The Anthropocene Crisis and the Call for Interspecies Knowledge: Focusing on Anna Tsing, Thom Van Dooren, and Donna Haraway's Understanding of the More-Than-Human Other

This study addresses the critique of traditional knowledge in the Anthropocene and explores the transformation of knowledge. The Anthropocene crisis demands various philosophical reflections and the pursuit of knowledge that can mitigate climate change. I propose a shift from knowledge based on anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism to one that enables interspecies coexistence, exploring the direction of such transformed knowledge. To this end, the study compares several ways of knowing from posthuman knowledge, specifically in multispecies studies. The examples examined include Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing,” emphasizing the connection between matsutake mushrooms, forests, and indigenous peoples; Thom van Dooren’s “arts of attentiveness,” focusing on mourning with endangered species in the era of extinction; and Donna Haraway’s concept of “response-ability” regarding interspecies knowledge construction in natureculture environments. These cases share several commonalities: firstly, they include more-than- human critters such as animals and plants as subjects of knowing, expanding beyond human cognition. Secondly, in terms of the object of knowledge, it identifies the object as ontologically entangled with the subject, emphasizing the ethics of relationships in cognition. Thirdly, in terms of content and methods of knowledge, they stress the ecological situatedness of knowledge and the importance of narratives appropriate to such situations. This shift from anthropocentric notions of knowledge to interspecies knowledge will help us to co-create the world with more-than-human other.