Event Description
This talk takes as its starting point Muhammad Asad’s observation in The Message of the Quran that human sense-perception is limited and that there must therefore be more-than-human worlds “beyond our ken.” Drawing together contemporary ethological work on animals’ sensory worlds and a 10th-century Islamic epistle on animals’ capacities to worship the divine, Fernando imagines possible worlds that nonhumans—dogs and ghosts, pigs and gods, cats and jinn—may be worlding without and unbeknownst to humans. Such not-knowing decenters the secular fantasy of human mastery that underpins the Anthropocene. Riffing on the concept of negative theology, Fernando argues for a kind of negative zoology, where the human is an onto-epistemological limit and the difference of the other—divine, animal—is unbridgeable, and offers limit as an ethical and political opportunity for a more-than-secular orientation to living and acting as humans.
Event Speaker
Mayanthi Fernando, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Event Information
Open to Columbia University ID holders; registration required. For more information, please visit the event webpage. Please visit the Heyman’s Center website for directions.
Hosted by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
