In his lucid introduction, Thomas Lamarre, Stengers’s translator, considers this book ‘a summation of Stengers’s work to date’, as she ‘relays’ Whitehead’s thought to grapple with contemporary issues in our ‘times of collapse’. In this she is continuing the work of her longer Thinking with Whitehead that did much to relaunch the somewhat forgotten Whitehead, via Europe and back to readers in the anglosphere. This review article takes Stengers’s cue to test its ideas elsewhere, specifically among the Goolarabooloo people in (...) North-West Australia, fairly recently colonised and resisting the modernisation frontier of which Stengers is very critical. To that end, this article finds field philosophy, as in the environmental humanities, a commensurate approach, as it teases out some Indigenous Australian concepts that ‘make sense in common’ with Stengers’s Whitehead. (shrink)

In this interview, Vinciane Despret discusses the importance of Bruno Latour to her work. In particular, she addresses the questions of methodology. She examines why it is necessary to invent a new method for each new object we study and how we can become more attentive as scientists, especially those specialising in ethology, to the ways in which humans and non-humans are interested in each other. Finally, Despret considers how we can inherit from Bruno Latour’s work for our future thinking.

Indigenous cultures have an immanentist ontological basis, as opposed to the largely Western ontology of transcendence. We explore the implications for this assertion in the different ways that technological artifacts can be seen to articulate with human and non-human bodies in extended ecologies. Our method is one of an Indigenous critique of modernity, which aims iconoclastically to deflate the faith, hope and idealism often invested in technologies. Our (counter) examples emerge from the TV series Bush Mechanics, where practical skills are (...) articulated with blackfella magical powers. These illustrate how bush ecologies are vastly different from suburban car cultures, such that what really matters in people’s coarticulations with machines is now open to philosophical speculation via an Indigenous critique of Western modernity. (Indigenous) powers of immanence can be opposed to (Western) powers of transcendence, we argue, through disclosure of the operations of the ecologies that sustain them. (shrink)

1. IntroductionIt is an increasingly accepted protocol to situate oneself discursively in order to approach a set of problems. This protocol, consolidated by Donna Haraway’s famous “situated knowledge,” is also evident in everyday Indigenous Australian practice.1 I begin, therefore, with my long association with the Goolarabooloo community in Broome, North-West Australia, and in particular with Paddy Roe, who started teaching me in the late 1970s. This text attempts to translate his sense of belonging to that territory, an attachment he had (...) to struggle to maintain, both in the face of ongoing destructive colonization and also in the face of other Aboriginal territorial claims. These collective attachments are therefore inflected by history—not just settler history, but Indigenous history that has changed in relation to colonization. These changes are wrought through overwhelmingly rapid material changes, shifting institutional alliances, contested concepts, and new practices. This ethnographic history is an attempt to provide an overview of some of these changes in the North-West corner of Australia over the last forty years. (shrink)

This article argues that the concept of translation is central to the work of Bruno Latour, starting before ANT, with the group working on the sociologie de la traduction at the École des Mines. As one of his translators, I reflect on the extension of his identity via translation, then on the idea of translation as ‘political labour’ across social discontinuities, including those in colonisation contexts where certain languages can become hegemonic. Finally, with Latour’s major project, the Inquiry into Modes (...) of Existence, translation continues its descriptive task, but carries so much weight over the various modes of existence that it qualifies as a key philosophical concept of considerable analytic value. (shrink)

Rather than mourn what this country lacks from a safe critical distance, Muecke and Pam aim to strengthen its connections with their art, making words and images move as they travel this unique country.

Stephen Muecke, one of the originators of fictocritical writing, presents a selection of his best essays in this innovative genre.

Aboriginal Heritage Trails are a growing phenomenon in Australia. They come in all shapes and sizes, from mere signage to—in the case of the famous Lurujarri trail out of Broome, Western Australia—...