Description: On the conservation frontier of southern Chile, the lives of smallholding settlers, Indigenous Mapuche farmers, environmental activists, entrepreneurs, and conservation scientists all grapple with the enduring impacts of settler-caused environmental depletion, aspirations for a new ethics of care, and the promises of an ecotourism boom. Here, the question of what it means to be human is not simply an existential concern but the reflexive result of experiences of becoming human through and with nonhuman others in an increasingly uncertain world.
Review Quotes: "In this fascinating account, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani examines the diverse ways 'being human' emerges in a conservation frontier in southern Chile. Based on years of fieldwork with Indigenous settlers, forest lovers, timber harvesters, and avian ecologists, among others, Alterhumanism helps us see humanity as a kind of ongoing experiment, full of possibility and contradictions--an important reminder to all of us."--Laura A. Ogden, author of Loss and Wonder at the World's End
"Piergiorgio Di Giminiani provides an ethnographically rich and intellectually provocative study of the Anthropocene within the conservation frontier of southern Chile. Plural renderings of 'the human' emerge within the entangled, multispecies worlds of Indigenous farmers, national settlers, ecotourists, conservation scientists, birds, and forests. Di Giminiani develops an innovative theoretical approach termed 'alterhumanism' that will reward engaged readers within the fields of environmental anthropology, multispecies ethnography, posthumanism, and Latin American studies."--Marcos Mendoza, author of The Patagonian Sublime: The Green Economy and Post-Neoliberal Politics