Companion Spirits

“Beautifully written, passionately argued, and deeply affective, Companion Spirits is a critical reflection on the necessity for anthropologists not merely to study more-than-(secular) material phenomena, but to let the spirits into ‘nature’ as the facts if we are to have any hope of understanding the climatic and ecological catastrophes engulfing the planet.” - Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism

“‘Neither true nor false, but real.’ ‘More than natural, more than material, more than human, more than…’ These two refrains sound throughout Companion Spirits, calling nervous secular modernist readers like me to listen intently. We become more than who we were when we picked up this pervasively unsettling, deeply pleasurable, richly researched and argued book. Intent listeners must take the risk to transform ourselves into someone more vulnerable, more porous, more generous, more bodily, and so perhaps more spirited. This wonderful book proffers a complex invitation to let go of categories and commitments, even our most progressive and vital ones, about who and what are, about who and what are real. Resonant with Buddhist sensibilities, the invitation is to become open to not knowing. I remain what Fernando calls a ‘vital materialist,’ but she opens me up, just maybe, to something more than that. Companion Spirits succeeds in cracking open ongoing fantasies of human dominion and exceptionalism in what she calls not the Anthropocene, but the Anthroposecular. The point is to understand why and how obligations and ethics that flow from being subject to ‘more than…’ are critical to stemming the onrushing damage of our disenchanted, dark times.” - Donna Haraway, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene