Abstract

As plastics circulate the oceans and animals lose their place in the world, the fragile and indeterminate aspects of the shared world become palpable. The concept of affordances, central to ecological psychology, means to capture the possibilities for action that the world offers. It suggests a pragmatic conceptualization of the world for human and non-human animals alike. As such it is perfectly positioned to foreground the fragility of a “multispecies entanglement,” a world shared with multiple species across generations. These indeterminate aspects of the world have so far however received little attention. By bringing together evolutionary thinking in ecological psychology and ethnographical work on animal extinction, this article explores one way for affordances to bring out the messy aspects of the shared world. On this view affordances help to achieve and maintain our shared world by inviting animals to participate in that world. Affordances are unfinished, perpetually in a process of co-becoming as world and animals take shape across multiple timescales. The article ends with two concrete examples that show the fragility that this view of affordances highlights, and the responsibility it requires of human life in a multispecies entanglement.

摘要

随着塑料的流通，海洋和动物在世界上失去了地位，共享世界的脆弱和不确定的方面变得显而易见。负担概念是生态心理学的核心，意味着抓住世界提供行动的可能性。它暗示了人类和非人类动物对世界的一种务实的概念化。因此，它非常适合展示“多物种纠缠”的脆弱性，“多物种纠缠”是世代相传的多个物种的共享世界。迄今为止，世界上这些不确定的方面很少受到关注。通过将生态心理学中的进化思想和有关动物灭绝的人种学研究结合起来，本文探索了一种让养育能力揭示共享世界混乱状况的方法。按照这种观点，馈赠活动通过邀请动物参与该世界来帮助实现和维持我们的共享世界。随着世界和动物在多个时间尺度上的形成，承付能力还没有完结，永远处于共同存在的过程中。本文以两个具体示例结尾，这些示例显示了这种供求观所强调的脆弱性，以及它在多物种纠缠中对人类生活的责任。