Works and Projects

Ping and Mr.& Mrs. Crow | BioGeoMetries | Therianthropes | Lessness | Sonitus Urbanitatis | Sissyphus | Difficult Journeys | The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prostitute | Living With Colours | Dancing Landscapes | Fear Is A Man's Best Friend | Afternoon Echoes | Home | Camera Travels | Forest Loops | Still Lives | Pyrkos | The Machine Dream | The Liquid Reality | Cross-country Run | | One Day At The Quietest Sea | 2000 Miles (and thirteen years) | In between | Early Videos | Ars Moriendi

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Ping, Mr. & Mrs.Crow and Other Neighbours

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It would seem then that the idea that humans are the only story-telling animals is by no means an unproblematic reflection of reality. It is something that some people like to believe, just as some once believed that most humans were brutes and thus incapable of making meaning. It is, in other words, a construct , one that is intmately connected with structures of power and with the forceful repression of the awareness of nonhuman forms of agency and expression. Not surprisingly, in this matter, too, the hand of power has often fallen hardest on Indigenous people.

It is perfectly possible, then, that far from being an exclusively human attribute, the narrative faculty is the most animal of human abilities, a product of one of the traits that humans indisputably share with animals and many other beings – attachemnts to place. Perhaps, then, story telling, far from setting humans apart from animals, is actually the most imprtant residue of our formely wild selves.

Amitav Ghosh THE NUTMEG'S CURSE