This collage aims to free our thinking from the excessive conceptual baggage that were accumulated as a result of our exclusive attention—to the neglect of everything else—to that which makes us human exceptional.
The logic of living dynamics beyond humans, and the sorts of ancillary phenomena created through it, might at first appear strange and counterintuitive. But they permeate our every day lives, and they might help us understand our lives differently if we could just learn to look for them. One example is the wide-spread connection between the topology of landscape and human bodies.
A Zan verse on mountains and water (山水;also means landscape in Chinese)says
看山是山 看水是水
看山不是山 看水不是水
看山仍然是山 看水依然是水
青原惟信禅师
《指月录 卷二十八 六祖下第十四世》
The first stage, seeing mountain as mountain and water as water; the second stage, seeing mountain not as mountain and water not as water; and the third stage, seeing mountain still as mountain and water still as water.
Recording of pointing at the moon: Scroll 28
The emphasis on defamiliarization—coming to see the strange as familiar so that the familiar appears strange—calls to mind a long anthropological tradition that focuses on how an appreciation for context (historical, social, cultural) destabilizes what we take to be natural and immutable modes of being. And yet, when compared to the distance-making practice associated with more traditional liberatory ethnographic or genealogical exercises, seeing the human from somewhat beyond the human does not merely destabilizes the taken-for-granted; it changes the very terms of analysis and comparison.
This reach-beyond-the-human changes our understanding of the foundational analytical concepts such as context but also others, such as representation, relation, self, ends, difference, similarity, life, the real, mind, person, thought, form finitude, future, history, cause, agency, relation, hierarchy, and generality. It changes what we mean by these terms and where we located the phenomena to which they refer, as well as our understanding of the effects such phenomena have in the living world in which we reside. *
* Kohn E. How Forests Think : Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. University Of California Press; 2015.