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Childhood, Ferocious Sleep: Counterpunch book review by MARTIN BILLHEIMER

July 27, 2018

 

In her recent critique of kids’ books, Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation (Routledge; PB edition, 2018), Layla AbdelRahim recounts this striking tale from Onchukov’s collection of North Russian folk stories:

A man was walking to Njonoksa, on the bridge… he saw a she-devil rambling: “A dress to impress I had; everything was taken away; but today, into the water I probe in a fashionable German robe, all bright, and with a haircut short and never will I emerge again, and never will show my voice.

Her admirable English translation parodies pedagogical grammar in a kind of beat hopscotch: dress/impress is serpentine; robe/probe sounds slightly lewd (and why is the robe German, not Dutch or Turkish?). The haircut seems an unexplained rite (short, shameful?). You cannot show a voice, but a face – yet certainly a voice shows something? Colossal stature, or its opposite in a visual gag. The babbling she-devil is a loopy relative of the Grimm Scissor Man or the Japanese snow witch. Note that she’s met on a ramble, where all songs and accidents start (or end: ‘No more I’ll go a roving’). And bridges are common places for strange meetings, once upon a time.

…The argument of Children’s Literature is that most Western childhood classics contain, consciously or unconsciously, a virulent antipathy toward the natural world, animals and animal nature, and the Commons. Fear of the wilderness is a preoccupation of this morose literature, represented in mythic or animal forms that both allure and terrify. The result is the inculcation of the arid outlines of commodity relations over the vigorously dialectical childhood mind. Even when children’s books offer a critique of that terrible project which begins at childhood’s end – Adulthood – the best it can muster is a kind of sentimental admission of defeat, exemplified by A. A. Milne’s final paragraph in Winnie the Pooh.

…AbdelRahim’s critiques of Lewis Carroll, Frank Baum, Milne, Lewis and Sendak are incisive and carefully thought through, stated clearly but with a true feel for poetics and ambiguity. As arguments, they are probably irrefutable.

Full review HERE

 

 

 

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Education, Unschooling, and Losing Our Sense of Empathy with the World

June 11, 2018

Layla returns to A Worldview Apart podcast and talks with Eric Garza about what attracted her to unschooling when her daughter was born, what unschooling means and how it worked for her, and how modern schooling diminishes people’s capacity for empathy, among other things. To learn more about education and child-rearing cultures read Wild Children — Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education (Fernwood Publishing 2013).

Or, visit the direct link HERE

31st May 2018

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Questioning Social Narratives – interview

Layla discusses the thesis of her book Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation: Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness (Routledge 2015, 2018) with Eric Garza on A Worldview Apart podcast, in which she critiques the foundational social narratives that support a human-centered view of the natural world and that compel people to perpetuate and acquiesce to oppression.

Or, find the direct link HERE

13th September 2017

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How Children’s Literature Links to Narcissism and Violence

May 28, 2018

Stories we tell ourselves work to justify the abuse we inflict on the planet.

Posted May 18, 2018 by Marc Bekoff, Animal Emotions on Psychology Today

“The stories we tell ourselves mostly work to justify and veil the abuse we inflict on the planet and our nonhuman siblings. Within a blink of an eye, our civilisation has brought life on earth to the brink of extinction.”

A few weeks ago I received and began reading through a most fascinating and wide-ranging book by Dr. Layla AbdelRahim called Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation: Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness. I was familiar with another of her books titled Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education, and after reading through her latest work I wanted to know more about it, so I asked if she could answer a few questions. Gladly she said she could. Our interview went as follows.

 

Why did you write Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation?

This book is based on my doctoral dissertation in which I set out to understand the principles of life in wilderness and what made wild socio-economic relations different from the economic principles of civilisation. Since my previous work was rooted in anthropology, I was particularly interested in understanding how cultural choices – such as killing animals, domestication of human and nonhuman sexuality, and other forms of violence – become encoded and incorporated into our lives through personal and institutional practices and how we ensure the self-reproduction of these institutions.

My research revealed that because the economies of wilderness are governed by mutualistic, empathic relationships of exchange, individuals and groups (or species) continuously seek new ways of interacting. Here, empathy, or cueing in to how your community of life feels becomes an important guide by which members of the community gather knowledge and which guides their actions and reactions. This system requires presence and favours the constant evolution of diversity. Civilisation, in contrast, is rooted in the economy of domestication, in which everything and everyone is forced to conform to the will of human owner of resources. It is a socio-environmental and economic system rooted in monoculturalism, where empathy stands in the way. Thus, civilisation came up with a convoluted technological system that allowed people to alienate themselves from the pain they inflict on others. Language and symbolic culture thus enabled humans to institutionalise an ideology of violence and transmit it through abstract “knowledge” based on narratives that frame our and other beings’ experiences. Instead of basing our knowledge on direct experiences of how our own livelihoods impact others from whose suffering we benefit, we now rely on narratives to define for us which acts are to be understood as violent and thus to be defined as illegal or deviant and which violent acts are not even to be seen for what they are.

Children’s literature and culture are potent loci for this ideology, ensuring its uncompromising reification and unconscious propagation. The book shows how many of the fictional and scientific works that we assume to be “feminist,” “environmentalist,” or “anti-racist” build their narratives on this foundation of violence and thus inadvertently defeat their own purpose: the film “Up,” the popular books such as Anne of Greene GablesWinnie-the-PoohThe Giving Tree, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, among others. However, and perhaps the most important objective of the book is to offer a way forward in envisaging new socio-economic relationships modeled on mutualistic paradigms in the wild and integrating them into our desires, narratives, institutions, and practices. I use Tove Jansson’s Moomin books to illustrate what possible ways forward may look like.

How does it follow up on your previous interests?

This book came out of years of personal observations, experiences, and my brief stint in journalism of war in Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, as well as my work with refugees of war and later anthropological research in Europe and North America. But most important, it comes out of my lifelong concern for the well being of nonhuman animals. My maternal grandparents had a small family farm south of Moscow surrounded by a forest. There were cows, goats, pigs, rabbits, chickens, geese, ducks, cats, and a dog. My grandparents loved and took great care of the animals. And yet, they killed and calmly ate the animals they gave names to and who I believed were part of the family. I would run to the forest and try to find a logic to this, but I could not. I tried to help the animals and save them from that fate, but even though at the time, I did not know what institutions were, I could see that there was a social wall, a consensus, that safeguarded these acts of violence.

At the age of three and a half, I resolved not to eat animals and to do everything to help bring an end to their suffering. Children’s literature was particularly striking to me in how it framed our relationships with our nonhuman siblings and each other. I experienced Brothers Grimm tales as ethnographic depictions of cannibalism and human predation: in the stories, animals and children were told they were loved and yet they were eaten without hesitation when hunger struck. In real life too, people I trusted and loved ate the animals who trusted and loved them. Thus, even though, at the time, I did not have the terminology, I nonetheless grasped the connection between our (civilised) economy, stories, and cultures of subsistence before I had language – or perhaps, because I did not have it. Over the years, this connection grew clearer as I delved into interdisciplinary research on violence, deviance, normalcy, legality, illness, and health. I thus started my studies in the “hard” sciences and later as I went into anthropology, sociology, and comparative literature.

What are your major messages in this wide-ranging and very novel book?

There are several messages I hope to get across. First, the stories we tell ourselves mostly work to justify and veil the abuse we inflict on the planet and our nonhuman siblings. Within a blink of an eye, our civilisation has brought life on earth to the brink of extinction. I urge people to rethink the ways in which each of us, wittingly or not, perpetuates this tragedy, both on personal and institutional levels; the ways in which each of us plays our role of the “Little Eichmann” in the holocaust against life. Because language constitutes the main technology for the transmission of socio-economic choices, people need to examine the ways in which language inhabits and domesticates us prompting us to contribute to an economy based on predation. In other words, we must connect words with deeds and not separate them as we currently do.

My book offers an analysis of how narratives of civilisation centre the interests of the “owners” and the “agents”, i.e. of those who are economically and politically dominant and silences the voices of the suffering to continue their exploitation. In this manner, the public discourse frames the perspective of the predator in terms of truth and the voices that challenge the naturalness of predation as lie. My hope is that this book will provide a new lens through which to understand our anthropology – or self-knowledge as predators – and to rewild ourselves, starting with our narratives and socio-environmental economy and ending with our language and dreams.

Who is your major audience?

The book is intended for a varied lay and professional audience. To make my work accessible to non-academics, I explain the “difficult” terms. The explanatory notes and bibliography offer further suggestions for research. The lay audience can be activists, parents, or simply people concerned with aligning their own personal and professional lives to respond adequately to the demands of the current environmental and political challenges.

The book should be of equal interest to economists, environmentalists, animal well-being activists, natural and social scientists, humanists, educators, academics and non-academics alike.

What are some of your current and future projects?

I am currently working on my next book project, in which I examine the links between the narratives in evolutionary theory, education, economics, and the domestication of human beings. I am comparing Western, Russian, and Arabic conceptions of evolution.

“If we are to halt the impending anthropogenic catastrophe, we need to identify the ways in which we have disrupted the system of life on this planet.”?

Is there anything more you’d like to tell readers?

If we are to halt the impending anthropogenic catastrophe, we need to identify the ways in which we have disrupted the system of life on this planet. To do that, we need to do three things: get outside our narcissistic narratives; cede our self-designated place as top predator; and re-integrate ourselves into wild economies, in which we cherish and respect the self-realisation and well being of each creature regardless of species or whether they hold any value for us. This is what I mean by rewilding.

Thank you, Layla for a most interesting and informative interview. You helped clarify for me just what your book is all about and I hope it will receive a broad and cross-cultural audience. I hadn’t fully appreciated the power of children’s literature and now I do. It’s essential that others appreciate and understand it as well. 

 

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Naked Wildness

January 8, 2018

Some of the topics discussed in this interview are wildness and civilisation, Stanford prison experiment, science, and domestication.

 

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Primitivism 101

Interviewed by Ron Lester Whyte for Deep Green Philly on the principles of anarcho-primitivism, cooperation, and anarchism.

Part 1/3

To listen to the other 2 parts click HERE

 

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Will Civilize for Food

Tonight, Layla AbdelRahim and Rabble Rouser discuss the marshmallow test, a more in-depth study of domestication and work, how they relate and are interdependent, and the role of deferred gratification in both modern civilized living, and how it controls action against civilization as well. Patience is not a virtue, it is a vampire.

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Civilized Racism II

Topics racism, Ferguson, police violence, anarchism, primitivism, domestication
Despite claims that we’ve entered a “post-racial” era, racism is alive and well, thriving even, and anti-black racism, in particular, continues to escalate. Layla AbdelRahim and I first discussed this topic several years ago after the Trayvon Martin murder. The recent modern-day lynching of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown by a Ferguson, MO police officer has once again raised familiar issues, including the mainstream media’s propensity to posthumously blame the victims of racist violence for their own deaths. In 2014, Layla returns to the Deep Green Philly podcast to discuss civilised spaces and the “open season” on Black and Brown people.
Though she eschews labels, Layla tentatively describes herself as an anarcho-primitivist, specifically focusing her work on, among other things, the role of domestication and civilized narratives in shaping the socio-economic structures of society.Interview conducted by Ron Lester Whyte, 5 September 2014

Excerpt from the audio

“The criminality of the murder is not the question. For example, if you kill a wolf you will not be persecuted because, well, wolves are seen as a threat to domesticated animals and the land that has been taken by the humans, and by the humans who are given the agency to consume and control, and who therefore have the right to kill. And this is the problem, the problem is not even the idea of teaching children to be racist or to be sadists; the idea is to show them, to train them from early childhood to know their place in this food chain, in this niche [and to teach them] whether or not they constitute the resources that are disposable or usable, with the right to live – if they perform according to the prescribed role they were given in that structure, in that hierarchy of resources. If they challenge, if they threaten the interests of the hierarchy then there’s no problem killing them. These acts are not an aberration, they’re a reconfirmation of this narrative that structures our socio-economic possibilities”.

Civilized Racism part 3 (of 4)
Civilized Racism part 4 (of 4)


(2014)

 

Layla speaks on the medicalisation of the oppressed and the civilised “othering” by means of constructs of illness and health. Interviewed by Ron Lester Whyte for Deep Green Philly, 29 March 2012

Civilized Racism part 1 (of 4)
Civilized Racism part 2 (of 4)


(2012)

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Civilized Racism I

Trayvon Martin, Anna Brown, Shaima Alawadi and Civilized Racism

Layla speaks on the medicalisation of the oppressed and the civilised “othering” by means of constructs of illness and health. Interviewed by Ron Lester Whyte for Deep Green Philly, 29 March 2012

Civilized Racism part 1 (of 4)
Civilized Racism part 2 (of 4)


(2012)

Revisiting Civilized Racism in 2014

Layla discusses civilised spaces and the “open season” on Black and Brown people , 5 September 2014

Civilized Racism part 3 (of 4)
Civilized Racism part 4 (of 4)


(2014)

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Domestication, aliénation et civilisation – Interview par MÉDIA RECHERCHE ACTION

December 14, 2017

Comprendre la base violente et civilisatrice qui mène à notre domestication, de l’ontologie civilisatrice à l’ontologie sauvage

by MÉDIA RECHERCHE ACTION

août – septembre 2012

Première partie d’une entrevue avec Layla AbdelRahim sur les concepts civilisateurs de l’homo sapiens moderne qui se conçoit à la fois comme ressource et comme prédateur.

Quel rôle devrait-on occuper afin que la communauté de vie dont nous faisons partie soit viable ?

Sujets abordés lors de l’entrevue:

Première partie

Domestication, aliénation et civilisation (partie 1)

  1. Expériences marquantes de son enfance passée en Russie et au Soudan (00:00 à 08:20)
  2. L’acquisition et la transmission de l’information culturelle (Pierre Bourdieu avec l’habitus et Richard Dawkins avec le concept de mème) (08:20  à 14:47)
  3. La civilisation est fondée ontologiquement dans la violence qui en est son premier concept. (John Zerzan et l’aliénation du réel par le langage) (14:47 à 19:49)
  4. Le moment d’aliénation selon Layla commence où nous avons décidé de nous construire comme prédateur, comme consommateur de la vie des autres. (19:59 à 42:13)
    1. La conception de ressource, tout devient une ressource y compris nous-mêmes et la conception de viol qui y est liée  (27:22 à 37:57)
    2. La surpopulation causée par la pression du premier monde qui ne peut se résoudre avec la conception de ressource (30:42 à 37:57)
    3. Réapprendre sa place parmi la communauté de vie (37:58 à 42:13)

Ecouter la première partie

Deuxième partie

Domestication, aliénation et civilisation (partie 2)

  1. La domestication engendre la civilisation et la reproduit (00:00 à 15:49)
    1. La civilisation est basée sur une mentalité de la pauvreté (Marshall David Sahlins, Stone Age Economics) (04:31 à 05:59)
    2. Le développement technologique, particulièrement dans le domaine de la santé, ne sert qu’à nous maintenir dans notre rôle de ressource et ne bénéficie qu’à la classe riche. (05:59 à 15:49)
    3. (Les villes, des centres de parasitisme (08:40 à 10:09))
  2. Une épistémologie sauvage basée sur une ontologie sauvage (15:49 à 22:33)
  3. La manipulation de la représentation de l’état de nature dictée par la pensée civilisatrice (18:11 à 22:33)

Ecouter la deuxième partie 

Troisième partie

Domestication, aliénation et civilisation (partie 3)

  1. Les luttes basées sur l’humanisme européen échouent lorsqu’elles ne remettent pas en question la création même de l’humanisme comme base aliénante du vivant (00:00 à 07:27)
    1. Dépasser les revendications orientées vers les frais de scolarité et remettre en question l’existence de ces institutions qui participent à notre domestication (01:42 à 03:40)
    2. Se poser la question « Qu’est-ce que c’est que d’être humain dans notre monde ? » nous dispose  à remettre en question notre relation au vivant. (03:40 à 05:24)
  2. Toute ethnie confondue, nous avons de la difficulté à nous concevoir hors de l’humanisme comme faisant partie des besoins des autres « humains-animaux ». (07:27 à 09:15)
    1. Speciesism, Racism and Sexism Intertwined, voir video: Nekeisha Alexis-Baker(07:51)
    2. Le spécisme devient la base d’une pensée qui divise et construit l’ « autre » ainsi que son oppression.  (08:11 à 09:15)
  3. Expériences actuelles qui vont à l’encontre de notre société domestiquée (09:30 à 11 :35)
    1. Film (en plusieurs parties): anOther story of progress (09:30 à 09:51; 11:18 à 11:35)
    2. Front de libération animale (ALF), Front de libération de la Terre (ELF) (09:51 à 10:50)
  4. Expériences personnelles avec le système d’éducation et le choix de ne pas domestiquer sa fille par l’école (11:35 à 18:31)
  5. Son expérience avec la maternité dans un contexte contraint par la croissance capitaliste postsoviétique (18:31 à 25:13)
    1. Lasse Nordlund
    2. Anecdote avec sa fille (23:55 à 25:13)
  6. Permettre une participation active de l’enfant à sa propre éducation et le développement de son empathie (25:13 à 30:24)
    1. Mettre un enfant au monde pour sa propre raison d’être (28 :07 à 29:34)
  7. La sémiologie de l’image des publicités pour l’allaitement témoigne de la hiérarchie raciste et civilisatrice qu’elle entretient (30:24 à 31:55)
  8. L’importance de se déciviliser avant même une grossesse pour ne pas perpétuer la domestication. Qu’est-ce que c’est que de redevenir sauvage ? (31:55 à 42:10)
    1. La médicalisation du processus d’enfantement revient à gérer la venue d’une nouvelle ressource (35:26 à 39:10)
  9. Apprendre par l’empathie en étant en contact avec le vivant (42:10 à 45:28)
  10. L’importance de résister à la scolarisation (45:28 à 52:25)
    1. (Livre: Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education, 46:55)
    2. Homeschooling et unschooling (50:32 à 52:25)
    3. Maria Montessori et le concept de fenêtre, moment au cours duquel l’enfant a une ouverture à apprendre sur un sujet particulier.   (51:31 à 52:25)

Ecouter la troisième partie 

Quatrième partie

Domestication, aliénation et civilisation (partie 4)

  1. La domestication limite notre apprentissage et nous détruit physiquement et émotionnellement. (00:00 à 06:20)
    1. Arshavsky et Ukhtomsky, physiologistes russes (00:00 à 00:34 ; 01:53 à 04:05)
    2. Pierre Alexeiévitch Kropotkine, naturaliste qui lie la science de l’évolution et l’anarchisme (L’Entraide, un facteur de l’évolution) (00:34 à 01:53)
  2. Des exemples concrets des principes du « unschooling » et le moment où sa fille prend connaissance de l’existence de la guerre. (06:25 à 18:01)
    1. Un des principes du « unschooling » est d’être sur le terrain pour avoir un contact sensible avec le sujet que nous voulons connaître. Pour apprendre ce qu’est la guerre, elles ont fait un voyage où le conflit serbo-croate a eu lieu. (12:05 à 15:31)
    2.  Il y a une certaine arrogance des gens qui connaissaient une réalité par un récit, alors qu’ils n’ont pas acquis la connaissance sensible. (15:31 à 17:21)
  3. La littérature pour enfants cache les perspectives des auteurs sur la vie et sur leurs relations dans le monde. Layla examine les perspectives sauvages et de domestication qui forment les ontologies des Moumines de Tove Jansson (représentant le monde sauvage), de Dunno dans Mites of Flower Town de Nikolai Nosov (basé sur des postulats anarcho-socialistes), et de Winnie l’ourson dans la Forêt des Rêves bleus par Alan Alexandre Milne (basé sur les principes civilisationnel, monarchiste et capitaliste) dans Genealogies of Wilderness and Domestication in Children’s Narratives: Understanding Genesis and Genetics in the Untangling of Identity (18:01 à 27:29)
    1. Au-delà des luttes qui revendiquent plus de domestication, l’idée derrière tout ça est une transformation qui englobe le vivant dans son ensemble. (27:29 à 31:52 )
    2. Livre: Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education, 30:30
    3. L’anarcho-primitivisme pour Layla est basé sur le dualisme parce que cette position ne peut exister qu’en présence de l’ordre auquel elle résiste. Dépassé ce dualisme, c’est la vie sauvage (31:52 à 34:58)
  4. Comment nous pouvons nous impliquer, en ce moment, au Québec, en défendant ces valeurs? (34:58 à 38:04)
  5. Rompre avec la domestication (38:04 à 43:15)
  6.   Dépendance à la technologie et parasitisme (43:15 à 50:37)
    1. Films : anOther story of progressSurplus (45:46 à 46:46)
    2. La plus grande révolution est de se libérer de cette praxis dont nous avons hérité (47:23 à 50:37)

Ecouter la quatrième partie 

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