Registration is required.
Please register to attend this event on zoom.

In this conversation with Gnosologies host Giovanna Parmigiani, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo, shows how sentient mountains and lakes (Apus) channeled by Northern Peruvian shamans address the greatest challenges of our current climate crisis: overcoming our anthropocentrism, our sole focus on human welfare, and justice for humans at the expense of the planet. Bacigalupo argues that by healing epistemic fractures between subject and object, matter and spirit, humans and ecosystems, Apus teach us planetary ethics, restoring our belongingness to the earth.  
Bacigalupo discusses how Apus also offer a collective vision of humanity’s future as climate change ravages the world. By decentering the human and gaining awareness of the inevitable end of the space-time of modern industrial civilization and humanity—and of a world that will continue to exist without us—Apus inspire us to respond to the climate crisis. When we accept that humanity will ultimately be destroyed by climate change events, Apus reason, we might mitigate our suffering by engaging in ethical, reciprocal, multispecies relationships to postpone the end of humanity and to reimagine our existence as insects and birds in a post-human world.  

Bacigalupo asks, “What could be the implications for our climate crises of truly decentering the human? How might sentient landscapes define and advocate for collective ethics and climate justice? And what kinds of postapocalyptic visions could trigger our moral responsibility toward the earth?” 
  
ANA MARIELLA BACIGALUPO, PhD, is a Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York (SUNY), University at Buffalo. She works with Indigenous Mapuche in Chile and pan-Indigenous communities in northern Peru. She has written several books, including Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Patagonia (University of Texas Press, 2016). Prof. Bacigalupo is a fellow at the National Humanities Center, writing a new book: The Subversive Politics of Sentient Lands: Collective Ethics and Climate Justice in Northern Peru. Her research has been funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and many more. 
SITALIN SANCHEZ, Sirena Design Lab Co-founder and HDS graduate, will join the conversation.