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reneerianne's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
I have a hard time coming up with a rating for this book. I like Haraway's concepts and I enjoyed getting a peak into the way she thinks. I agree with many of the things she writes about how we should move forward in living on our planet. Strangely enough, I think I enjoyed the final experimental chapter the most. However, I went into this with what I think were entirely the wrong expectations. After having read a lot of work by others that discussed the concept of staying with the trouble, I expected this to be the core reading on the topic. Instead, I found very little theoretical explanation of the way of thinking and a lot of biology jargon and terminology that made this a difficult read to me. I believe this work could have resonated with me a lot more had it been a little more descriptive about the introduced concepts, but I will be revisiting the book and others' writing about it in the future.
savaging's review against another edition
5.0
"Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the-minute. I imagine chthonic ones as replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair. Chthonic ones romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with sky-gazing Homo. Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and perform the material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters. They also demonstrate and perform consequences. Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no one; they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth. They make and unmake; they are made and unmade. They are who are. No wonder the world’s great monotheisms in both religious and secular guises have tried again and again to exterminate the chthonic ones. The scandals of times called the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene are the latest and most dangerous of these exterminating forces."One downside to reading this book is I'd find myself on public transportation weeping about lemurs and bees.
But the upside is a jubilant sense of feeling understood and deepening my understanding. This serious consideration of the more-than-human playful-deadly overabundant earth! Haraway almost convinces me to return to academia (until I remember the work of this sort of academia happens in uncomfortable rooms and not in swamps and spider dens).
There are also some repetitive elements. In the case of repeating sentences across an essay, I feel this is Haraway returning to words as a way of weaving together meaning. In the case of repeated paragraphs across separate essays, I think it's just bad editing.
crlnvrvlt's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
3.0
ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
there's a too-big metric ton netbag of every thing in this book and more, all connecting to a specific and particularly located some thing else that matters, plus all the well death and life worlds that might be and all must respond, non-optional. and i want more! and more! i've watched donna haraway build this loving and too-real philippic for a better world on a response-able program of multispecies cosmopolitics in the years following *when species meet*. the book's final chapter goes out on a limb in a speculative fabulated symbiogenetic fun mode where partnerships for living and dying well are forged at birth by a cult of hot compost to return the human species population into balance with gaia. i take this as the elaboration on the lack of choice that women have over their bodies with regard to making babies rather than kin, but i expected there to be a moment where she would go into abortion more directly. the question here isn't super elaborated beyond the general ethic promoted through making kind with our netbags of holding extinction stories like the expressionist or symbolist bee painting in the evolutionary morphology of the orchid. i fucking love this story, all the feels...
kvdb's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
bennificial's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
3.0
I liked most of the book and thought that a lot of it was really interesting but then it got weird when she started talking about how we need to reduce the human population. Hate that she would perpetuate Malthusian ideas but the parts that did not talk about that were interesting.
sergiodevesa's review against another edition
4.0
Donna J. Haraway propone un modelo de convivencia con la biosfera donde los Humanos seamos simbiontes con otros bichos que habitan la Tierra.
Aconsejo aproximarse al libro sin una idea preconcebida ni esperar encontrar grandes respuestas teóricas sobre un futuro guiado por el Ecologismo. Por el contrario, este ensayo ilustra maneras de pensar, de "devenir-con" otros seres vivos y ser respons-hables y terminar con el Capitaloceno.
Una de sus propuestas es transmitir sus reflexiones a partir de ejemplos e historias, culminando en un relato en su capítulo final que nos aproxima mediante la imaginación a un futuro posible. Me asombra y agrada encontrar nexos con la autora en historias como la de Nausicaä del Valle del Viento, famosa película de Hayao Miyazaki, de los que se sirve para ilustrar ideas de su propuesta Ecologista. Otros elementos de su SF (String Figures, o Figuras de Cuerdas) conectan con Ursula K. Le Guin y otras autoras como Octavia E. Butler, pensadoras que refuerzan la posición de Haraway de construir un futuro distópico sin destruir la realidad actual, sino devenir hacia un modelo mejor y partiendo de lo que tenemos. Lo que, en general, es mucho trabajo por hacer.
Aconsejo aproximarse al libro sin una idea preconcebida ni esperar encontrar grandes respuestas teóricas sobre un futuro guiado por el Ecologismo. Por el contrario, este ensayo ilustra maneras de pensar, de "devenir-con" otros seres vivos y ser respons-hables y terminar con el Capitaloceno.
Una de sus propuestas es transmitir sus reflexiones a partir de ejemplos e historias, culminando en un relato en su capítulo final que nos aproxima mediante la imaginación a un futuro posible. Me asombra y agrada encontrar nexos con la autora en historias como la de Nausicaä del Valle del Viento, famosa película de Hayao Miyazaki, de los que se sirve para ilustrar ideas de su propuesta Ecologista. Otros elementos de su SF (String Figures, o Figuras de Cuerdas) conectan con Ursula K. Le Guin y otras autoras como Octavia E. Butler, pensadoras que refuerzan la posición de Haraway de construir un futuro distópico sin destruir la realidad actual, sino devenir hacia un modelo mejor y partiendo de lo que tenemos. Lo que, en general, es mucho trabajo por hacer.
laindarko2's review against another edition
challenging
inspiring
slow-paced
4.0
Make kin, not babies!
I'm compromising with the 4 star rating as I would give this a 5 for the impact it has had on me but a 3 for overall structure as a text.
Haraway's writings on how to be in a troubled world, in a trouble time, inhabiting troubled minds, bodies, and consciences, are really, really important to me. My main takeaways being the emphases on kin-making, storytelling, play, and acceptance that sometimes healing/resurgence/decolonizing are bumpy processes; they can be risky, partial, imperfect, and could sometimes even fail, but they are always worthwhile practices. Haraway presents some compelling examples of the exact kinds of healing and kin-making processes she's talking about and she provides an immense network of other texts, ideas, stories, and art to look into -- going beyond merely citing sources and treating her sources (no matter how old) more like active collaborators, very much in keeping with her principles. Her use of language and story is definitely challenging to get used to, and one could argue that she limits the accessibility of her ideas in this way, but there's intentionality to every word choice and turn of phrase and I don't think this book would be what it is without it. Her use of language is, in itself, an example of the creative reimaginings that she is advocating for. We love a theorist who doesn't just talk the talk, but walks the walk!
However, I think this book needed to be edited down a lot. There's a lot of unnecessary repetition. Most of the main ideas are explained wonderfully in just the introduction and don't really need to be re-explained, yet they are, in every chapter and using more or less the same words. I don't know much about the background of this book's publication, but I have a suspicion that it started out as an essay and was inflated to fit a more publishing-friendly page count.
Regardless, this book is an essential part of my personal library at this point. I would recommend at least the introduction and first chapter to all of my fellow Braiding Sweetgrass-loving academics.
I'm compromising with the 4 star rating as I would give this a 5 for the impact it has had on me but a 3 for overall structure as a text.
Haraway's writings on how to be in a troubled world, in a trouble time, inhabiting troubled minds, bodies, and consciences, are really, really important to me. My main takeaways being the emphases on kin-making, storytelling, play, and acceptance that sometimes healing/resurgence/decolonizing are bumpy processes; they can be risky, partial, imperfect, and could sometimes even fail, but they are always worthwhile practices. Haraway presents some compelling examples of the exact kinds of healing and kin-making processes she's talking about and she provides an immense network of other texts, ideas, stories, and art to look into -- going beyond merely citing sources and treating her sources (no matter how old) more like active collaborators, very much in keeping with her principles. Her use of language and story is definitely challenging to get used to, and one could argue that she limits the accessibility of her ideas in this way, but there's intentionality to every word choice and turn of phrase and I don't think this book would be what it is without it. Her use of language is, in itself, an example of the creative reimaginings that she is advocating for. We love a theorist who doesn't just talk the talk, but walks the walk!
However, I think this book needed to be edited down a lot. There's a lot of unnecessary repetition. Most of the main ideas are explained wonderfully in just the introduction and don't really need to be re-explained, yet they are, in every chapter and using more or less the same words. I don't know much about the background of this book's publication, but I have a suspicion that it started out as an essay and was inflated to fit a more publishing-friendly page count.
Regardless, this book is an essential part of my personal library at this point. I would recommend at least the introduction and first chapter to all of my fellow Braiding Sweetgrass-loving academics.