Tok Thompson - Posthuman Folklore

F O LKL O RE

T O K TH O MPS O N

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI / JACKSON

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright 2019 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 9781496825087 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781496825094 (paperback)

ISBN 9781496825100 (epub single)

ISBN 9781496825117 (epub institutional)

ISBN 9781496825124 (pdf single)

ISBN 9781496825131 (pdf institutional)

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

It is often considered a bit de rigueur these days to offer up to the reader some personal perspectives of the author on the topic at hand. This reflexivity, it is hoped, helps the reader to understand the authors standpoint, interests, and any potential biases. Accordingly, I offer a brief account of my own personal connection to the topic at hand, as best I can, in this brief prologue.

My own personal views have been influenced not only by Western science, but also by my own experiences growing up in the backwoods in Alaska, where wild, unhabituated animals frequently interacted with my familys world. As I came to recognize the animals as unique individuals, each with their own concerns and personalities, I developed a notion of animals and humans as engaged in largely the same life experiences: growing up, playing with siblings under the watchful care of the parents, setting off on ones own and competing for a mate, acquiring food and shelter, and in turn producing and training the next generation. And, hopefully, having a bit of fun somewhere in all of that. My view of animals was also influenced by Native viewpoints, particularly that of the local Denaina tribe. As in much of Native North America, animals were acknowledged as elder brothers (a remarkable understanding of the basics of evolution, dating from long before it was acknowledged by Western discourse). In the Denaina stories, the animals referred to people as the Campfire People (both hominid and non-hominid animals being covered under the term people). In these stories, we humans were the people that made campfires, while the other people, our elder brothers, were the ones who first helped form much of what the world as we know it. Both these experiences provided me with a strong interest in animal intelligence studies, and I followed the growing scientific acknowledgment of the mental abilities and personalities of non-hominids with a certain sense of relief: what had always seemed obvious to me based on my own experiences was now becoming much more accepted within the scientific community.

I was also born on the cusp of a new era in human culture, the digital realm. As a member of the computer science group in high school, I witnessed the computer revolution revamp how culture was produced, reproduced, and disseminated. By the time I was in college at Harvard in 1984, personal computers were beginning to become widespread, mostly used as word processors. I have a sneaking hunch that I may have been one of the last students at Harvard turning in papers produced on a typewriter. By the time I entered graduate school in 1997, in the masters program in folklore at University of California, Berkeley, under the legendary Alan Dundes, the internet sensation was sweeping the nation. By 2000, most American households had access to the internet, a watershed date in human history. That same year, marking the new millennium, I co-founded along with compatriots in the folklore program, Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture, one of the first fully peer-reviewed academic journals distributed freely online. Folklorists were quick to note the explosion of folklore on the internet, in the form of jokes, contemporary legends, and many other genres. Much of the communication on the internet seemed very folkloric, being passed from person to person, changing and adapting, and often without an attributed author. Suddenly, the entire discipline of folklore became relevant towards understanding a whole new arena of cultural production. I entered graduate school in what was increasingly viewed as an antiquated discipline, and I emerged from graduate school in what was increasingly viewed as a cutting-edge discipline. It was not the discipline that changed: rather, the world around it had.

All the while, a wholesale collapse of the Earths environmental ecosystem increasingly pointed towards upcoming catastrophes, and the ongoing decimation of Earth-based life. Wholesale extinctions became increasingly common. Minority cultures, particularly the indigenous, with their close awareness of our relationship to the Earth, were also continuing to be under assault. Culturally, the rapid loss of indigenous languages points once again to loss of biodiversity, and cultural diversity: a loss of remembrance of our connectedness with life on Earth, and a loss of balance against the anthropocentrism of much of contemporary world cultures.

These processes have not stopped, nor even slowed. The digital realm is vastly more complex and omnipresent than just a few years before, increasingly blending our everyday lived lives into the cyber realm. Contemporaneously, the ongoing climate devastation has continued to worsen, bringing with it a scholarly awareness of dangers of the Anthropocene, and the ongoing destruction of biologically based life on Earth.

These two processes must be seen as linked: the idea of the virtual is necessarily viewed along with the ideas of the biological. These rapid changes have brought wholesale changes to our cultures, politics, technologies, laws, economies, ecosystems, and, at the very base, our ontologies: our thoughts of what it is to be us. The philosophical impact of rethinking our ontologies, both in terms of the digital realm and the biological realm, are covered under the umbrella term of posthumanism, which is to say, rethinking what we mean when we say human. As an anthropologist, and a folklorist, my own investigation into posthumanism has close ties to my personal experiences, and to my interests in vernacular culture, in how people themselves perform these philosophical stances in the everyday lived lives. I invite the reader to consider these questions throughout some of the case studies I have assembled into this work. This book is not meant to be a comprehensive overview, but rather a sampling of some of the ways that posthumanism is increasingly influencing how we think of ourselves, and the world around us.

First and foremost, I would like to extend a thanks to my late mentor, Alan Dundes, who always encouraged an engaged, rigorous, and fearless approach to scholarship. My work is in many ways continually indebted to his teachings. I would also like to thank my undergraduate mentor Charles Lindholm for setting me on this career path so long ago, and my high school mentor Keith Tanaka, who encouraged my academic pretensions from an early age. My parents, Stanley and Donnis Thompson, are ultimately the most responsible for my intellectual development, and I am forever indebted to all their hard work in providing for a wonderful childhood, exposed both to civilization and to wilderness. I have been extraordinarily blessed by having many mentors, teachers, and inspirations over the course of my life, and acknowledgments are due to all of them.