Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and the author of, most recently,
The Fossils and the Bones
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Published:September 2016
Chapter 3 starts with a conversation between the author and two of her Indigenous colleagues on a remote beach in the Northern Territory of Australia after the discovery of the rib cage of a durlgmö (a plesiosaurus). The chapter uses this and other personal and aesthetic encounters with fossils and bones to demonstrate how contemporary debates in speculative realism and object-oriented ontologies engage, contain, and discipline Indigenous understandings of the fundamental task of human thought in the context of awa-gami-mari-ntheni (a manifestation)—when something not merely appears to something or someone else but discloses itself as comment on the coordination, orientation,...
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