GSSC Seminar Series

14 April 2026

Humanities beyond Humans? Reassessing More-than-Human Approaches

Christoph Antweiler (University of Bonn)

12:00-13:00

The ‘more-than-human’ approach aims to move away from viewing humans as the centre of a scientific worldview. The basic premise is that animals, plants, microorganisms, as well as objects and technical systems, should be seen as participants in social and ecological processes. The ‘more-than-human’ approach is fundamentally relational.

In environmental cultural studies and environmental anthropology, the ‘more-than-human’ approach is already almost hegemonic, or at least currently mainstream. It goes by various names, such as ‘more-than-human’, posthumanism, relational ontologies and new materialism. I refer here to studies by, for example, Whatmore, Braidotti, Latour, Lorimer, Haraway and in anthropology Tsing, Kirksey, Kohn and Sahlins. Contributions by these scholars are largely well received within the environmental sciences.

This lecture highlights, in a thesis-like form, some of the problems I see with the ‘more-than-human’ approach. As there are differences and variations within the ‘more-than-human’ approach, it should be noted that the points raised here concern positions which – though not always in their entirety – are held by most proponents.

The talk will address ten points: (1) the so-called West and ‘Western science’, (2) ‘Western dualism’ and terminology, (3) criticism of the natural sciences, (4) the relationship between indigenous worldviews and science; (5) the historical responsibility of the sciences, (6) the colonial appropriation of foreign knowledge and epistemic violence, (7) the appreciation of cooperation, symbiosis and symbiogenesis, (8) agency and sociality, (9) the critique of the supposed special status of humans, and (10) the critique of anthropocentrism.

Christoph Antweiler is a senior professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn. He studied geology and paleontology (Diploma) and subsequently anthropology (PhD) in Cologne. He earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the theory of social evolution and completed his habilitation with an empirical study on the rationality of decision-making in urban Indonesia.

His main research areas include local knowledge, urban culture, ethnicity, human universals, and anthropogenic environmental change. His book publications include: Inclusive Humanism. Anthropological Basics for a Realistic Cosmopolitanism (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2012), Our Common Denominator. Human Universals Revisited (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016, pb. 2018), Anthropology in the Anthropocene (Darmstadt: WBG, 2022), Heimat Mensch. Eine populäre Anthropologie. New edition (Stuttgart: Alibri, 2022), Anthropology in the Anthropocene (Cham: Springer, 2024), and Menschen machen Erdgeschichte (Munich: Oekom, 2025).

Antweiler is a member of the Academia Europaea (London) and serves on the International Advisory Board of the Humboldt Forum (Berlin).