A NEW LEXICON: BEYOND “OTHERNESS”
We need to think of “nature” not as something out-there in a distant forest or remote geography, but as an immediate relationship with the world in which we inhabit — an ecological intimacy and not an “other;” so close and immediate that it shapes our very identities, and shapes our experience of it.
We must remind ourselves that our identities are not solely shaped by religious, cultural, or social beliefs, but also by the multitude of organisms that comprise our bodies, with whom we have co-existed and co-evolved, and that we are shaped by and through planetary temporal and spatial spheres. Nature, then, is an ecology of the “self” — immanent and immersive.
Such a recognition of our inter-dependent identities is also a powerful means to transform ourselves into non-alienated beings. It allows us to re-imagine ourselves from isolated, individual selves to being integral parts of many complex webs of communities and interactions. It serves to de-centre us — the “human” — from the hierarchical and privileged apex space we have come to occupy, to become more horizontally co-evolved and vulnerable beings. By giving up such a false privilege we could empower ourselves, since it allows us to adopt an ethics of co-existence — and indeed of survival — which can help to modify the ways in which the actions of some of us have caused an overstepping of planetary limits, and ultimately, to heal the wounds of the anthropocene.
Situating nature back in such an ecology of inter-connections is to decolonise it and rethink it as an entangled relationship. It can help us recognise that more-than-human thought exists, as does more-than-human agency and personhood. Post-anthropogenic futures will be built upon such a repositioning, and its implications are deep, epistemological, and ontological, and go beyond the nature-culture divide.
In such a re-configuration, what kind of knowledges, languages, and understandings will we need in order to inhabit (or re-inhabit) a new world? How will we repair the division of knowledge systems between, for example, the sciences with the stories and traditional myths of those who have lived in harmony with nature for generations, practising mutual respect and codependency? What kind of lexicon and glossary of terms will we need not to separate our worlds but rather create a complete whole, and to resituate ourselves into our local-ness? The task is not a simple one. It has been complicated by centuries of extractive logic, across the material, spiritual, and pedagogical realms.
One possible approach is to create a new lexicon and glossary that enables us to occupy our new-found knowledges and terrains. The publication Growing Lexicon is an attempt in that direction. Below are some examples of words documented within it, as suggested by 32 artists as part of the larger project on multispecies worlds. It is also an invitation to create our own words, which explode the boundaries of the binary.
Some of these contributions include:
Project by Ravi Agarwal – www.multispeciesart.org
Contributors include: Arunkumar H.G, Gram Art Project Collective, Vibha Galhotra, Gigi Scaria, Paribartana Mohanty, Ranbir Kaleka & Vir Vikram Singh Kaleka, Sahil Naik, Sahej Rahal, Tanmoy Samanta, Sudarshan Shetty, Raqs Media Collective, Rohini Devasher, Rashmi Kaleka, Gyanwant Yadav, Navjot Altaf, Babu Eshwar Prasad, Parag Kamal Kashinath Tandel, Umesh Singh, Maya Ko’vskaya & Gao Yanqin, Achia Anzi, Ishan Tankha, Sharbendu De, Dharmendra Prasad, Rajyashri Goody, Sonia Mehra Chawla, Blaise Joseph, Gopa Roy, Himali Singh Soin, Michael Günzburger, Sujit Mallik, Stella Mayakóvskaya, and Prabhakar Pachpute.
1 • Samtal Jameer and Samtal Jameen (Equal Terrains, Equal Selves):
Jeeva Jaala:
This intricate tapestry of the animate / inanimate, the visible / invisible I search for equilibrium in the forest of termite mounds. It is a term used by 12th century reformist Basavanna to describe the web of life.
Kal:
The many tongues of the Indian subcontinent, utter the words ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ in a single pronouncement, one that awaits us, a day away from now.
Nirbhara:
The means dependence on oneself or on the other. Like domestics and pet animals depends on the human. For example, during the rainy season, the water used to accumulate in a pond and by virtue of which water level used to be maintained. In that pond, different kinds of animals and birds drank water with freedom any time and hence depended on that pond. But now the pond has disappeared due to which animals and birds have to face the problems of drinking water.
Hiraeth (Cymraeg) / Saudade:
Untranslatable, yet meaning many things in their distance, is nostalgia, longing and a seething desire; sometimes a sense of regret. A yearning for a home and land that cannot be returned to or one that no longer exists; a deep and irrational bond felt with a time, ecology, and place, irretrievably; the desire for a beloved, made painful by absence.
Bio Contrivance:
The subtle entanglement between bios and artifice, such that it becomes hard to tell in the overlapping buzz where exactly life-force blurs into machinic efficacy, or vice-versa. Nano-mechanical lenses fitted into the panopticon-house fly’s compound eye were a bio-contrivance that preempted the hardening of the human eye by seducing it with exuberant vividness
Gexing:
A Chinese neologism for non-speciesist personhood that includes both human and more-than-human or other-than-human beings, that does not problematically re-center the human as does the extensional concept of “nonhuman personhood.