Cultures of Energy

164 - Eduardo Kohn


Listen Later

What’s worse than listening to lovebirds on Valentine’s Day? Surely it is listening to them wondering whether the rideshare model can be applied to socks. So feel free to skip past all that nonsense (15:19) to our special holiday conversation with anthropologist and philosopher Eduardo Kohn. We begin with his influential book, How Forests Think, and how Eduardo’s fieldwork in Amazonia and the semiology of Charles Saunders Peirce helped him break down the nature-culture dualities of much western theory. Eduardo walks us through icons and indexes as ways of knowing and being in the world and discusses how the modern (human) investment in symbols and symbolic abstraction has contributed to the Anthropocene trajectory. We talk about academic resistance to engaging the semiosis of life in its broadest sense, why ethnographic method should be celebrated as a form of (iconic) mindful attention to the world, what’s similar about art and science as modes of knowing, and how sylvan thinking can be an ethical practice in the Anthropocene. We turn from there to Eduardo’s current scholarly and creative collaborations that cross legal, scientific and shamanic registers in the interest of “cosmic diplomacy.” We close by talking about the ethical importance of aesthetic experiments and accepting life as a wild guess.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

Cultures of EnergyBy Dominic Boyer

  • 4.9
  • 4.9
  • 4.9
  • 4.9
  • 4.9

4.9

54 ratings


More shows like Cultures of Energy

View all
On Being with Krista Tippett by On Being Studios

On Being with Krista Tippett

10,370 Listeners

The Political Scene | The New Yorker by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

3,912 Listeners

The LRB Podcast by The London Review of Books

The LRB Podcast

292 Listeners

Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry by David Naimon, Tin House Books

Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

444 Listeners

Novara Media by Novara Media

Novara Media

160 Listeners

The Dig by Daniel Denvir

The Dig

1,520 Listeners

The New Yorker Radio Hour by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

The New Yorker Radio Hour

6,682 Listeners

Politics Theory Other by Politics Theory Other

Politics Theory Other

153 Listeners

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat by New York Times Opinion

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

6,728 Listeners

Throughline by NPR

Throughline

15,930 Listeners

Acid Horizon by Acid Horizon

Acid Horizon

176 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,293 Listeners

Ones and Tooze by Foreign  Policy

Ones and Tooze

338 Listeners

Ordinary Unhappiness by Patrick & Abby

Ordinary Unhappiness

201 Listeners

Past Present Future by David Runciman

Past Present Future

317 Listeners