SAN'SI'IN-SHIP? toward a meditational ethics of custodianship

초록

This work of autotheory explores whether meditation may offer a methodologically germane mode of responsiveness to Donna Haraway's compostist challenge, in which "think we must!" In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Haraway urges their readers to approach futurity as materially sympoietic, that is, partnered, trans-connected with oddkin inter-species intersubjectivities, Homo sapiens as composted sapience rather than beleaguering posthuman social mass. Set on the steeply sloping seven acres my wife and I have taken to calling "Yes Mountain" (Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea), this paper foregrounds mindful humility as one means of opting out of anthropogenic slow violence; our pacifism seeks to actively relinquish tools, weapons, and words. But Yes Mountain currently faces a direly urgent problem: the rapacious and elongated summers now produce conditions that are highly favorable to vector species carrying parasites that cause Pine Wilt Disease; in five years, more than two million Pinus denisflora and Pinus koraiensis have been killed on the Korean peninsula. Haraway speaks of "cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the 'game over, too late' discourse" interrupting any act of sympoiesis, but rather than any of these, it is insufficient knowledge by which my wife and I are paralyzed. How to find a way out of our morally perplexed passivity? Our farming neighbors endlessly praise the efficacy of Abamectin, a biopesticide. This paper seeks to explore not only what to think, but also how & mldr; how to homage, care for, respect, defend, salvage, preserve the elder arboreal presences on Yes Mountain, in ways that neither barbarically nor re-traumatizingly disregard and overlook the rhizomatic, unseen, microbial undergrounds?

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