9 Questioning a Posthumanist Political Ecology: Ontologies, Environmental Materialities, and the Political in Iron Age South India

Abstract

This paper examines the political ecology of an 80 km2 region of central Karnataka, detailing how social relationships of inequality were linked with the production of a variety of meaningful places and environmental resources in Iron Age (1200–300 BCE) South India. Such analysis is then intersected with modern framings of inselberg landforms as spaces of “Nature,” demonstrating how such framings potentially silence humans in their environmental history and reproduce a nature–society binary that has substantial implications for the politics of land use and conservation today. In doing so, the paper critically considers the implications and limitations of a posthumanist political ecology that advocates nonhumans as “actors” that contribute to socio‐political histories for understanding the politics of environmental production, both past and present.

Critical Geoarchaeology: From Depositional Processes to the Sociopolitics of Earthen Life

“…They argue that, in the context of the South Indian Iron Age (1200-300 BCE), the value placed on herd animals and herding resources heightened the social and political consequences of anthropogenic soil erosion, which shifted the distribution of available pasture and contributed to the emergence of social inequalities during the second and first millennium BCE (e.g., Bauer 2015, Bauer & Kosiba 2016. In other words, the ability of soils to shrink, swell, transform, and move dynamically contributed to the configuration of social conditions within this specific cultural context (see also Bauer 2018a).…”

The politics and historicity of megalithic places in early South India

“…Megalithic monuments were integral parts of the ongoing production of historicities related to the constitution of social collectives and specific places and resources, but only as mediated through cultural systems of value and signification (e.g. Preucel, 2020; see also Bauer, 2018; Bauer and Kosiba, 2016). Thus, while we are appreciative of aspects of new materialist frameworks, we see significant shortcomings in fully embracing the symmetrical project (e.g.…”

“…Detailed recording of “off-site” artifacts or “background” scatters by MARP has also pointed to significant spatial patterns in prehistoric agricultural production and expansion (e.g. Bauer, 2018). For instance, the earliest evidence for field manuring or fertilization practices on the peneplain date to the Iron Age or early historic period, when inhabitants primarily made use of the moisture-retentive, clay-rich soils of the eastern portion of the study region.…”

Ethics, Not Objects

“…If we are only interested in charting relationships among entities, and we consider people no more important than any other entities in the network, then we have no logical means by which we can hold perpetrators of violence and suffering to be accountable for their actions (Bernbeck 2018, 365). If our ontology is ‘flat’, what happens to inequalities and power relationships (Bauer 2018; Fernández-Götz et al 2020; Van Dyke 2015)?…”