Episode 32: Beyond Dichotomies: Shaman Stories in Contemporary Literature

Posted Date: October 15, 2021

Episode Description: In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik interviews Dr. Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu. Dr. Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu discusses her new book project Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel: Histories of Lands, Animals, and Peoples beyond the Nature/Culture Divide on shamanism in contemporary literature, encompassing Northern Siberia, China, North America, Australia, and Turkey. She highlights the importance of kinship and forging ties with other human and more-than-human life forms as resistance to overextraction and global capitalist discourses. Lastly, we explore the current trends, studies, and communities in literature and environment and environmental humanities in Turkey.

Guest Biography

 

Dr. Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu works as an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Boğaziçi University. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Purdue University with majors in English and German and a minor in French Literature. Her research has been concerned with how reality/imagination, reason/emotion, mind/body, subject/object dichotomies and hierarchies have been undermined in literary works with postcolonial, ethnic, indigenous, feminist, and ecocritical inflections.

Her recent publications include her book Major Minor Literature: Animal and Human Alterity (2018), an article titled “Dressing the Cuts of the Past, Seaming a Glocal Future in Louis Erdrich’s Tracks and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness” (2018), two book chapters co-authored with Ezgi Hamzaçebi: “Writing Beyond the Species Boundary: Bilge Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats and Sema Kaygusuz’ Wine and Gold” in Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film (2019) and “Precarious Lives of Animals and Humans through the Lens of Contemporary Turkish Literature” in Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes (2020).

Project Description

Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel: Histories of Lands, Animals, and Peoples beyond the Nature/Culture Divide examines how shamanic figures and societies featured in the selected novels have been subjected to marginalization, dislocation, and dispossession through imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist encroachments in different historical and geographical contexts. Dr. Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu illustrates how the animalistic cosmologies of the nomadic societies and the ritual practices of shamans in these stories offer alternative perspectives to the long dominant anthropocentric conception of the universe, which underlies the overextraction of the earth’s natural resources and the massive destruction of ecosystems under global capitalism. With our planet on the brink of an irreversible environmental crisis that endangers human and more-than-human life alike, we urgently need relational native perspectives that unsettle the dichotomies and hierarchies of Western rationalist discourse.

Recommended Resources

  • Astor-Aguilera, Miguel and Graham Harvey, eds. Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality. Routledge, 2018.
  • Beck Kehoe, Alice. Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2000.
  • Bird-David, Nurit. “Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology, vol. 40, 1999, pp. 67-91.
  • Brightman, Marc, Vanessa Elisa Grotti and Olga Ulturgasheva, eds. Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia. Marc
  • Brightman, Vanessa Elisa Grotti and Olga Ulturgasheva, eds. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2012.
  • Clifford, James. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-first Century. Harvard University Press, 2013.
  • Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies.” Common Knowledge, vol. 25, no.1-3, 2019, pp. 21-42.
  • Ergin, Meliz. The Ecopoetics of Entanglement in Contemporary Turkish and American Literatures. Palgrave Macmillan, 2107.
  • Ertuna Howinson, Irmak and Hande Gürses, eds. Animals, Plants, Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature. New York: Routledge, 2019.
  • Oppermann, Serpil and Sinan Akıllı, editors. Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes. Lexington Books, 2020.
  • Oppermann, Serpil and Serenella Iovino. Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthopocene. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.