Sayan Dey
As we dream and build alternative futures, how do we move beyond anthropo-ego-centrism towards a humble, cobwebbed, and rhizomatic state that is “protean, open, prefigurative, and coexisting” with the rest of nature? With this question at the heart of the article, Sayan Dey explores how factors like class, emotions, race, culture, nature, and society shape our everyday emotions and experiences of eco-intimacies and rhizomatic turns.
Touch
Schools and higher educational institutions in India, as a part of their sensitization programs against physical and emotional abuses, have been undertaking multiple forms of initiatives through curricular and pedagogical transformations and workshops informing the learners about the diverse ways in which humans can be compassionate, loving, and caring, and treat each other with dignity in a time when reciprocative destruction and abuse are celebrated. One of the essential aspects that educational institutions emphasize is the distinction between good touch and bad touch. However, the emphasis is restricted chiefly to anthropocentric concerns. It does not take into account the more-than-human living forms, such as plants, trees, rivers, oceans, the sky, soil, insects, and mammals, and others. To explain further, across generations, it has been taken for granted that the patterns and intentions of touching each other only matter to humans, not to other living forms. Because they do not react like humans and their languages of expression are mostly not interpretable for humans, it is believed that the rest of nature can be ‘touched’ and ‘felt’ according to one’s own whims and fancies.
However, this is just another preconceived narrative that humans have curated to exploit, manipulate, uproot, and re-root nature according to their commercial, industrial, and aesthetic desires. When people touch nature like water, leaves, branches, trees, insects, and animals, they do not always touch out of love, admiration, aesthetics, and care, but also touch to see in what ways the living form can benefit them. For instance, people touch leaves and branches to analyze their medicinal, aesthetic, and commercial values so that later on they can be produced, ambushed, and reproduced for profit-making purposes. People touch water to understand to what extent it can be utilized for domestic and industrial purposes. People touch insects and animals to understand if their skins and body organs can be peeled, operated on, and sold in markets.
As a child, my grandmother and mother would always take me out into the gardens and small pockets of forest that still existed in my residential locality in Kolkata, amidst the mad rush of urbanization. One of the many things that they taught me was how to touch and feel nature gently. Every time I made an effort to pluck a leaf, tear a flower, or capture a butterfly, I was not only stopped, but also thoroughly explained how it physically and emotionally hurts nature. If I were ever bitten by a bug or stung by a bee, I would be informed on how to behave and respect them so that they do not feel threatened by my presence.
My grandmother always told me, “Gaach kintu kwatha boley. Tui kichu jigasha kor ora thik uttor debe” (“Trees can speak. If you ask them something, they will respond to you.”) She also taught me that to speak to humans, a tree should first feel comfortable, loved, and respected. To make trees think so, it is essential to touch and embrace them gently. This is why, every time I went to gardens and other forms of natural spaces, I was always encouraged to observe the movements and listen to the sounds of nature deeply. I was encouraged to take note of how leaves and branches moved, brushed, and entangled with each other. I would often be asked to stand under trees with long branches, close my eyes, and experience the touch and movement of the leaves and branches above. This is how I learnt how to and how not to touch trees and other living forms, so that they feel respected, loved, and cared for, and most importantly, an essential part of the daily ecosystems.
Emotions
In a time when the planet is impacted by endless environmental catastrophes like melting icecaps, frequent earthquakes, rapid temperature rises, flashfloods, and others, on the one hand, it is essential to engage with advanced initiatives like developing sustainable engineering and architectural techniques; on the other hand, it is also crucial to re-perform nature-human intimacies on sensorial groundings. To tackle the fear of what Elizabeth Kolbert calls “the sixth extinction,” the scientific grounding of possible solutions won’t help alone. A firm emotional, sensory, and cultural grounding rooted in the ancestral knowledge systems of various Indigenous knowledge systems is required. Scientific statistics, disaster management labs, tracking instruments, and mobile apps can be good enough to generate awareness and reduce damage the ‘next time,’ but what about ‘right now’? Exclusive scientific groundings for solutions are not only exclusionary in their approach but also fail to take into account the phenomenon of emotional eternity, which serves as an agency for weaving intimate ways of living in nature.
Recently, I came across a book titled Scatter, Adapt, and Remember by Annalee Newitz. The book outlines the various scientific, engineering, and architectural transformations that human communities are already adapting to and may further adapt to prevent the impending sixth extinction. The book also discusses the various plant and animal species that have successfully resisted extinction and undergone adaptations and evolution at different points in time. However, nowhere in the book is it specified what not to do so that nature does not feel threatened and tormented anymore. These subtle normalizations of anthropo-ego-centric narratives in the sciences, innovations, and survival have been intergenerationally embedded in our scientific upbringing. This is why erasing forests, floras, and faunas has been logically justified by scientists, colonialists, and capitalists through the narrative that plants do not feel any pain because they do not have pain receptors, nerves, and brains. When Indigenous sciences resisted such severed narratives by justifying them through cosmic, terrestrial, metaphysical, and aquatic knowledge systems that are rooted in the stars, sky, land, water, constellations, touch, and smell, they were silenced as unscientific. However, today, academic disciplines such as posthuman studies, Anthropocene studies, critical plant studies, critical waste studies, and various other interrelated fields mimic, adopt, and recycle the cohabitational values of Indigenous communities, packaging them to the world as newly discovered theories and methods.
This hypocritical attitude serves as one of the many influential factors that lead humans to form intimacies with nature based on utilitarian rather than emotional values. This is why, instead of respecting the natural growth and mobilization of nature, humans decide which plants should be allowed to grow freely and which ones should be customized, which ones should be displayed in the gardens, and which ones should be imprisoned in glass chambers, and which ones should be touched, felt, and preserved and which ones which ones should be chopped, capped, and sold for commercial gains. For instance, since the 19th century, cherry blossoms have been planted in Bangalore, replacing many local species. This was initially done by European settlers and later by the locals, who found the cherry blossoms more aesthetically pleasing than local trees and believed they created a simulated image of European streets, gardens, and sidewalks. 1 Today, these plants are not commonly found across the city. They are restricted to locations inhabited bysocioeconomically privileged communities, including financially flourishing locals, NRIs, expatriate workers from the Global North, and European tourists.
Therefore, as we are collectively brainstorming about co-building alternative futures, we need to read the environmental crises not in a singular form, like a scientific crisis, or a humanitarian crisis, or a commercial crisis, but as a polycrisis involving factors like class, emotions, race, sensory, culture, nature, and society which needs to be addressed in more pragmatic and intersectional ways tied to our everyday emotions and experiences of eco-intimacies and rhizomatic turns.
Care
The phenomenon of rhizomatic turns is shaped by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy of the rhizome and Donna Haraway’s philosophy of assemblage. According to Deleuze and Guattari, living forms exist and interact in a multirooted manner underlined by varied forms of socio-emotional multiplicities. Therefore, totalitarian singularities can never be accepted as ideal methods of practicing ecological wellbeing. Haraway’s idea of assemblage is a continuation of acknowledging multiplicities through acts of collective knowing and doing. Multirooted existence through collective knowing and doing becomes possible through germinating pluriversal values and practices of reciprocative care. Reciprocative care between more-than-humans and humans can be manifested through reciprocative intimacies of touch, smell, and other sensory experiences, and these aspects should be fundamental to the teaching-learning and knowledge-making processes since childhood. Touching and feeling nature with gentleness, respect, and care is an essential ingredient of such learning processes. Usually, we are only taught to touch nature when we need to extract and experiment with it. For instance, we are taught to touch leaves to put different chemicals on them for experimentation in chemistry classes; roots, animals, and insects in the biology labs to understand their genetic and biological characteristics; and branches to identify their medicinal values, etc. However, societies and educational institutions hardly teach us how to touch a plant, insect, or animal to make them feel loved, cared for, safe, and respected. This touch, as a radical pedagogy, is essential for generating socio-emotional intimacies with nature. While touching a learner feels the surface, movements, silence, sounds, and aesthetics of nature. Even before reading about photosynthesis, cyanobacteria, algae, and geological transitions, it is essential to build sensorial intimacies with nature as deeply as possible, because the technical knowledges of textbooks and laboratories hardly contribute towards emotional growth in learners.
During my stay in the Yonphula district of Bhutan between 2019 and 2021, especially during the COVID-19 lockdowns, I would walk out of my home located inside the college campus, make a short walk down the valley to meet, greet, and embrace an oak tree. It was my daily morning ritual. Why did I do this? I do not have any scientific reasoning to justify this act, but I have enough emotional reasoning for sure.
During lockdowns, with closures of in-person interactions, social distancing, and a ban on public gatherings, meeting and greeting friends, families, and colleagues became almost impossible, resulting in mounting frustrations and loneliness. To overcome this state of stuckedness, nature became my shelter and company. I started sitting with, hugging, and listening to an oak tree for hours. Every pattern of their movements, touch, tickles, and sounds not only emotionally healed me but also profoundly ingrained in me the values of eco-intimacy. Visiting the oak tree, touching it, and embracing it served as a therapy for me. Every time I touched the tree and felt the branches and leaves brushing against my hair and face, I felt as if it was embracing me and calming me down. A point in time came when I could not imagine a day without visiting, interacting, and engaging with that oak tree. Eventually, it became my daily company, my friend, and my therapy. When I shared this experience with my colleagues, many of them followed in my footsteps and made new tree friends and grass friends. These processes of intimately and reciprocatively interacting with nature are founded on the values of entanglement, collaboration, and well-being. Later on, I incorporated these experiences into my teaching and learning methods as well. While teaching a course on ecocriticism, I assigned group assignments to students, such as building greenhouses, eco-dustbins, and eco-gardens, which allowed them to move beyond their four-walled classrooms and gain an intimate understanding, interact with, and learn from the natural environment. Such experiences make humans realize the deep social, cultural, and emotional kinships that we share with nature. This realization is an essential experience, a shift, and a turn from anthropo-ego-centrism towards a humble, cobwebbed, and rhizomatic state that is “protean, open, prefigurative, and coexisting” in nature. Even before we explore innovations, policy changes, and technological transformations to tackle environmental catastrophes, it is essential to cultivate a physical and emotional connection with nature, not in an intimidating way, but in a loving and caring way. Otherwise, we will continue to discover new disciplines, establish new solidarity networks, sign policies, and nod our heads with exaggerated promises and vague visions, without being able to penetrate to the roots of the problems we aim to address.
Sayan Dey works as an Assistant Professor at Bayan College (affiliated with Purdue University Northwest), Oman. His latest monographs are Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean (Anthem Press, 2023), and Garbocracy: Towards a Great Human Collapse (Peter Lang, 2025). His research interests are posthumanism, decolonial studies, environmental studies, critical race studies, culinary epistemologies, and critical diversity literacy. He can be reached at www.sayandey.com
- During conversations about floral and faunal destruction in Bangalore, many colleagues, students, and friends shared how the presence of cherry blossoms in Bangalore makes the localities, streets, and sidewalks appear European-styled in nature. ↩︎