Sandra Swart (Südafrika) spricht im Rahmen des Brownbag-Lunch "GreenHour" am Wissenschaftszentrum Umwelt zum Thema “Becoming a Lion’s Historian: more-than-human solutions for living on planet earth.”

Sandra Swart is a professor and chair of the Department of History at Stellenbosch 伟德国际_伟德国际1946$娱乐app游戏, South Africa. She received her PhD in modern history from Oxford 伟德国际_伟德国际1946$娱乐app游戏 in 2001, while simultaneously obtaining an MS (with distinction) in environmental change and management, also at Oxford. Her research focus is the socio-environmental history of southern Africa, with a particular focus on the shifting relationship between humans and animals.? For this week’s Green Hour, she presents:

“Becoming a Lion’s Historian: more-than-human solutions for living on planet earth.”

‘If a lion could speak,’ the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, ‘we could not understand him.’ But I contend that lions do ‘speak’ – they communicate in voice and action – and we homo sapiens have long tried to understand them and sometimes succeeded. I would go even further and say that lions have tried to understand us too. In fact, as I will argue, the contact between humans and lions has sometimes shown evidence of mutual comprehension. Of course, it was a shifting and partial understanding and, as I will show, affected by the changes in human and lion lifeways – so perhaps we can call it co-created. I will show that, at the same time as Wittgenstein used the lion to illustrate the impossibility of such communication, a real lion-human community were speaking to each other and used this conversation to survive in a shared territory in the Kalahari desert. I reconstruct this peculiar pact as a way of thinking afresh about how we tell more-than-human histories. I will tell of two species, both apex predators, who learned to live together in a shared world. This is a new kind of history that challenges us to take animal cultures seriously.