ABSTRACT
This opening chapter of the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity’s Part I provides a nuanced and embodied more-than-human framework for considering ecocultural identity from influential cultural ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram. Abram centers earthly existence as the focus point for moving through and past interrelated social and environmental problems. He shares insights about acknowledging and embracing identity via the path of remembering humanity’s interdependence ‘with so many other shapes and styles of sensitivity and sentience.’ He elaborates on the intimate relations between language and the more-than-human world (his broadly influential term) and how those who write have the obligation to keep human language alive, and to transform and create new terms to evoke the world within which we are connected in an interbreathing vital flux of earthly organisms. In this vein, Abram introduces the term Humilocene to describe the current ‘epoch of humility’ as a regenerative, ethical, and empathetic framework within which multiple ecologies of sensory experience interlock to engender ancient and new ways of being human – as a species, as animals, as sensory bodies – and to break from the predominant contemporary narcissistic human posture threatening existence on our planet. As a new epochal concept developed in this chapter, the Humilocene provides fresh and ecoculturally inclusive ways to understand and engage with contemporary environmental and sociocultural crises and to foster relational identifications that stimulate humble and holistic conversations, opportunities, and actions.
Keywords: Humilocene, interbeing, interbreathing, more-than-human, Anthropocene, Holocene, epoch, senses, sensible, body, magic, language, ecology of language, animal flesh, conflicts, interdependence, ‘the environment,’ culture, Anthropos, discourse, Capitalocene, humility, humiliation, ‘The Humbling,’ technology, disability, race, gender, cities, photosynthesis, gravity, wildness, wild, chaotic, orality, oral cultures, literacy, animism, hunters and gatherers, place, space, time, Indigenous cultures, rediversification of culture, interspecies encounters, shape shifting, reciprocity, shaman, familiars, sentience, multiplicitous otherness, materiality, politics, bioregion, able-bodied, disabled bodies.
