Dave Shaw

Cultural Entanglements:
(Re)Turning to Indigenous Knowledges in Agential Realism
As of the present writing, I am in the process of completing my MA thesis, which I am
scheduled to complete in April of 2017. The thesis, entitled Entanglement and Responsibility in
Barads Agential Realism, explores Karen Barads critical posthumanist engagement with the
modern liberal subject, in an effort to rearticulate notions of responsibility in the context of the
posthuman turn, in which discrete beings (human or otherwise) are no longer an ontological
certainty. The goal of the work is to produce a framework through which one can coherently
address the ethical responsibilities of humans without reverting to the Euro- or anthropocentric
assumptions imposed by the nineteenth-century theorists of liberal humanism. As Barad posits, a
posthuman conception of responsibility entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements
of the self and other, here and there, now and then (394). The project of my PhD dissertation
will be an extension of the research aims of my MA thesis: I will examine the posthuman
subjects described by Barad in juxtaposition with Indigenous Canadian knowledge practices,
with an emphasis on the phenomenon-oriented and relational ontologies that many Indigenous
knowledges construct. The goal of the work will be to consider ways in which Indigenous
knowledges can be productively put in conversation with critical posthumanism to construct an
intercultural apparatus for sustainable entanglements within our singular and dynamic global
system.
In my MA thesis, I outline how Barads critical posthumanism not only serves to
challenge the Western liberal humanist subjects relationship to the rest of the world, but, more
fundamentally, works to rearticulate what it means to be a human. Barads interpretation of the
philosophy-physics of Niels Bohr demonstrates the precarity of the ideological constructs that
inform the western liberal ideals of individualism and objectivity, and thus forces the Western
subject to acknowledge his fundamental entanglement in, and therefore responsibility to, the rest
of the world as a single dynamic and intra-active system. The research of my MA thesis is
providing me with a strong background in posthumanist theory, with an emphasis on
phenomenon-oriented ontologies practiced by theorists such as Jane Bennet, Nancy Tuana, and
Karen Barad. I believe the work completed in my MA thesis will provide a robust theoretical
foundation for more closely examining critical posthumanism as not only a move away from the
anthropocentric isolationism of liberal humanism, but, significantly, a move toward the kind of
relational ontology described by Indigenous scholar and activist Leanne Simpson who writes,
As Rosi Braidotti suggests, Humanisms restricted notion of what counts as the human is
one of the keys to understand how we got to a post-human turn at all (16). While it is certainly
the case that posthumanism serves as a valuable critical vantage for critiquing the exclusivity of
the liberal humanist subject, it is not entirely clear, in Braidottis work, who exactly is entailed in
the we that is turning toward the posthuman. And this is, potentially, a problem: as theorists
such as Juanita Sundburg argue, many critical posthumanist theorists fail to properly
acknowledge how localized (and, in certain respects, radical) liberal humanisms conception of
the individual actually is, and thus risk implicitly suggesting that posthumanism represents a
fundamentally new ideological turn. Indeed, while posthumanism does signal a shift in

traditional Western academic thinking away from the anthropocentric assumptions of liberal
humanism, it is perhaps best understood as a shift back toward a kind of assemblage-based or
relational ontology exemplified by many Indigenous traditions of knowledge. As Sundburg
points out, Indigenous authors in the Americas, for instance, outline complex knowledge
systems wherein animals, plants, and spirits are understood as beings who participate in the
everyday practices that bring worlds into being (35). As Sundburg goes on to demonstrate, the
divide Western liberal humanists draw between nature and culture is, in many respects, a
uniquely Western concern. For this reason, what is needed is a fundamental reshaping of how the
project of critical posthumanism is understood in the larger global context: not as a
groundbreaking theoretical practice spearheaded by Western academia, but rather, as a kind of
corrective turn back toward a more traditional phenomenon-oriented ontology, which recognizes
humanitys inextricable entanglements within the word.
Indeed, the role that the ontology of Indigenous knowledge practices play in
rearticulating human responsibility is well understood in many domains of criticism: As Williams
et al. argue in their Radical Human Ecology, a collection of ecocritical essays primarily by
Indigenous authors, the ultimate challenge facinghumankind is an onto-epistemological one
both as it concerns our experience of reality (including what we think we are), and what we
count as knowledge (1). Similarly, ecological theorist Freya Mathews points out, [t]he
ecological crisis is a symptom of a deeper, metaphysical crisis in human consciousness and an
accompanying crisis of culture (8). For Mathews, as for Williams et al., the discourse of
ecological responsibility is tethered to the metaphysics of how humanity (and, primarily, modern
humanity) views itself in relation to the world. For this reason, Barads agential realism might
best be seen as an urgent rejoinder for driving the Western academic discourse on ontology back
toward the Indigenous knowledge practices that focus on articulating humans as an active and
responsive component of a larger global system.
Crucially, it will not be the position of this paper to argue that Western and Indigenous
knowledge practices are diametrically opposed and isolated from each other. As Watson and
Huntington observe, [s]uch WesternIndigenous dichotomies falsely indicate entirely
separable spaces within which to produce accounts of reality (259). Instead, the following
writing will employ Barads notions of entanglement and response to demonstrate how these two
epistemological traditions are already co-dependant as practices of knowledge-making, and
therefore can be productively juxtaposed to offer a more complete discourse on the topic of
global responsibility. Indeed, Barads agential realism already offers a unique bridge between
recent developments in Western physics and much longer traditions of Indigenous knowledge. As
Watson and Huntington observe, IK is a knowledge not about things, not objectsInstead, IK is
relational (270). Like Barads agential realism, the Indigenous knowledge practices examined
by Watson and Huntington exemplify a phenomenon-oriented ontology that does not presuppose
the discrete beings, but rather, emphasizes the relationality through which objects iteratively
emerge, or, as Barad suggests, her posthuman ontology doesnt presume the separateness of
any-thing, let alone the alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that sets
humans apart (136). Using Barads agential realism as a guide, my dissertation will aim to
rearticulate critical posthumanism as a discursive turn toward the relational ontologies that have
long been established in Canadian traditions of Indigenous knowledge.

Works Cited
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter
and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013.
Mathews, Freya. Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture. SUNY P, 2005.
Sundberg, Juanita. Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies. cultural geographies, vol. 21, no.
1, 2013, pp. 33-47.
Watson, Annette and Orville H. Huntington. Theyre Here- I Can Feel Them: The Epistemic
Spaces of Indigenous and Western Knowledges. Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 9, no.
3, pp. 257-281.
Williams, Lewis, Rose Alene. Roberts, and Alastair McIntosh. Radical Human Ecology:
Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches. Ashgate, 2011.