Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

0:00Welcome to the new books network. Hi guys, welcome to the new books that work. I'm your host Yadong Lee, a PhD candidate in socio-cortranthropology at Tulane University. In today's episode, we are going to discuss a book about conservation, settler colonialism and a fundamental question. What does it mean to be human in a time of increasing environmental uncertainty? Well in the forest of southern Chile, today's new book draws a more than a decade of feetwork with small-holding settlers, indigenous-mapucing communities, environmental activists and entrepreneurs and conservation scientists. It shows how conservation politics take place amid the lasting efforts of settler-caused environmental depletion, completing ideas of care and being human and different ways of relating to landscape and non-human beings. I'm very glad to have the author, Dr. Pierre George, D. Jimi Niani, with us today. So, Pierre-Law, welcome to the new books network.

1:00Thank you very much, Yadong. It's a honour to be talking to you tonight. It's my pleasure to talk and review about this fascinating book. The book we'll be discussing today is Auto-Humorism, becoming human on a conservation from tier. Polish by the University of Arizona Press in 2025. Our guest, Dr. Pierre-Law D. Jimi Niani, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Pontifico Cast Lake University of Chile. His research focused on land, indigeneity, conservation, agriculture and a state craft based on ethnographic work in Chile and Italy. He's also the author of Sentient Lens, Indigeneity, Property and a Political Imagination in New Liberal Chile. He also published by the University of Arizona Press in 2015, as well as co-editors of several volumes on indigenous relations, environmental politics and reparations in Latin America. So to begin, Pierre-Law, could you briefly introduce yourself to your listener, although

2:02you have already done another MBA interview several months ago and many of our listeners might have already listened to this conversation. But I want to invite you to do another self-introduction, so what is your academic background, what are your main research interests and many research questions that have guided your research from your earlier work to this study of contested human-involvement relations in South-Winchilly. Thank you very much, Edong. My research trajectory, I think the starting point is my PhD thesis, but now a few years ago, which is based on research in South-Winchilly about indigenous land claims, which eventually turned into that which is late 2000, early 2010s and eventually turned into monographed published in Spanish and then in English as the topic of indigenous land claims is very

3:09contentious and it's yes to do with the basic questions about democracy and multiculturalism in Chile. And I wanted to have the book published in Spanish first and then I had the chance of really working a slightly more theoretical version in this, which ended up in as a monograph in 2018, sentient lands. So after my PhD, after I finished my PhD, I moved to Chile and I pretty much had my entire career there and pretty like that time was a small department and now eventually became quite a large one. And I had the chance of carrying out mostly research in Chile and more recently I had the chance of bringing some of the questions that was interested in to my home country, Italy and we'll see how that goes. But the book we'll be talking about today, Alter Humanism has to do with also the Parama

4:13Life where I wanted to develop research on conservation and quickly realized that I had to be done with emphasis and focus on different forms of social grouping and different forms of different modes of life that exists around the conservation movement and conservation economy. So from an initial interest, they sort of write the politically college conservation, let's do with dispossession, eviction and exclusion from conservation benefits. It gradually turned into an interest into how as humans we would build our own differences by engaging with non-human life. Fantastic. I think you situated your lost ethnography in newly brought Chile and for this book a key concept and the main context where different group of people meet each other and different

5:16story happen is the conservation frontier. This is not simply a remote forest where conservation politics happens but a space midst through overlapping histories of settlement, resource extraction, nation building, and environmental rhythm and new green economies. So how do you define a conservation frontier and where is the frontier study in terms of as landscapes, communities who live there and the institutions that seek to manage, protect or govern it? Thanks. You said it perfectly. I mean, the idea of frontier is usually associated with the remote space but instead as many authors of self-conjography, social theory and topology, a frontier is something that we do to space. It's a process rather than a geographical construct in itself. So when I started working on forest conservation, Sanduncilus and realized that this particular

6:17area was there with many overlapping histories that pretty much focused on the premature date around one particular historical process which is the transition from a resource frontier to frontier where nature becomes a commodity for experiential tourism and for the new green economy. So in that sense that frontier forest is the site of multiple histories. One history, one significant history is of course a nation building. As in many countries across Latin America and I think that applies to quite a lot of many post-colonial contexts, national parks and conservation areas are the history of being built for geopolitical purposes. So establishing conservation, protected areas in the Andes and Chile was the way of

7:19we're setting national sovereignty in the face of possible claims from Argentina and simply the presence of Chinese and populations and farmers who have moved from one place to another without clear national identification. So that's one particular history that is crucial. The second issue is the fact that forest frontier forests, that way are the site of extractive activities that are crucial to the development of capitalism in the last 20, 200 years in Latin America in Chile in particular. So these forests were being exploited for different purposes, for instance, to be railways that could eventually connect the southern territories to bigger urban centers in the central Chile and mining centers in the north of Chile. So as a resource frontier, it was crucial for the process of more capitalism in Chile.

8:25And the other transition which is the one that the book mostly closely deals with is something that we are used to associate maybe more recently with energy transition or development of green economy which is basically as this forest where we're being exploited, they sort of become, that exploitation become nopstickal for the development of new activities such as tourism. So these from tip forest can tell us many different stories about initial building capitalism and green economy. And as you said, they're not remote areas. They are very center of this process. Perfect. Thank you for this very kind and detailed introduction to your view site. I think conservation frontier is a insightful concept and it can be applied to context across

9:30and beyond Latin America. And the title of the book introduces an emphasize the term auto-humanism. You use it to rethink what it means to be human on a conservation frontier in relation to forest, to animals, plants and other human communities. So what does the alter in auto-humanism mean for you? And how does this idea help you and your readers to recognize the pure and changing forms of human or human relations that you encountered in your view site? Thank you so much. Yes, it's such a crucial question because I think to ask, to ask, I would like to mention the origins of this idea. As I was doing a graphic field work in this areas, the question of how different human societies have different ontological articulation of nature was very clear from the start. I mean, I was doing field work with different what we call communities, practice communities

10:37are grounded in particular relation with the land such as indigenous Mapuche communities and also settlers in a different way. So it's sort of like the old question of cultural difference came back to me. And clearly, one way of dealing with it is what the ontological turn has taught us about thinking cultural difference, nine terms of representation, nine terms of world making. So there was the first inspiration and I, and as something that I developed in my early project as well. But in a way, what was missing from that question is the fact that much of the engagement with life that from which different categories of our emerges, different ontological divisions that as well emerge, there was something missing which is the question of what is to be

11:40human. And I think that question is central to the Eastern topology, but I think it's a special question within what we call as an ontological interest. So in trying to make sense of the world around us and given meaning and categories and recognize in different form of agents is out and dangle among themselves. Eventually, we've always faced the question of who we are as a species. And in a sense, after we've been intimate about finding differences about within these social groups based on the question, what is to be human? But making that question ecological in a sense that the question is not about some sort of substantial definition of humanity as it was the case for traditional humanism or or discussion about humanity, but that the question, what is to be human as to consider how engaged in austerity, which is other humans, but also non-human forms of life.

12:41So a cost of using problematically the dichotomy between human and non-human, which is, this is inevitable, so coming on this book, I stress the human question as a key question within the general ontological prerolescent that we deal with when we do any fieldwork. So instead of simply characterizing differentologies, I think that we also need to ask when it is reconsider the human question in line of an ontology which is now if we understood there is more than human. Exactly. And you mentioned several times its own ontology and your argument in this particular book and your earlier work, I think clearly engaged with anthropological discussions of ontology and opposed humanism, but it also seemed to be pushing the whole conversation about ontology

13:42in a somewhat different direction in this book. So how does auto-humanism connect with this early debate about ontology? And is it useful to describe it as a more procedural and unfinished approach to ontology, to becoming human, or would you put it differences another way? Well, thanks, that's also a crucial question and I think there's something that I've been thinking a lot for a long time and I had the chance to develop in this particular book. And I think there are multiple traditions, right? When we talk about the ontology and ontology, we're looking at a very small fraction of what this term means for social theory and philosophy in general. And I think within social sciences there have been two major frameworks. One that emphasizes ontology's theory about what exists in the world and that's how this theory is subject to multiple and often problematic forms of translation.

14:45And I'm thinking, of course, about the ideas about ontological pronunciations pushed forward by the Verde Castro, which is one of such traditions in ontology. And the other traditions, which especially inspired by indigenous studies, STS, and also a feminist critique, is one that consider ontology as a question that needs to be approached to an emphasis of enactment. So how certain our actions would take in more making. And I think with different words that sort of go around, this concept could be assemblages, network, right? That's this big vocabulary in that. And I think the two, there's lots of interesting overlaps between the two categories. And then it's interesting to find, to focus on all overlaps instead of saying, oh, this is my version of the zoological tenderl I like.

15:49This is my, this is the other version. And I think the communication that makes impossible is to recognize both ontology as a social theory. And I think by defining different forms of humanism, I do so. But also recognizing that this theories come from practices and enactment that go beyond these groups. So in this book, when I talk about, I specifically talk about different forms of humanism as a city of a different ontology, configuration, the world organized it socially. But I do so aware that these are ways of talking about them. And this is a form of obstruction. The ethnographic reality brings you to a place where you need to recognize that these borders are relevant, but also are there to be crossed, right?

16:50So I think my, my approach to the ontological turn is informed by trying to find some meaningful connection between this to the tradition as many other, of course. And the other question is that this book is very much inspired by posseumemism in all these different shapes and forms. But in a way, it's also inspired by recent critics of posseumemism, especially ideas about like considering human agency as, as, as, as not very special or just as one of many forms of agencies. And I think posseumemism is definitely right in, in, in humanist ways of going beyond human exception in this and the question, the point is now about going back to the question of what it makes human soul special. But I think as humans we write as humans as well,

17:52in the World of Humans, so there's sort of a perspective of quality to what we talk about when we talk about technology. And that perspective of quality is the fact that in many contexts, many historical and geographical contexts, whether we like it or not, we understand the world by starting to assume as whether we are humans. So I think these two questions about the connection between different traditional ontological discussion and anthropology, and a rediscovery of the humanism through post-humanism, which is something that many authors have done, are the two main triggers for thinking about this term particularly. Excellent, thank you very much for help us trace the connection between your ethnography and other previous classic works in this field. And I think your book is very interesting, because it follows for main collectivities in our detailed and everyday ways. There are small-holding settlers, mappuccine people, environmentalists, and conservation scientists.

18:56These groups do not simply hold different opinions, different ontologies about being human, about becoming human, but they inhibit and produce the foreware through distinct practices and relations. And their own understanding of becoming humans are tightly related to each other and other beings. So I'm thinking about could you introduce the history of encounter between this four collectivities to our listeners, and how did you build relationships and conduct food work with such different groups over the course of your research? Well, thank you very much. I'll probably say that the reason why I focus on these four ways of engaging with forests and more generally with the world is that they came from a very prolonged ethnographic work done with bits and pieces over many years. So my initial interest was in work was to understand the park people

20:03relationship based on a different assumed difference between private conservation and public conservation. And then when I was talking about my project with colleagues, with people from the field sites, etc, something clicked and the fact that people were telling that, this is the same forest for all of us, but also this is a different one. So how do we recognize there is something that we share and there's communication and there's intersection and tanglement or life through history, but we also need to recognize there are basic differences. To find a basic difference, we need to look at this entire environment rather than isolating social groups. So when contact makes some, contact makes ontological difference relevant. That's what I'm trying to say. And this historically, I mean this different this frontier forest, we're in happy that of course by

21:06indigenous people, a Christian indigenous people who in some cases, and many of the present communities are with subject to evictions that were relocated. So they, the history are actually settling in this, in this around this mountains and this valleys. In a way that they were frequently using the same laws and means of satire colonialism, like a flying for land grants, you using use of rights, adverse possession, all these mechanisms that set us were using. Some of the Makoja communities in this area also used them, but at the same time there were victims of evictions, relocation and of course colonial satire colonialism, in only supposed, you know, in only supposed to be more versions from cultural simulation through the education system to simply pressure from capitalism to self-properties and become a labor force

22:08for the major injustices in the country. At the same time, the setters that I were living side by side, sometimes there were families sharing, I can't see the size, there were, they did not correspond to the setters and many are in mind about sort of like European wise setters, were moved to the area and created new Europe says some historians have mentioned. This is sort of, as an Latin America, this is the history of setters being the interest of this image of set, you know, the sort of like the traditional, I guess, successful version of setter colonialism from the point of view, the colonialists of course. And this sort of figure of setters who are often assume sometimes as quotas and also as a possible security danger to nation-building, they were also victim of evictions. So as there's a reason groting,

23:12anthropological literature on actual setters, setters live as a way to talk about setter colonialism and draw a lot about this literature, basically in recognizing that there's weak talk about setter colonialism without thinking setters simply as the automatic representation of this process. They're the protagonists of this process, but they also, in a way, they can be victims of it. So the people who win and people who lose in the industry of colonial violence, colonial expansion even among setters. So activists at the same time are entrepreneurs in the ecotourism industry and they are, you know, the different born in this, this economy. So I'm interested in this, in this connection, because I think this connection tells us something about how we engage with force when we are inspired by both possibilities. A theoretical commitment to conservation, as a political act,

24:14but also well-leaming through conservation as in the emergence of this green economy and green entrance journalism. And finally, the last group that was working, the pleasure of working with our colleagues from my own university and some colleagues from other universities, were working in the same set spot that many of these new ecotourism activities were being carried out right next to Indigenous communities, where we will, where one day develop collaborative schemes and also with settlers as well. And they are, they see themselves as a prize scientist, in a way they see their science as a form of commitment to social and ecological justice. So again, not the usual image of scientists that we sometimes are accustomed to insert in traditional STS studies. And again, their experience tells us about this this very fluent and complex web of collaboration and relations,

25:16among these groups, and yet there are moments when differences appear in all their ontological clarity. Yeah, Piano, I really appreciate the efforts you put into describing the complexity of the collectivities you mentioned is a book, even within this category, like you mentioned, even within the category of settlers, people are very different. And they can simultaneously be the, you know, the colonizers and the victims of colonial violence is such a very detailed and very insightful description. Now one of the books, Central Comparison, is between settlers auto-humanism and the Mapuchin auto-humanism. And to some extent, I think this is a classic pair of frontier, as I can concept between settlers and indigenous people, but you describe it in very complicated way. So these groups have different histories in the region, including unequal positions within the longer history of land settlement and indigenous disposition.

26:17So how do settlers and Mapuchin people differ in their ways of relating to land, forest, and non-human beings? Were there also points of overlap, exchange, or expected similarity between their ways of becoming human on the frontier? The question reveals it can be very revealing and highlighting certain potentials, certain imitation or certain version of the ontological term. That my, that my, you might be interested in trying to have a clear representation of the major ontological tendance that sort of guide, but also they are constituted by actions in the real world between these two groups, right? And I think there's no way there's no easy way out. I mean, we do need to talk about ontological difference because as many indigenous colors and colonial, anti-colonial thinkers have mentioned, when we talk about

27:21Latin American priests in Meso-Sahia and the ideas of like interracial relationships between white population and indigenous population, we run the risk of forgetting the dichotomy that matters, which is there are people are colonizers and there are people who are colonized. And that's the, that's the, that's the starting point. I guess it's inevitable to start from that point and that means to recognize that when indigenous people claim they have a different direction, a relation with land, with water, with forests, we need of course to take a seriously and that means to recognize there is not just a cultural representation or symbolic representation that can be uspiletically or many different ways that is an ontological depth to this information. So, that I think that's the starting point, but then after that, it, it, it, it, it, anography brings us to places where we acknowledge that that difference is much more subtle and needs to be understood in terms of emergence rather than, than previous existence. So,

28:29there are moments, there are relationships, there are actions that make that difference clear in, in a context where many actions and many ideas about nature also share between groups as different as Mapusha Kimiakis and set this. And in particular case of Chile, again, that's, that has to do also with a particular Easter colonization. There are many mistis of settlers having really strong intimate contact with Mapusha Kimiakis. Some of Mapusha people displaced from the region communities, they had to adopt sort of like settlers, lifestyles, even like legal means just to be able to relocate and land through colonization laws. And, but then again, this is recognizing this intersection, means also to, not forget about the dichotomy between colonizer and colonizer. And, and important as such,

29:31the dichotomy have on, on, you know, remembering that settler colonialism is not simply an historical process or a moment, but it's a way of structuring people, groups, categories, laws, and even our relation with the world and how we understand it in a categorizer. And your book also exams environmental activists, entrepreneurs, and scientists. So, they are relatively new actors in this conservation frontier. But, you know, they often come to the frontier with powerful commitments to ecological protection, to conservation. But at the same time, they also understand environmental care differently from local settlers and from pushing communities. So how would you describe the auto-human rhythms of environmentalists and the conservation scientists? How are there ways of perceiving and caring for forest, differ form, or sometimes connect with those of settlers and my coaching farmers? Yeah, thank you so much. That's such a crucial question for, and it's, it's, it's a long debate as well within environmental anthropology and

30:38environmental studies in general. I think the famous case is the, is the Amazon that since the 90s have seen really stronger lines between environmentalists, international NGOs, focusing on the environment and indigenous communities. And, and this is also the case of Chile. This can be, there can be a very problematic relation, but also a very fruitful one. So, anthropologists, critical disciplines, so we tend, I guess we tend to sort of like rely too much on, on our, on a critical representation of, of some of the actors we work with. So, there is lots of literature emphasizing how, you know, environmental groups are, can perpetrate, you know, forms of dispossession for farming populations, can depoliticize environmental indigenous movements by just assigning their role, a role as a

31:45garden, so forth, as a garden, so nature. So, there's a lot of, there's lots of literature on this point, on, and also about, like, you know, grigrabbing and all that, especially within political college. And I think, you know, these literature is right in many ways, but it's also insufficient. So, as I wanted to deal with the, I wanted to recognize the particular ontological confirmation of the, of the world for environmentalists, I began to realize that, of course, there are problematic relations about provisions concerning certain activities, of certain ideological constructions about how we should engage with other species, et cetera, but there are also lots of oral lives and collaboration, and some, you know, some sectors, I'm up to go also, very much involved in environmental movements. So, again, environmental, what I call as environmental is alter-humanism. It's a way of, of, of, of, this way of engaging with the human

32:50question, which does not seem to restrict it to what we call generally as environmental activities, that's in the newspapers, but it's, it's a way of, of understanding humanity and, and nature. There is, there's open, open boundaries. So, and I think that's, that's interesting for all, right? So, I start with the assumption that conservation can be problematic, can be axiotinary, but I try to move forward, because I think that's point is ready to be made many different ways, and I, an inography, in this place would not bring anything new if you just have to state that, that, I also wanted to recognize the, the, particular way of, of, we're making that can be found in environmental thought and actions. Why recognizing that environmental thought actions are not prerogative of certain actors, but it's, it's an open, it's an open era. And I think the same argument, maybe that's so good, we're talking about scientific authority, can be made about scientists.

33:54Again, there is, there's, there's, there's, there's, it's very common place to raise a critique about conservation scientists as important scientific authority and all of that, but I think it's, so well-made point, but again, I guess it's insufficient to recognize that science also builds a particular way of understanding the world as a particular ontological foundation, but, especially in applied science, in field science, where, you know, we have to deal with how things like listening to birds, navigating the forest, taking measures which are really hot to take, there is a certain phenomenon, phenomenological background to this research that calls for collaboration with farming and indigenous population. So, the scientists I was live and, and ideas I described were describing this book are reproduced many of the ideas about nature and humanity, can be, can be send into conservation science in general, but are these ideas also also come from

34:58these collaborations and these very complex relationships. Well, I think thanks for being so honest with your own previous assumptions about your field site, about your research subject and what you actually encounter in the field work. You mentioned a term a problematic but also a fruitful relation, and I think it's a perfect description. And across the later chapters of this book, you show that it is all the human rhythms do not remain separate as you mentioned before. They come into contact through conservation projects, through economic activity, through scientific research, and other political claims. So, at times, a clash, well, at other times, they form unexpected alliances to form, as you mentioned, a problem that take, but also a fruitful relation. So, could you share one example from your field work that shows different auto-humanism meeting each other, what does that encounter review about the possibilities and limits of collaboration on this constellation from tier. Thank you very much. This is so crucial. I mean, it's, again, the notion of auto-humanism

36:06is just an analytical mean among many others to be talking about how we differ in humans based on how we understand what humanity is in nature. So, but then again, there is an implicit risk in taking this automation, again, as yet another synonym for culture in a very traditional term, right? There's nothing wrong absolutely about it, but I think there is a clear understanding that these are abstractions. So, and in reality, this abstraction is very dynamic. So, and I, and the idea, one of the ideas behind auto-humanism is that the very notion of humanity is approach, and as a project, I have different forms of participation and different pressures as well. So, state power is a very, is very influential in directing what sort of idea of humanity

37:06exists among people on frontier areas, right? Especially because they've been, they've seen in their life the effects of nation-building, perhaps more so than people in urban centers and in big metropolitan areas. So, pressure to become citizen, pressure to become a conservationist, pressure to become entrepreneur, which I don't particularly on the book, but there are many different projects about humanity that are related and on the same time, inferences and diets and shapes, these existing social forms of humanism. So, I think one of the, one thing that I particularly interested is the how in these particular places, and again, this is a realization that sort of clashes with some certain more critical approaches to conservation, is the fact that many people, settlers, indigenous people did not necessarily see conservation as a

38:13threat. Some did, of course, I mean, when certain activities are prohibited for the existence of a private part, or a new and public part, of course, as a threat to someone's livelihood, right? And that's basic subsistence. There are people who sort of like, which transformed the life based on this pressure to become an adopteous green economy. And I like to think that these people, especially, you know, people living around these rural areas, were not simply learning to become conservationists or simply accepting passively certain ideas about conservation, but they produced the one ideas conservation by taking some of these ideas, especially forward by outsiders, sometimes, NGOs and activists, etc. They make it their own and they produce a different type

39:13conservation. So, I think that's something that is more inspiring to the cat, instead of simply assuming that people are a passive subject in processes of, you know, subjectification in which they simply are exposed to different government institutional pressure to become certain types of human rights. And I think, I think like the question of becoming conservationist is a question that reveals many things about how this auto-humanism for instance is associated with farming life or with the conservation movement. At the same time, they entangle, but also they clash. So, and again, there's no easy answer to it, just that the two sides of these relationships are equally significant and they should be taken as highly creative processes and generative as well.

40:17So, conflicts between conservationists and resistance farming communities, do simply state a way, they produce changes in behavior and changes in activities that might have unintended consequences that are worth suitable consequences. So, they might not anticipate it until it happens. And they have to do with not only with material needs like, okay, there's their provision to carry out certain activities and this provision are certainly dangerous for someone's subsistence, but they are more complex. They involve, of course, their material, but also to do with behavioral attitudes, with ideas about nature, with the new intersection between different cosmologies. And those are creative and people are not simply subject to this relationship, but they've taken it. There is strategies to respond to them. They can be

41:17passive subjects of this process of subjectification, but they can also resist and they can also adapt them and just form them in a way they're very creative and very uncertain as well in their future consequences. Excellent. I think auto-humanism is deeply grounded in Satsun Chile in this conservation frontier, but it also speaks to different regions around the globe. As you know, the encounters between Sattler and Indigenous people and the scientist environmentalist is more and more frequent to be observed around the globe and also speaks to a much wildest set of question about environmental crisis in the answer per thing. The conservation frontier can be a refuge, can be a site of green capital accumulation, as many political scientists, a political economist write about, and a space for political and collaborative experimentation. At all ones. So looking beyond Chile, where can auto-humanism tell us about living with forest,

42:20human authors and non-human authors amid climate and environmental crisis? Well, thank you very much. There's something that I've been thinking about for a long time and I'm not sure I have a clear answer to it, but I think one of the other inspiration for thinking about this idea is the different sources. One source is of course the idea of the Andrew scene, and I think I like to take the Andrew scene as a source of starting point in a reflection of the meaning of humanity. So, and I think the Andrew scene is not clear, it's ambiguous, and that's just at least value. So it leaves the question open. It recognized entanglement of human life with other forms of life. As Conor Lees mentioned, the idea of an entanglement humanism is part of this new understanding of humanity in geological terms, but it also brings us back to the question of simply

43:24of recognizing that human are exceptional, but maybe not in the ways we used to think about it, but in the ways that we can create a new forms of destruction and depletion. So these two ways of being human entangled and exceptional in its destructive force, coexist in the Andrew scene. So the Andrew scene brings back its introduction and it transforms them as well. So I think that's one point about the question of our ultriminism in a related certain ways of understanding the environment in the Conor crime crisis. But I think the other question is that, Tempted, I felt you mentioned earlier, but the idea of what humanism is very much present in anti-colonial and indigenous thinking, especially, it's a very common commentary to Franz Fanon's book on the fact that

44:26Western humanism can be a form of oppression and has been used as a form of oppression in in denying the legitimate needs of other forms of being human. So it's, and I think the two the two notions are the idea of the Anthropocene as a way of thinking the human question. And ongoing colonial violence is those two are inseparable. They are very clear, they're clearly inseparable at the times they're believing with where we open the news of social media, whatever we expose the images of ecological collapse, reinex to images of colonial violence that we, there are simply, seems to have not been, never been questioned, right? So the researchers of certain form of colonial violence and the open legitimization of them are now at the core of many so-called Western

45:26liberal democracy, right? As this Western liberal democracy have accepted, finally, the opening accepted they were the colonial groups, right? And that's something that something is crucial today, right? It's many places in the world. And and with the climate crisis on the background. So that's, I think, by waiting from places, waiting from times. And I think that's the time that we're thinking and we're dealing with like the intersection of reneural colonial violence with it's a, with it's a, it's a explicit way of denying other forms of humanism. And the questioning of human exception is in the comes from this very individual and malleable notion of the Anthropocene that is with, it's usefulness, lies exactly. And that malleability is not clear what it means. The forces us to recognize is that humans are responsible for the climate crisis. Not all humans, of course, are talking about

46:28those responsible for the great acceleration. But also that humans have this inarisi paradoxical where there have been human, which is entangled with other forms of life, deeply entangled in whether we didn't recognize before. But also we remain exception in our destructive abilities. It's fascinating. I think auto-humanism offers not only a new concept, but also a ways of approaching a ethnographic research. One that stays open to ambivalence, uncertainty, and the problematic but fruitful relations that emerge in the field. So I'm very curious about how writing this wonderful book has changed your own thinking and research practices. And who tell us about your current research and the question you hope to pursue in the future? Thank you so much. Again, this book didn't originate from one research project. Many different projects that were classes together at the time. And then they gave me the

47:30opportunity of learning many different things. And in dealing with the diversity of the fieldwork and trying to express that, instead of taking it as part of a main subject, in trying to pinpoint the system of different ontological conformations, different aminoisms. I also realized that the system, the social group, is built on collaboration and complex, and I was never being part of this. I think I had the chance of and the time as 12 to develop certain collaborative practices that were designed at awkward different groups. So collaborative schemes to collaboration with indigenous communities are very different than collaborating with scientists or other communities. And of course, these collaborations are not like a easy way out of a complex that we, the anthropologist

48:36and gateway that might reproduce, which is the power dynamics between an outsider coming, working on other people's life, extracting information sometimes, and a whole man right at books. So we are the ad, but we can, the data experience can also give us the opportunity to do something, something different, which is interesting only as an applied question, but also as an intellectual question. So when you create this collaboration, you realize there are some things that you were not interested in, and some other things that you were overlooking, and the importance of memory, especially for oral memory in many of these different communities are crucial. And again, they bring back even like painful memories, such as evictions, indigenous communities, property, crashes among settlers, and all of that. So I think that's, I think collaboration is

49:44not simply something that we need to do as a easy way out of our ethical dilemmas and our ethical social commences anthropologists, but something that we engage with where we like it or not, or whether we are in control of that and not, and in doings and in the involved in this collaboration, we can learn many other things among ourselves, for instance, how we are in the field and our professional practice, how we can be better, but also more importantly, that's not very important, but the most important thing is how we can say something about the world, make sense of people that we've been working with, and they eventually can even reach our own, to a certain understanding of the differences, cultural social differences that we always deal with. And I think that two projects that I haven't been interested in recently have been working on drought climate crisis in Chile, particularly in the Hague Industrial House, which is very different from frontier areas, it's very much in the, in the epicenter of Chile and other industrial complex, and it's been

50:53heavily economically, particularly by by droughts, of course, washed and by climate crisis, so that's that's one thing I'm interested in, and more recently I've become working on rural and and bad German and regionalist, regionalist in Italy around my home, you know, around my homeland, if you will, and I'm interested in two things here, one to understand our recentment mergers and we've seen them against metropolitan powers, against the dependence on other economies, against the European Union, etc. But bringing back, bringing questions about how engage with non-human life as well, so I'm sort of connecting these questions about urban depression, rural depression, rural exclusion, with the lesson that I've been learning through this book about, you know,

51:58societal differences as potentially ontological difference. A pillow, thank you very much for this sort of conversation, I think as you described, a book like Old Humanism is based on many years of research with different groups of people and working with settlers, working with indigenous people, and with scientists are very different from each other, and this makes me more interested in how your collaborative research will go in the future in Chile and in your home country. So thank you very much for producing this book, thank you for this thoughtful conversation and I'm very much looking forward to your future work. Thank you so much, you know, it was a pleasure and I hope to engage in more conversation with you and your colleagues and the new groups from the future. Excellent, I also want to know more about, you know, the conservation from tier and also the urban depression in Italy. Thank you very much. So today I had a conversation with PLO D. Jiminyani about his new book, Old to Humanism, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2025. For listeners, interested in environmental anthropology,

53:03indigenous studies, Latin American studies, conservation politics, old ontological-turned-answer apology, this book offers a rich ethnographic comped of life in southern Chile's conservation from tiers. You've been listening to the new books network. I'm your host Xia Dongli. We hope you will tell me next time. To get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.