In this lecture I will discuss the recent turn toward more-than-human, posthuman, multispecies thinking in light of the climate crisis. While affirming the need to rethink our relationship with nature – particularly through the insights of indigenous cosmologies or ontologies – I will argue for the urgent necessity of recentring human social relations: how human beings relate to one another, and what they do to each other as well as to nonhuman beings. I develop this argument through fieldwork among India’s Adivasis – indigenous forest dwellers historically labelled as animists – focusing on the arrest, imprisonment and custodial killing of a key activist. By analysing this activist’s life work and the ongoing challenges facing the social reproduction of Adivasi communities, I will propose a politics of planetary care as both a theoretical lens and a political imperative. Planetary care encompasses attention to indigenous cosmologies and more-than-human entanglements, but also crucially extends feminist theories of social reproduction, wherein care is recognised as a foundational value for sustaining human life and the healthy social reproduction of communities. Crucially, this vision of planetary care demands active confrontation with the structural inequalities of capitalist exploitation, state violence and conjugated social oppression, while valuing the environment as integral to the social reproduction of people and the cultivation of sustainable, just, and thriving communities.

ALPA SHAH is the award-winning author of ‚Nightmarch‘‚ ‚The Incarcerations‘ and ‚In the Shadows of the State‘. She has presented for BBC Radio 4. She was raised in Nairobi and studied at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics, where she was Professor of Anthropology. She is now Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University, with a fellowship at All Souls College.

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