| Description |
We cannot take for granted that when we speak of “the human†we speak of something unchanging, unquestionable, ontologically durable. On the contrary, what it means to be the kinds of beings that we are is always fluctuating in response to forces beyond our control. Historically, deathcare practices have forcefully impinged upon how we think of ourselves. For more than 150 years in the United States, conventional burial and cremation have been working to materialize Enlightenment ideas of humans as discrete, autonomous, and self-contained beings, thus estranging us from our very conditions of (im)possibility. In Mortal Assemblages, I argue that contemporary shifts in the rhetoric and practice of deathcare are transforming how some groups think about what it means to be human. Tracking several emergent ruptures to this predominant way of thinking, I demonstrate how long held ideals of the human are giving way to more ecological understandings. The cases that animate this project variously disperse, decompose, and digest classical concepts of human subjectivity in favor of thinking the human as finite gatherings of material-symbolic forces. Marshaling resources from the fields of rhetoric, history, continental philosophy, social theory, and ecology, I extrapolate from texts circulating in and around the practices of conservation burial, human composting, and consumptive reciprocity to create concepts that might help us better respond to the fact that we are fundamentally, collectively, and inescapably entangled in complex ecosystems. |
