Wilder powers

Langford, Jean M.

doi:10.14318/hau3.3.010

Cited by 15 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…One has to find a place so that everything is in order, but this order is always prone to disruptions (Rennesson, 2019, p. 10);; for example, by construction work. The disorderly wild pa thuean (ป่ าเถื & อน) becomes a space of intensified change, as boundaries between entities turn even more porous (Langford, 2013). Here, rapid change might lead to full disintegration at the limit-point of death (and subsequent rebirth) or to becoming some other entity, as borders between beings have never been stable.…”

Section: Taking Care Of Tropical Zombiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemics and 'Zombies': How to Think Tropical Imaginaries with Cinematic Cosmologies

Kroulík

2021

eTropic

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The tropics in occidental imaginaries are typically coded as either edenic paradise or as hell. It is in the latter mode that they come to be linked with zombies, diseases, and questions relating to the autonomy of the human body. In this article I first summarise historical connections between colonialism and the tropics as expressed through dealings with disease set against a background of Christian-secular cosmology. I then further think the issue with two films that approach disease and the tropics through the zombie, which I conceive of as radical heteronomy. One film, Zombi 2, is a Euro-American engagement with the tropics as imagined from a temperate zone and a Christian tradition. The other, Cemetery of Splendor, is a Thai film that engages notions of disease and the autonomy of the human body from within the tropics and a Buddhist imaginary. I tie these questions of disease, ‘zombies’ and the tropics in with more general discussions of cosmologies, including those of the moderns. The displacement of modern ontological certainty (which is imagined through the zombie and conditioned by cultural and ideological imagination) opens a space for engaging the problem of a pandemic with notions of subjectivity and corporeality. An underlying thematic throughout this article is an argument for the importance of the cinema image in dealing with bio/socio/political issues. Here, in this translation of the cinematic world into discourse we are engaged at the intersection of tropics, disease, bodies and heteronomy.

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Section: Taking Care Of Tropical Zombiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemics and 'Zombies': How to Think Tropical Imaginaries with Cinematic Cosmologies

Kroulík

2021

eTropic

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Language, Translation, Trauma

Pillen

2016

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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Contemporary definitions of trauma and their application remain controversial within anthropology. A survivor's awareness of a parallel, incompatible world of atrocity is understood to bypass language or conscious expression. Such a framework can be compared with ethnographic work on the silence of survivors. Experiences of inhumanity and extreme violence eventually find a discursive niche but nevertheless pose problems of translation. Through the lens of traditional anthropology another realm emerges—a world of vampires, zombies, and cannibals. “Crimes against humanity” can be added to the list, but overall translations seem oriented toward the maintenance of interpretative control, even in contexts of mass dehumanization. Anthropologists are well placed to pay attention to both the complex evidential systems of survivors and the construction of liberal voices. The image of trauma and its untranslatability, however, linger in the background of interventions and point to the vital but endangered bond between language and humanity.

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Avian Bedlam

Langford¹

2017

Environmental Humanities

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At an urban parrot sanctuary in the Midwestern USA, humans care for eightysome parrots from more than a dozen species. Many of these parrots have personal histories that include various forms of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. The article explores the forms of interspecies communication through which human caretakers interpret and respond to the psychic lives of these parrots-psychic lives that are marked by troubles ranging from social withdrawal to self-destructive behavior. These interspecies communications include body language, gesture, nonverbal vocalizations, and human-language phrases. While biosemiotic theory offers a provocative starting point for understanding these communications, sanctuary interactions destabilize certain semiotic distinctions, drawing attention to ambiguities between semantic and nonsemantic vocalization, vocalization and body language, informative speech and expletive, and communication and symptom. Building on ideas about metacommunication in animal play, I suggest that both psychic trouble and interactions to ease that trouble might be considered forms of biosemiotic creativity. By loosening and opening up the distinctions frequently drawn between human and other-than-human semiosis, it is possible to develop subtler accounts of the semiotic improvisations that emerge in uniquely configured multispecies communities such as the sanctuary.

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Wilder powers

Cited by 15 publications

References 16 publications

Pandemics and 'Zombies': How to Think Tropical Imaginaries with Cinematic Cosmologies

Pandemics and 'Zombies': How to Think Tropical Imaginaries with Cinematic Cosmologies

Language, Translation, Trauma

Avian Bedlam

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