Animals and Anthropology (2018) AnthroPod podcast. A good source for learning about approaches animal studies offer anthropology (and arts). When human interests (white male) are positioned outside the focus of a study, different beings have the opportunity to emerge. For example “wildness” (as a state of being) is linked to colonial views of what nature is. Wildlife reserves are for animals which fit westerners views on how wild beings should behave – Uninterfered by human development, like in paradise. The podcast provides (yet an other) argument that anthropomorphisation is not as bad as previously thought, when it offers us a way to approach others (as informants of situated knowledge). There is also a call for decolonisation of animal studies.
More-than-Human Politics (2016) AnthroPod podcast. A less compact series of talks and discussions, which investigates how to translate nonhuman knowledge into words and texts. I think this is a silly question to begin with… It’s not actually a question, it’s a statement (or a prayer, like loreipsum), uttered to further the omnipotence of words. The statement is fuelled by able-bodied nostalgia and a mystic believe that there is a meaning behind what we experience. Judging from a recent column Sofie Oksanen is a victim of the same mysticism A Soviet shadow looms over the Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki (2018).
Language shapes reality, and our recent history still makes Finland behave in a certain way.