The Art of Reading through a Pandemic (Covid-19): Quotes from “Arts of Living on A Damaged Planet”

(March 15, 2020) While the spread of COVID-19 goes out on control in Europe and the US, a few of us humanity in Mongolia seem to have come to a panic-free state due to living in quarantine since January, 2020 while the rest of the world lived their daily lives as if it wasn’t much of a concern. The overflow of information on media swallowed the entire nation for the past 2 months as the country put aside politics and put “humanity” upfront together where we relied on and obeyed every decision made by the government we seldomly trust.

What matters now is the ultimate “arts of living and staying united” as the world faces another pandemic. At the same time, realize the nature of the pandemic rather than blaming a race, nation or country. I happen to be one of those deciding to read through this phase and share notes of the book I’ve been meaning to complete (or at least grab it, capture a favorite quote and Instagram it 😊)

In the era of Anthropocene, we often consume ourselves with self-development books and predictions about the future of AI, neuroscience, economy and all the “ only important” matters of our time. But do we care enough about the planet’s future and consider taking a look into all organisms, humans and our entanglements with each other? Probably Not. With this, I hope to shed some light on promoting works of anthropologists who may give us some altruistic understandings about the planet and our role to be a responsible neighbor, not masters.

So, I thought this Pandemic might be the most appropriate time to share quotes of the Tsing, Swanson, Gan, and Bubandt (2017) “Arts of Living on A Damaged Planet” and send a reminder for us that it’s not only academics’ or Anthropologists’ job to be subsuming our daily thoughts about Anthropocene and the ecology, but we can always remind ourselves it’s our responsibility to become a little more considerate individuals. The 20th century maintained the fiction of our individuality and the 21st century rewrote the entanglement between humans and non-humans. Let’s embrace the re-definition of entanglement all along with some beautifully stated quotes and lines from the book in hoping that humans may become better neighbors!

Editors:

Anna Tsing

Heather Swanson

Elaine Gan

Nils Bubandt

Quotes for the soul:

“Our ghosts are the traces of more-than-human histories which ecologies are made and unmade”

“An extinction is a local event as well as a global one. Extinction is a breakdown of coordination that has unintended and reverberating effects”… extinction leaves traces and the traces are still with us…

“Man is the only animal that shoots other creatures with paintball guns, and when the creatures flap around in terror or fall to the ground injured and in shock, man is the only animal that cheers” -In the Midst of Damage-

-How can you study something you can’t sense?

-“The most common truism about radiation is that humans cannot sense it, but that is not true. With a dosimeter, you can hear radiation. With a camera, you can see it. If the levels are high enough, you can taste it on your tongue. It tastes metallic” -Nuclear Spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone-

“Jellyfish are monsters. In the Black Sea, comb jellyfish eat ten times their weight in a single day, destroying fish and fisheries. If jellyfish are monsters, it is because of their entanglements-with us. Jellies become bullies through modern human shipping, overfishing, pollution, and global warming. In all our heedless entanglements with more-than-human life, we humans are too monsters.”

“Life, put simply, is symbiosis “all the way down”

“Symbiosis are vulnerable; the fate of one species can change the whole system”

“Sym-poiesis is a simple word; it means “making-with”. Nothing makes itself, nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing”- Donna Haraway

“We have never been individuals. ‘We’ refers to all life; his “individuals” are autonomous species as well as single organisms. If the most of the cells in the human body are microbes, which “individual” are we? We can’t segregate our species nor claim distinctive status-as a body, a genome, or an immune system. And what if evolution selects for relations among species rather than “inidividuals”?” — Beyond Individuals-

“…imagine what has been lost; more holistic forms of restoration depend on our ability to consider the structure and composition of the past plant and animal ecologies, as well as the practices of the indigenous peoples who once cultivated these lands” -At the Edge of Extinction-