Eduardo Kohn

My lifework is dedicated to developing the conceptual equipment –the ideas, methods, and theories– to prepare us to live in this age of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change. Centrally, this involves imagining better ways to live with the living world, in ways that can allow that world to orient our conduct. It involves, that is, a fundamental rethinking of anthropology and “the human” so that we can learn to “ecologize” our ethics. My current project, Forest for the Trees, builds on this foundation to argue that a forest –that highly “absential” emergent product of a vast network of nonhuman semiosis– is a real thing and not merely a human abstraction. I teach a series of courses in anthropological theory and an anthropology “beyond the human” and collaborate on major team grants with the aim of making McGill a centre for the environmental humanities and a place from which to rethink our relationship to the living world in times of climate crisis.