Non-Anthropocentric (Kincentric) Culture

Given the baggage of the human/non-human binary within Western culture (see everyday term: "Human”), it’s perhaps no surprise that qualifying culture as non-anthropocentric is something that Western culture and thus scholarship is only more recently taking an interest in, what some rhetoricians refer to as the “ecological turn.” For example, Indigenous cultures have long acknowledged the interdependence of human and non-human existence. Kyle Whyte explains that Anishinaabe traditions include the philosophy that “nonhumans have their own agency, spirituality, knowledge, and intelligence.”[1] He writes:

Interdependence highlights reciprocity or mutuality between humans and the environment as a central feature of existence. In Anishinaabe traditions, reciprocity is also systematized. That is, environmental identities and responsibilities are coordinated with one another through complex social, cultural, economic, and political institutions. Interdependence suggests a much larger system of “reciprocities” that characterize many hundreds of relationships of interlocking/intersecting relationships across entire societies.[2]

For Whyte, the essential understanding that culture is more-than-human creates the basis for Indigenous identification with the environment, one that includes mutual responsibilities. Glen Coulthard further theorizes this ethical obligation to the environment as “grounded normativity,” by which he means “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.”[3] For Coulthard, the project settler colonialism has intentionally targeted these practices in order to undermine the resilience of Indigenous lifeways.

Much more recently cultural studies has taken an interest in a non-anthropocentric notion of culture. Jennifer Daryl Slack’s definition writes that we ought not to let “Eco” become yet another preposition (like cyber, techno, queer), marking out a space of study as we consider culture. Instead, Slack suggests we study culture as the “co-evolution of all these significant articulating vectors, factors, or bodies.”[4] Insisting on culture in a non-anthropocentric sense, she defines it as follows: “[C]ulture is an active process of articulating flows within which relations of power are reproduced resisted and transformed. There are no neatly parsed, fixed ‘humans’ or ‘other than humans’ or for that matter cyborgs, in this concept of culture. There are only intermingling modalities, configuring bodies, geomorphs, biorhythms, herds.”[5]

For the explicit purpose of water politics in the arid American West, I suggest that (as we strive to articulate non-anthropocentric definitions of culture, as we talk about the water cycle, as we advocate politically for a restructuring of colonial water infrastructure) we take up Slack’s call to radically rethink culture as a more-than-human site of struggle. But that we do so by simultaneously centering Indigenous knowledge systems. For example, for me, that means listening to, deploying, and appropriately citing Indigenous terminology such as “reciprocity,” “restoration,” and “interdependence” instead of inventing new settler language to explain the same phenomena. 

It is in this spirit that I think cultural studies’ definition of non-anthropocentric culture ought to center Indigenous theory. For me, this theoretical frame is thus the most unstable and contextual. The amendment to Slack’s definition of non-anthropocentric “culture” that I would suggest at present is a turn to kincentricity. For example, Enrique Salmon writes that “In the minds of Rarámuri, [more-than-human lives] are not anthropomorphized. Instead, they are human but with different features.”[6] In this light, one of my temporary definitions of culture is a kincentric process of interdependent, co-embodied struggle in which relations of power are reproduced, resisted, and transformed.  

[1] Kyle Whyte, “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice,” Environment and Society 9, no. 1 (2018): 127, https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090109.

[2] Whyte, 128.

[3] Whyte, 128.

[4] Jennifer Daryl Slack, “RESISTING ECOCULTURAL STUDIES,” Cultural Studies 22, no. 3–4 (May 1, 2008): 493, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380802012575.

[5] Daryl Slack, 494.

[6] Salmon, Eating the Landscape, 17.