Uncanny Ecologies

Abstract

If secularity ushered in the notion of humans as buffered subjects immune to nonhuman agents, recent attempts to recognize the agency of nonhumans and to see humans as always in relation to nonhumans—the natureculture turn—may be understood as both a posthumanist and postsecularist project. Yet this scholarship has largely restricted nonhumans to entities previously classified as “natural” phenomena, leaving “supernatural” beings out of the conversation and leaving the distinction between nature and supernature intact. Fernando argues that fully undoing the nature/culture distinction means attending to this third domain—the more-than-natural—still banished from our ontological horizons. This is especially important for any consideration of the Anthropocene, since climate crisis affects communities that do not live only in secular worlds nor abide only by secular categories. The author therefore turns to South Asia to theorize what she calls uncanny ecologies—that is, interspecies webs of care and commitment among animals, humans, and deities. The author also asks why these nonsecular multispecies worlds have not been taken up as viable models of relationality and Anthropocene livability to the extent that Amerindian ontologies have, speculating that more-than-natural, more-than-human agency remains a problem for secular sensibilities.