Vieraslajisuudesta vierasmaailmaisuuteen – lintujen kohtaamisen uutta runousoppia

• Karoliina Lummaa Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74907

Abstract

From Other Species to Otherworldliness – Toward a New Poetics of Meeting Birds

When discussing animals, both scientific discourse and everyday parlance often rely on the concept of species. In addition to its ambiguity in biology, this concept has raised ethical concerns among posthumanist philosophy and human-animal studies as it may entail hierarchical separations between different types of animals. This article proposes an alternative way for thinking about nonhuman animals and a conceptual tool for analysing cultural representations of animals. Otherworldliness refers to nonhuman animals as having their biologically and ecologically specific ways of experiencing their living environments. Instead of a human-centered view of animals as representing a certain species – named and classified by humans – animals are thought of as otherworldly, having their own worlds. As the concept is intended for analysing nature writing and environmental art, it is developed in a literary context, using bird poetry as examples. Two poems from Jouni Tossavainen’s collection Kerro (2007) and one poem from Jonimatti Joutsijärvi’s collection Tule on minun nimeni (2007) are shown to mediate bird life on thematical and formal levels. Theoretically, otherworldliness is based on Jakob von Uexküll’s ethological theory, most notably on his concept of Umwelt. Timothy Morton’s conceptualizations of humans and nonhumans as coexistent strange strangers and the Earth as an entangled mesh are connected to the Uexküllian Umwelt in order to highlight the connectedness of human and nonhuman worlds. Thus humans can imagine and create art works that mediate the worlds of nonhumans, even though this attainability of otherworldliness always remains partial.