Taking inspiration from this literature and placing it in conversation with Native and Indigenous scholarship and a series of contemporary socio-environmental struggles occurring in Latin America and beyond, this course will discuss the conceptual-methodological tools that a concern with politics of matter has generated. The epistemic and political implications of these tools go beyond their analytical usefulness as innovative devices to explore novel phenomena. They complicate well-established fields of inquiry, such as political ecology and economy, environmental studies, ethics, social justice, and modern politics; and, indeed, the singular ontology that these fields may inadvertently and explicitly sustain. We will explore how it is that things, stuff, matter, 'nature' came to fall outside modern politics as such, and the kinds of ethico-political repercussions that problematizing this division may produce.