Ecologies of Participation: Agents, Shamans, Mystics, and Diviners

(Hardback)

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In this daring debut, Zayin Cabot challenges the wise homebodies of academia. A profoundly interdisciplinary approach to comparative scholarship, Ecologies of Participation offers a methodology whereby we can face our shared planetary predicament. It is grounded in process philosophy, and asserts the importance of a new ontology of agency. It traces the importance of Lvy-Bruhl and Lvi-Strausss early work, while offering new insight into the ontological turn in anthropology. This book sets out to destabilize modern reductionist trends toward scientific materialism, without falling into postmodern cultural constructivism. It does not assume the givenness of nature or culture. By advancing a multi-ontology approach, this work offers robust interventions into decolonial and critical studies. Cabot takes contemporary scholarship in new and exciting directionsoffering an unstable ground from which to examine our shared worlds, both human and other. Throughout the last chapters of the book, these threads are illuminated through a detailed ethics of comparison and participation.

Reviews

This a book that is impossible to capture in some neat established academic sound-bite, mostly because its multiple claims are all quite impossibleimpossible, that is, within our present Western and colonized ways of speaking, thinking, and being. If we can imagine ourselves outside or after that framework, we might say that the book, like its author, is a shaman, and a diviner, and a traveler among worlds, including future worlds. The vision of the human (and nonhuman) that emerges through these words and worlds is unabashedly global, comparative, moral, and magical. Here is a weird and wonderful book in which everything is alive and even the stones tell stories. Really. -- Jeffrey J. Kripal, Rice University
This is a revolutionary book that combines the sensibilities of the scholar and the shaman. It boldly challenges us to entertain the feasibility of ontologically thick multiple worlds in creatively enriching and eco-sensitive ways. Engaging the works of authors as diverse as Alfred North Whitehead, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Jeffrey J. Kripal,Ecologies of Participationdemonstrates the fruitfulness of a genuinely transdisciplinary, decolonial thinking in casting new light on an impressive array of philosophical and cross-cultural dilemmas. Cabots invitation to inhabit multiple ecologies is as timely as it is essential for our unprecedentedly planetary times. -- Jorge N. Ferrer, California Institute of Integral Studies
A joyful, verve-driven contribution to the conversation about the role of ontological difference in getting a handle on what used to be called cultural diversity. Impressive in its scope and ambition, this book takes the whole debate about ontology in the humanities and social sciences to places its never been before. -- Martin Holbraad, University College London

Author Bio

Zayin Cabot is lecturer of philosophy and religion at California State University, East Bay.