Relating With More Than Humans

Within the social sciences, other-than-human being’s agency has often been denied and interbeings relationships have not been fully addressed. However, many indigenous worldviews and Western contemporary spiritual practices are shaping a very different reality, with various attempts to share the world with non-human beings, animate or inanimate, creating forms of relationships to “the living”. This edited volume documents how humans deal with non-human entities in a large variety of cultural contexts. It focuses on ritual processes and how ritual creativity is mobilised to invent new ways of relating with more-than-humans. Comprising nine case studies, the volume is divided into three main sections that address successively daily interactions, political implications, and spiritual engagements. Cooperative interactions, kinship relations, senses of belonging, traditional healing techniques, non-human beings’ legal personality attribution, transformative experiences, and phenomenological relationalities are examined in various locations: West Africa, Buryatia, Estonia, Finland, France, Mexico, Nepalese Himalayas, Sweden and Wales. Chapters "Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality and Spiritual Practices in a Living World—An Introduction" and "Ritual Animism: Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Socio-environmental crises are currently transforming the conditions for life on this planet, from climate change, to resource depletion, biodiversity loss and long-term pollutants. The vast scale of these changes, affecting land, sea and air have prompted calls for the ‘ecologicalisation’ of knowledge. This book adopts a much needed ‘more-than-human’ framework to grasp these complexities and challenges. It contains multidisciplinary insights and diverse methodological approaches to question how to revise, reshape and invent methods in order to work with non-humans in participatory ways. The book offers a framework for thinking critically about the promises and potentialities of participation from within a more-than-human paradigm, and opens up trajectories for its future development. It will be of interest to those working in the environmental humanities, animal studies, science and technology studies, ecology, and anthropology.

In this book, John Birtchnell offers a new theory as the basis for a science of relating. While links can be made between it and classical interpersonal theory, it has many new and original features.; The theory states that the relating of humans must have evolved out of, and be in continuity with, the relating of all other animals. The fundamental relating objective of both humans and animals can most easily be defined Identifying That Basic Framework Of Motives Which Is Common To Both.; Birtchnell proposes that such a framework is best constructed around two major axes, a horizontal one concerning the degree to which we need to become involved with or separated from others, and a vertical one concerning the degree to which we choose to exercise power over others or permit others to exercise their power over us. We differ from other animals in the horizontal axis in the extent to which we have expanded our proclivity for close involvement, and on the vertical axis in the extent to which we have become prepared to utilize such forms of power as we have, or have acquired, for the benefit of others. As a consequence of our greater involvement, we are capable of being concerned about and respectful of the needs of others, and trusting of those who are prepared to utilize their power for our benefit, though we remain capable of being disrespectful and non-trusting.; The four objectives derived from the proposed framework are called closeness, distance, upperness and lowerness, and a large part of the book is devoted to describing their characteristics. The book also explores the use of the framework as a means of classifying personality disorders and mental illness.; This book shoud be of interest to professionals and students interested in human relationsships, including psychiatrists, clinical and social psychologists, and psychotherapists.

This forward-looking Research Handbook makes an insightful contribution to the emerging field of studies on communication of, by and with AI. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from over 50 leading international scholars across various fields, it provides a comprehensive overview of the complex intersections between AI and communication.

Socio-environmental crises are currently transforming the conditions for life on this planet, from climate change, to resource depletion, biodiversity loss and long-term pollutants. The vast scale of these changes, affecting land, sea and air have prompted calls for the ‘ecologicalisation’ of knowledge. This book adopts a much needed ‘more-than-human’ framework to grasp these complexities and challenges. It contains multidisciplinary insights and diverse methodological approaches to question how to revise, reshape and invent methods in order to work with non-humans in participatory ways. The book offers a framework for thinking critically about the promises and potentialities of participation from within a more-than-human paradigm, and opens up trajectories for its future development. It will be of interest to those working in the environmental humanities, animal studies, science and technology studies, ecology, and anthropology.