Start Date
29-5-2024 12:15 PM
End Date
29-5-2024 12:30 PM
Description
This paper explores the practice of hospitality in the context of human-induced climate change. In this new and uncertain geological era, we will be required to re-examine our reciprocity with the earth and our fellow humans. We have over-farmed and over-extracted. Our voraciousness has left the soil close to exhaustion with concerns expressed that we have a finite number of harvests left. We have more mouths to feed than ever, villages are drowning under rising seas and our activities have initiated a mass extinction of the species with whom we share the earth. The grief surrounding this crisis is complex because we do not yet know or fully understand the scale of its impact. Michael Cronin describes climate change as a “hyper object” (2017, 2). We can never see it all at once although we might occasionally feel the burden of its inconceivable weight. I would like to perforate this grief with pinhole vignettes of human co-existence. I would like to present a case for our possessing the capacity to be better hosts and guests; to one another and to the earth. I would like to commit to memory that there were some important and poetic interruptions in our protectionist greed. We did sometimes allow ourselves momentary indulgences of rich human shared experience. Somewhere there was a collective desire for thoughtful conviviality. This paper is a collection of auto-ethnographical observations recorded in public spaces in Paris during a month-long residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, juxtaposed with French continental philosophical theory on hospitality. I will tell you stories about transcendence on the metro, carnal hospitality on the banks of the seine and nocturnal catharsis in the Latin Quarter. These small chronicles are not intended as vindication. They do not contain solutions. They might however give pause for something related to hope that we have an inherent desire to better relate to the earth and those that live on it.
Creative Commons License
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/dqz7-t425
Included in
Food Studies Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons
I’m Conscious of Time: Pinhole Vignettes of Human Co-Existence in the Anthropocene
This paper explores the practice of hospitality in the context of human-induced climate change. In this new and uncertain geological era, we will be required to re-examine our reciprocity with the earth and our fellow humans. We have over-farmed and over-extracted. Our voraciousness has left the soil close to exhaustion with concerns expressed that we have a finite number of harvests left. We have more mouths to feed than ever, villages are drowning under rising seas and our activities have initiated a mass extinction of the species with whom we share the earth. The grief surrounding this crisis is complex because we do not yet know or fully understand the scale of its impact. Michael Cronin describes climate change as a “hyper object” (2017, 2). We can never see it all at once although we might occasionally feel the burden of its inconceivable weight. I would like to perforate this grief with pinhole vignettes of human co-existence. I would like to present a case for our possessing the capacity to be better hosts and guests; to one another and to the earth. I would like to commit to memory that there were some important and poetic interruptions in our protectionist greed. We did sometimes allow ourselves momentary indulgences of rich human shared experience. Somewhere there was a collective desire for thoughtful conviviality. This paper is a collection of auto-ethnographical observations recorded in public spaces in Paris during a month-long residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, juxtaposed with French continental philosophical theory on hospitality. I will tell you stories about transcendence on the metro, carnal hospitality on the banks of the seine and nocturnal catharsis in the Latin Quarter. These small chronicles are not intended as vindication. They do not contain solutions. They might however give pause for something related to hope that we have an inherent desire to better relate to the earth and those that live on it.