Adam Louis-Klein + Justin Shaffner /// Sky-Earth System

In this episode, Justin and Matt speak with anthropologists Adam Louis-Klein and Justin Shaffner about their collaborative project, “The Sky-Earth System: A Manifesto for Learning to See and Think as a Generic Ancient”.

Adam Louis-Klein is a musician, philosopher and anthropologist from Seattle and New York. He studied Philosophy at Yale College (B.A) and at the New School for Social Research (M.A), Anthropology (M.A) at the University of Chicago, and is now a PHD student in the Anthropology department at McGill University. https://www.adamlouisklein.com/

Justin Shaffner: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=n4VX4kYAAAAJ&hl=en

Read the Text: https://www.academia.edu/105365384/The_Sky_Earth_System_A_Manifesto_for_Learning_to_See_and_Think_as_a_Generic_Ancient

Abstract: The Sky is falling and there are too few who recognize the importance of holding it up. We contend that many of the pressing problems of our times, including climate catastrophe and global inequality, are direct consequences of the cosmology of the Moderns. We argue that anthropology as a discipline should think with ordinary people everywhere and with the Universe at once. We propose the Sky-Earth System as a cosmology in which to think and live as Ancients, to suspend the impersonal World of the Moderns. The Sky-Earth System is a metaframe that replaces the Nature/Culture schema of the Moderns and puts the Human back at the Center of the Universe, ending the Copernican era as seen from within the history of the Moderns. It allows us to think generically, meaning to think with everyone anywhere and anywhen. We think-with revival movements of the Ancients that are taking place everywhere across the Sky-Earth System, practices of symmetric anthropology in the Upper Rio Negro of the Amazon, in the city of Manaus and in Brazil, the Village-as-University in Melanesia and the Boazi revival, Afro-Centric, Polytheist, Psychedelic, and other movements occurring in North America and elsewhere at the ends of the World.

Music for this episode:
Exhausted Divinity, Niky Nine
Knots, Hania Rani
Nomad's Theme, Matt Baker

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