Introduction

Abstract

The contributions in this special issue focus on different phenomena and conceptual approaches dealing with “the Posthuman” as a discourse of renegotiating nature-culture-relationships that has emerged over the past decades. The selected articles from fields of sociology, political science, and social anthropology demonstrate how to work with and discuss posthumanistic and post-anthropocentric perspectives, but also how to irritate and criticize universal assumptions of particular posthuman approaches empirically and theoretically. The introduction aims to position the particular contributions in a field of tension between de- and re-centering human beings and human agency.

Plural Nature(s): An Overview of Their Sociocultural Construction

“…This perspective points to their interdependence, illustrating how the physical and symbolic realms, human bodies, language, narratives, and realities are intricately interconnected. More recently, a current of thought called "Posthumanism" has proposed a reassessment of the nature-culture relationship that has developed in recent decades [53], deconstructing human-centric views by decentering the human in discussions about nature. Scholars in this field explore the agency and subjectivity of non-human entities, including animals, ecosystems, and technologies, emphasizing the entanglement of humans and non-humans in the construction of nature [54].…”