Strategic posthumanism: Confronting the fear of anthropomorphism,and finding brains in rivers

Introduction: A strategic shift

As ecological crises and climate instability intensify, the environmental humanities face a pivotal question: Should we direct our focus towards, or away from, the human – the Anthropos? This debate has animated divisions between eco-Marxists, Anthropocene theorists, posthumanists and new materialists. Central to these debates is not only the question of human culpability but also the contested meanings and boundaries of ‘humanity’ itself – who, or what, has been included within this category, and how these inclusions have shifted over time.

Yet alongside these theoretical debates, a parallel and increasingly influential shift is underway: the resurgence and growing visibility of Indigenous knowledges and cosmologies across both academic and policy spheres. From intergovernmental science-policy bodies platforms such as IPCC and IPBES to land-back movements and legal personhood for mountains and rivers, Indigenous ontologies are reshaping what counts as knowledge in global environmental discourses. ¹

Because posthumanist and new materialist theorists seek to decenter the human and challenge human exceptionalism, eco-Marxist thinkers approach such frameworks with scepticism, warning that they risk obscuring human culpability in environmental destruction. Andreas Malm, for instance, dismisses posthumanism as ‘banal’, insisting that global warming is ‘hyper-human’ in origin (2018: 114–115). For Malm and others, collapsing the boundary between humans and nature risks diluting political responsibility. In contrast, posthumanist theorists such as Donna Haraway ² and Rosi Braidotti, along with Indigenous scholars like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Zoe Todd, challenge the logic of human exceptionalism, advancing ontologies that foreground nonhuman agency and interspecies kinship.

This article argues that the eco-Marxist critique of posthumanism risks delegitimizing key contributions from Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders. In seeking to uphold political agency, eco-Marxist critiques often reproduce the very epistemic hierarchies that have historically excluded Indigenous ontologies. While recent scholarship (e.g., Barca, 2020; Skiveren, 2023) has sought to bridge eco-Marxist and posthumanist positions, few have examined this tension through the lens of epistemic injustice, especially as it pertains to Indigenous ways of knowing. ³

To address this gap, I introduce the concept of strategic posthumanism. This framework acknowledges the political utility of both human-centred and more-than-human perspectives, while actively foregrounding Indigenous understandings of nonhuman agency – not as metaphor or myth but as ontological assertions. It also helps illuminate how critiques of ‘anthropomorphism’ often function as epistemic gatekeeping, obscuring the colonial histories of dualist worldviews and the repression of Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies.

While I do not explore these differences further in this article, new materialism and posthumanism are certainly not identical. However, critics often conflate the two, and they do share a general emphasis on nonhuman agency. In coining the term “strategic posthumanism,” I aim to highlight the historical contingencies at play. Terms such as ‘human’, ‘nature’ and ‘agency’ are not neutral. They are embedded in histories of settler colonialism, extractivism and cultural hierarchy. What Malm derides as ‘brazen anthropomorphism’ (2018: 88), Kimmerer reframes as ‘the animacy of grammar’ (2013) – a reflection of fundamentally different worldviews, one that affirms the sentience and agency of abiotic entities, not metaphorically but ontologically. As such, dismissing the agency of nonhuman entities like rivers not only reflects a narrow conception of agency but risks perpetuating epistemic injustice against Indigenous knowledge holders.

For centuries, philosophy has been preoccupied with identifying the traits that distinguish humans from other species and often implicitly built this debate around what elevates humans above the rest of the animal kingdom. My goal is not to resolve the ontological question of human exceptionalism, nor to deny the possibility of meaningful distinctions between humans and other beings. Rather, I propose setting the question aside in light of the urgent ecological crises we face. From this perspective, the more pressing concern is not whether human exceptionalism is metaphysically ‘true’ or ‘false’ but whether its continued dominance in thought and policy perpetuates ecological harm and epistemic asymmetry.

Strategic posthumanism serves as a heuristic tool that makes visible and centres perspectives that challenge anthropocentrism – particularly those marginalized within dominant humanistic frameworks and historically repressed through colonial systems of knowledge and power. Simply put, posthumanism's significance lies especially in its strategic potential and not only its ontological validity: it offers a means to actively dismantle entrenched dualisms while recognizing that nonhuman agency is not just a hallmark of a few famous posthumanists but a vital and nuanced aspect of some Indigenous ontologies.

This article unfolds in four sections. First, I outline the philosophical stakes of posthumanism, with a focus on debates around nonhuman agency. Second, I interrogate the accusations of anthropomorphism and its colonial legacy. Third, I turn to Indigenous scholarship to highlight how relational ontologies challenge Western epistemic binaries. Finally, I introduce strategic posthumanism as a decolonial method for navigating these tensions – one that centres the more-than-human while resisting epistemic erasure.

In doing so, I suggest that posthumanism's true value lies not in the abstract decentering of the human but in its strategic potential to confront entrenched epistemological hierarchies and amplify historically marginalized cosmologies. Rather than engaging in a moot debate over theoretical unification, strategic posthumanism offers a pluralistic approach that invites the environmental humanities to revisit their commitments – not only to decenter the human but also to intentionally recentre the more-than-human in ways that affirm Indigenous resurgence and epistemic symmetry.

Methodological reflection

Taking Indigenous scholarship seriously means recognizing it as a vital intellectual contribution equal to other forms of knowledge. Avoiding engagement, or confining Indigenous knowledge solely to self-circulation or anthropological study, risks perpetuating intellectual colonialism by treating it as inferior, inaccessible or marginal.

While the term ‘Indigenous knowledges’ itself is rightly contested and often criticized for obscuring internal diversity and complexity (e.g., Agrawal, 1995; Hernandez, 2022), it remains a useful concept for confronting the epistemic injustices that have rendered Indigenous knowledge forms invisible. Recognizing these knowledges as epistemologies proper – and not only cultures, religions or cosmologies – is essential to challenging the hierarchies that continue to privilege Western scientific worldviews. ⁴

As a European, non-Indigenous scholar, I am acutely aware of the representational and ethical complexities that arise when engaging with Indigenous thought. My intention is not to speak for Indigenous peoples or to claim full comprehension of their epistemologies but to take seriously the insights Indigenous authors provide about their own epistemologies. This article draws exclusively on published work by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and does not engage in fieldwork or extractive research practices.

Throughout the analysis, I draw on Indigenous scholarship to substantiate and expand my argument, striving to engage respectfully with these perspectives as part of a broader effort to challenge entrenched epistemic hierarchies. I primarily engage with the various ways in which Indigenous authors have spoken of nonhuman agency, or some version thereof, as inherent to or characteristic of the epistemologies that they harbour and describe. This inevitably captures only a small part of a much broader and more diverse intellectual tradition.

Posthumanism: Agency and responsibility

Posthumanist and new materialist thought emerge from a shared intent to decenter human agency and redirect attention towards nonhuman forms of agency. ⁵ As Braidotti observes, the ecofeminist and Indigenous critiques of the human-nature divide have accelerated within posthumanist thought, fostering alliances between plural ontologists and decolonial theorists – though these perspectives remain for the most part distinct (2022: 92).

Philosopher Francesca Ferrando defines posthumanism by three key commitments: decentering the human, striving for post-anthropocentrism and adopting a post-dualist orientation. Importantly, posthumanism also acknowledges that the category ‘human’ has historically been exclusive and contingent, with many groups excluded or only partially included (Ferrando, 2020: 151) – a point echoed by Braidotti, who emphasizes how feminism and posthumanism share the goal of radically reimagining ‘the human’ to include those historically marginalized (2022: 3, 83).

More broadly, feminism and posthumanism share a commitment to amplifying the voices and experiences of those historically excluded from the category of ‘Man’ – not only women but also those beings and entities whose personhood and agencies have been more systematically denied. On the human side, this includes sexual and gender minorities, racialized communities, Muslim and Jewish populations and Indigenous peoples; on the nonhuman side, it extends to entities as varied as automata, fungi, rocks, giraffes – and rivers (Braidotti, 2019b: 39).

Like feminist efforts to deconstruct gender as a fixed category, posthumanism seeks to destabilize the characteristics attributed to ‘the Human’. This destabilization challenges exclusionary definitions shaped by dominant norms, politics and colonial histories. At its core, posthumanism seeks to uncover that which remains invisible or excluded from anthropocentric viewpoints (Ferrando, 2020: 23), highlighting the importance of nonhuman agencies and relational ontologies prevalent in Indigenous epistemologies. Although certainly not a universal feature across Indigenous communities, the examples are numerous enough to merit careful acknowledgment.

However, these perspectives face significant critique, particularly from eco-Marxists such as Kate Soper, Alf Hornborg and Andreas Malm. They caution that attributing agency to nonbiotic entities risks obscuring human responsibility for the ecological crises, which they largely attribute to capitalism and consumerism (e.g., Hornborg, 2017; Malm, 2018; Soper, 1995; Soper, 2012). As Alf Hornborg phrased it: ‘The uniqueness of human responsibility – which simply cannot be extended to rivers, volcanoes or even dogs – remains an insurmountable dilemma for posthumanism’ (Hornborg, 2019: 205–206). The problem with this critique, however, is that while posthumanists do indeed extend agency to nonhumans, such attribution does not automatically entail culpability or political responsibility – yet these are precisely the categories that critics such as Hornborg and Malm conflate in their objections.

This scepticism is especially pronounced in eco-Marxist accounts, where critics often resist the idea of agency beyond the biological and view attributions to abiotic entities – such as ‘monetary tokens, ancestral mummies, sacred mountains, astronomical bodies and computers’ – as fetishistic (e.g., Hornborg, 2017: 99). While Hornborg, for example, does not reserve agency exclusively for humans but extends it broadly to biological entities, he nonetheless rejects what he regards as the false animation of objects and even ‘fetishized living organisms, such as sacred trees […]’, thus dismissing Indigenous and other movements advocating legal personhood for natural entities as illusionary (Hornborg, 2017: 99; Hornborg, 2019: 214–217).

Malm similarly denounces what he terms ‘brazen anthropomorphism’, arguing that extending agency to rivers or mountains denies the human-driven origins of global warming and thereby undermines responsibility for it (2018: 88, 111). In his widely read The Progress of This Storm, he offers a particularly polemical critique aimed at the concept of agency within new materialism, what he calls a ‘general project of erasing the boundaries between the human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate matter’ (2018: 88).

Asserting that agency is traditionally tied to ‘having a mind’, Malm presents a view on agency that is premised on intentionality or the capacity to have goals and compares this to the ‘audacious claim’ that even inanimate matter could hold agency (2018: 85, 87). ‘But is it plausible to ascribe goals to a river or a mountain?’ Malm asks rhetorically, critiquing what he deems the new materialists’ conflation of intention with mere movement – specifically, the destination-less flow of riverine water. Unsurprisingly, he answers in the negative, explaining that neither rivers nor mountains possess brains, and thus cannot have minds or intentions (Malm, 2018: 90–91).

Although at one point Malm does briefly acknowledge that there may be some cultures that do, in fact, attribute sentience and agency to natural entities such as rivers, mountains or trees, he is also quick to dismiss their relevance: ‘Given the fabulous diversity of all the cultures that are not one's own, a willingness to embrace their beliefs leads down the slope where everything and nothing is true and false at the same time’. Now, perhaps more than ever, is not the time to indulge in ontologies ‘where the sun and the mountains are attributed full intentionality and stones have souls’, Malm asserts (2018: 173) and effectively excludes many Indigenous epistemologies from serious dialogue. This dismissal echoes colonial legacies that have historically marginalized Indigenous peoples as irrational or superstitious and relegated them to the lowest rungs of the civilizational ladder.

Marxist scholar Kate Soper likewise contends that rather than emphasizing bonds with nonhuman others, we should focus on distinctly human drivers of the ecological crises – namely, consumerism and capitalism. While stones and trees bear no responsibility for their ecological fates, posthumanists risk undermining critical moral inquiry by blurring the distinctions between humans and nonhumans (Soper, 2012: 375–376). Similarly, eco-Marxist Kohei Saito critiques recent monist theories that reject ontological binaries in favour of ‘relational thinking’, also a frequent characteristic of Indigenous epistemologies, warning that extending agency beyond humans often amounts to fetishization, obscuring capitalism's social impact on the environment (Saito, 2023: 3–5, 105, 125). Malm even hints that new materialists barely seem to believe that climate change is anthropogenic in origin – what he polemically describes as ‘the logical endpoint of new materialism’, which, he adds, ‘slams its head right into the ABC of climate change’ (2018: 111).

Across these critiques, agency tends to collapse into responsibility. Eco-Marxists argue that extending agency to nonhuman and abiotic entities is tantamount to assigning them a share of ecological culpability. At the very least, they suggest, such attributions obscure the distinctly anthropogenic origins of ecological crises. While eco-Marxists do not generally conflate agency and responsibility, in their critique of posthumanism the two concepts often become intertwined.

The core of this critique is that emphasizing nonhuman agency appears to translate into an implicit attribution of responsibility to nonhumans. Yet, in other contexts, eco-Marxists recognize that agency does not entail culpability: distinguishing between the two is central to their analyses of human socio-ecological structures driving planetary overexploitation and environmental injustice, where all humans have agency but their culpability is far from equal. Then why should this logic apply to the nonhuman world, even if we grant (some of) it agency?

Further still, it implies that any epistemology or ontology that grants agency to nonhumans outside of the biological realm is, at best, false – and at worst, damaging, in that it risks diluting human responsibility. As such, even if these critiques are primarily directed at new materialists and posthumanists, they inadvertently undermine, and at times ridicule, many Indigenous knowledge forms and worldviews.

Posthumanists, in fact, generally reject extending undifferentiated agency or responsibility to all nonhuman entities. Instead, their aim is to strategically decenter the human to foster kinship and connection across species, not to deny human responsibility for the planetary crises. Ursula le Guin, for instance, advocates ‘subjectifying the universe’ to reframe trees and rivers as ‘kinfolk’, a deliberate linguistic strategy to counter their reduction to mere resources (2017: M16).

Yet could this not also be read as another instance of the ‘brazen anthropomorphism’ often cited in critiques of posthumanism and its affiliates? Notably, such condemnations of anthropomorphism have persisted across long stretches of intellectual history, typically premised on assumptions of human exceptionalism. These assumptions, in turn, overlook the historically contingent processes that have shaped – and continue to shape – the very categories of the human and the nonhuman (e.g., Hornborg, 2019).

The next section turns to the history of science to examine how the nature–culture and human–nonhuman divides came to be constructed, and how they continue to shape contemporary debates, often operating as unspoken, commonsense assumptions that uphold ongoing epistemological hierarchies. In delving into the history of anthropomorphism and its scientific and colonial contexts, we find many sources of the rejection of non-human agency still prevalent today.

Anthropomorphism: A history of human exceptionalism

From Xenophanes to Francis Bacon, the fear of anthropomorphism has deep roots in Western intellectual history and continues to shape secular worldviews and informs their taboos (e.g., Daston, 2019: 70). In the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on ‘Anthropomorphism’, the term is defined as ‘the interpretation of nonhuman things or events in terms of human characteristics, as when one senses malice in a computer or hears human voices in the wind’. ⁶

However, this entry, short as it is, contains a further statement on the undesirability of this phenomenon: ‘Most scholars since the time of the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) have agreed that the tendency to anthropomorphize hinders the understanding of the world, but it is deep-seated and persistent’. From this, we are led to understand that anthropomorphism involves a flawed, or at the very least exaggerated, attribution of human characteristics to something or someone nonhuman. But as I will show in this section, this view becomes far more problematic when examined through a historical lens.

Although today it is grounded in secularization, anthropomorphization is frequently seen as a subtle form of anthropocentrism, as it underscores the difficulty of stepping outside one's own, inherently human, perspective. Every action is interpreted through the lens of our experience, which it said we cannot escape: the human one. As historian of science Lorraine Daston writes, ‘It is because we believe that anthropomorphism is caused by anthropocentrism that we find it reprehensible as well as erroneous, arrogant as well as confused’. But in 17th-century natural philosophy, the reasons were entirely different (Daston, 1995: 39).

Daston shows that the early modern prohibition against anthropomorphism stemmed not from secular notions of objectivity but from theological concern: God's omnipotence demanded that nature be viewed as passive and mechanical, subordinate first to God and then to man. Nature could not be imbued with agency without threatening divine authority. Natural philosophers like Robert Boyle (1627–1691) rejected non-Christian cosmologies that viewed nature as animate or intelligent, labelling such views ‘pagan’ and dangerously misleading (Boyle, 1686/1996).

Ideas that portrayed nature as more animate, and nonhuman entities as possessing soul-like qualities, agency and vitality, stood in stark contrast to the Christian worldview. This worldview saw the natural world as fallen and mundane, held a clear aspiration towards the heavenly and divine, and a desire to transcend earthly, carnal temptation and bodily limitations (indeed, ‘the prison of the soul’) (e.g., Porter, 1991). Such beliefs were in the 17th and 18th centuries deemed incompatible with Christian doctrines of human superiority and the dualism of spirit and matter, which ultimately led to their rejection by prominent natural philosophers (Glacken, 1976: 196–197; Shapin, 2018: 37).

The view that nature is inert and soulless – what Boyle and others saw as a necessary theological safeguard – helped shape the dualistic paradigm that still informs scientific worldviews today. The mechanical philosophy of the 17th century defined nature as non-thinking and non-agentic, in stark contrast to humans endowed with reason and spirit. This view stood in opposition to contemporary Aristotelian and Galenic conceptions of nature (Daston and Park, 1998; Shapin, 2018). The ‘pagan doctrine’ that attributed agency to the earth, moon, sun and stars, and its widespread influence, raised concerns that ‘the veneration for what they call nature [is] much greater than belongs to a mere creature’ (Boyle, 1686/1996: 57). Anthropomorphism, in this context, became a category mistake, a sign of heresy and irrationality.

Yet, when scholars such as Malm and Clive Hamilton today criticize what they deem to be acts of anthropomorphism, they often argue that these tendencies reveal an inescapable anthropocentrism (e.g., Hamilton, 2017: 94–95). What such critiques fail to acknowledge is that many Indigenous epistemologies do not ‘confuse’ humans and nonhumans but rather operate within ontologies where such rigid distinctions never existed in the first place.

Indeed, colonial encounters often involved not just the othering of nature but the simultaneous othering of Indigenous peoples. As Virginia Anderson (2004) shows, European colonizers labelled Indigenous peoples as ‘savages’ quite often precisely because of their relationship with animals, rivers and other nonhuman lifeforms and entities. According to historical accounts, Indigenous groups did not distinguish between what was conceptualized as ‘the natural’ and ‘the supernatural’, nor did they have the same hierarchical view of animals as the Christian orthodoxy embraced by the colonizers (Anderson, 2004: 7–8). They were viewed by colonizers as irrational, heretical and uncivilized (Alcoff, 2017: 400–401). These views were not merely epistemological disagreements and ontological incompatibilities; they were deployed as tools of epistemic and political domination.

As Amitav Ghosh (2021) notes, the expansion of the term ‘brute’ to include some humans occurred alongside genocidal colonial violence. This was a move that did not blur the lines between humans and nonhumans but rather hardened it, as it became easier to deny certain people both humanity and epistemic agency. As Ghosh writes, ‘it is probably no coincidence that the expansion in the meaning of the word “brute” occurred during the most violent period of the conquest of the Americas’, a time when encounters with Indigenous populations sparked fierce debates about whether they possessed souls or could truly be considered human (Ghosh, 2021: 187).

In Desert Notebooks, Ben Ehrenreich recounts how, in an 1885 lecture titled ‘From Savagery to Barbarism’, geologist John Wesley Powell identified the belief in animate ‘natural and celestial objects as a defining characteristic’ of what he termed ‘savagery’ (Ehrenreich, 2020: 76). The rejection of intelligence or agency in nature was a defining feature of Western thought in the late 19th century, and it was a key distinction Europeans used to differentiate themselves from the peoples they labelled as ‘inferior primitives’ (Ehrenreich, 2020: 76; Braidotti, 2022: 71; Anderson, 2004). The idea that rivers, mountains, trees, forests or even entire ecosystems could be alive and sentient was likened to a child's naïve and inexperienced inclination to perceive agency in inanimate things (Ehrenreich, 2020: 171).

These histories are crucial for understanding the stakes of the debate on nonhuman agency today. When critics dismiss the attribution of agency to nonhuman beings as ‘fetishistic’ or irrational, they often echo – whether intentionally or not – the same logics that were historically used to silence and discredit Indigenous worldviews. The charge of anthropomorphism thus becomes a form of epistemic gatekeeping, privileging Euro-Western modes of knowing while portraying Indigenous epistemologies and worldviews as ignorant or false.

A core insight of posthumanism is that ‘the human’ is not a universal category but a historically contingent construct, often used to exclude rather than include. The legacy of anthropomorphism-phobia reveals how deeply entwined ideas of reason, agency and humanity have been with projects of colonization and control. Recognizing this history creates room for strategic posthumanism, which seeks to hold space for Indigenous ontologies without collapsing them into Western theoretical frameworks or dismissing them as metaphor, fetish or mere projection.

Too often, the definition of humanity has been assumed to be a settled matter. As historian Roy Porter puts it, ‘[H]istory is an unfinished civilizing process – a struggle, anthropologists tell us, to affirm man's distinctiveness from Nature’ (Porter, 1991: 225). With the concept of strategic posthumanism, it becomes clearer that the distinction between human and nature is not just historical but it is also open to strategic intervention. Posthumanist interventions will decidedly often seek to include a plurality of perspectives, and especially those that have otherwise been suppressed and been the target of epistemic injustices.

Some may interpret this call for epistemological pluralism as a form of epistemic relativism. However, following philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend's critique of the often absurd objections to relativism (1975/1993, 1987), I would suggest that both ‘relativism’ and ‘reality’ are themselves context-dependent constructs, often burdened with philosophical baggage that limits their usefulness in cross-cultural dialogue. Relativism may indeed be an untenable stance in public debates about climate science, where shared empirical baselines are essential. Yet in contexts of intercultural exchange – especially when grappling with distinct ontologies – it may not only be defensible but necessary.

This distinction becomes clear when considering Indigenous knowledges, whose epistemic value has long been undermined or dismissed across historical periods. For example, some Indigenous perceptions of ecosystems, climate or weather are embedded in relational ontologies that may challenge scientific paradigms. Respectful engagement across distinct epistemologies requires acknowledging multiple, sometimes incommensurable, ways of knowing, even within the same context. In Inuit cosmologies, the concept of Sila is often translated as climate or weather, but it actually refers to a much broader sentient and animate cosmological entity that connects ecologies and humans (e.g., Leduc, 2015: 241, 247–248). Untranslatable, indeed, and utterly dismissed within realist paradigms.

Historical experience sometimes warrants relativism, for most things that have been pronounced real at various times were at others deemed entirely unreal. In some respects, a common ground is needed to enable communication, and in others, it can hinder it. As such, strategic posthumanism does not reject the possibility of shared meaning or empirical inquiry but it insists that such shared ground must be negotiated, not presumed.

Indigenous scholarship: Rivers, rocks and other persons

As Rosi Braidotti notes, the binary between human and nonhuman is far from universal. For many Indigenous communities, agency extends to mountains, rivers, animals and spirits – not merely as metaphor or mythology but as ontological reality (Braidotti, 2019a: 7). These perspectives challenge not only dominant Western dualisms but also the epistemic assumptions embedded in many eco-Marxist critiques of posthumanism.

In this article, I use ‘ontology’ in a broad and inclusive sense – as theories of being that do not belong solely to European philosophical traditions. For example, Potawatomi botanist Robin Kimmerer writes: ‘In Potawatomi, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums and even stories, are all animate. The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people’ (2013: 55–56). Miskitu scholar Mirna Kain echoes this view, nothing that the ‘worldview that human beings coexist with spirits, animals, plants and stones, among others, thus complementing each other, is a given for our peoples’ (2018: 188; e.g., Panduro, 2018).

A range of Indigenous scholars express similar ideas about the inseparability of humans and nature, or landscapes and histories. ⁷ Indigenous leaders and activists Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak exemplify this. In a book co-written with anthropologist Bruce Albert, the Amazonian shaman and spokesperson Kopenawa describes his life with the Yanomami people, who harbour an ontology that extends agency to many non-human beings (Kopenawa and Albert, 2013). ⁸

The term ‘Indigenous knowledge’ serves as an umbrella term for a vast array of distinct knowledges – each as varied as the peoples from whom they originate. In contrast to most scientific paradigms, many Indigenous knowledge forms are defined by nondualist ontology, meaning that they do not draw a sharp distinction between local ecosystems and human communities. However, it is important to note that Indigenous knowledges are just as dynamic and historically evolving as any other form of knowledge and encompass a broad spectrum of differences. Conceptualizing certain knowledges as Indigenous creates space for their alterity: it is not only about incorporating local knowledge into science but also about affirming it as other than science. This gesture resists epistemic uniformity and appropriation, instead advancing the case for plural epistemologies.

The very framing of Indigenous knowledge, however, runs the risk of reinforcing essentialist stereotypes and contributing to its exoticized othering. Labelling such knowledge as distinct from ‘science’ can inadvertently reproduce epistemic hierarchies. Some scholars have cautioned against the pluralization of knowledge types for this reason, arguing that all humans should be recognized as legitimate epistemic agents. While this concern is valid, it must also be acknowledged that local and Indigenous knowledges remain particularly vulnerable to marginalization and suppression under the dominance of technoscientific paradigms. In some cases, imperfect concepts may serve a more useful purpose than the absence of any conceptualization at all. As such, the use of a particular concept can have a strategic purpose to make something visible that would otherwise remain obscure (for more on this point, see Larsen, 2025).

Concerns about essentialism are explicitly addressed within Indigenous scholarship. In her groundbreaking work Decolonizing Methodologies (first published in 1999), Māori anthropologist Linda Tuhiwai Smith acknowledges that while Indigenous communities may at times appeal to seemingly essentialist notions of authenticity, such symbolic gestures can be ‘strategically important in political struggles’ (Smith, 1999/2021: 83). Similarly, Native Hawaiian scholar Stephanie Teves notes that the performativity of Indigenous identity often becomes a ‘catch-22’ – a tool of resistance that nonetheless must navigate externally imposed expectations of authenticity. ⁹ Still, she insists that ‘a performance in a commercialized public venue can still be spiritually significant’ (Teves, 2020: 483). These examples highlight that what may appear as essentialism (or romantic nostalgia, sentimental longing, whatever it may be) is often a conscious, strategic response to deep epistemic asymmetries. ¹⁰

Although Smith recognizes and supports the strategic uses of essentialism, she also argues that essentialism does not necessarily equal falsity, or even reduction. Indeed, certain essentialist notions are integral to various Indigenous epistemologies: ‘The significance of place, of land, of landscape, of other things in the universe, in defining the very essence of a people, makes for a very different rendering of the term essentialism as used by Indigenous peoples’ (Smith, 1999/2021: 84). When essentialist notions are coupled with spiritual concepts involving relationships to the land, forest, stones, rocks, insects and other seen and unseen beings, it becomes evident why Western scientific and Christian frameworks often struggle to fully recognize or engage with Indigenous knowledges (Smith, 1999/2021: 84).

Vanessa Watts (Mohawk and Anishinaabe Bear Clan) pushes this critique further by challenging the very separation between epistemology and ontology (2013). She introduces the concept of Place-Thought, describing it as an Indigenous framework in which thought does not occur separately from place, and being cannot be disentangled from knowing. When epistemology is distinguished from ontology, the world's entities are separated from the way in which the world is understood. The Western distinction between ontology and epistemology, she argues, removes ‘the how and why out of the what’ whereby ‘the what is left empty, readied for inscription’ (Watts, 2013: 24). For Watts, the ways in which we obtain knowledge (epistemology) profoundly influence being as such (ontology), thus she rejects not just the distinction between human and non-human but the even more fundamental distinction between epistemology and ontology and its universalist pretense. ¹¹

Clearly, there is no singular Indigenous position, even though the concept of ‘Indigenous knowledge’ occasionally invites broad generalizations across diverse communities. However, it is evident that the performativity involved in ‘becoming Indigenous’ may be repressive as much as liberating and those essentialist ideas should be approached with more caution than is often seen today. At the heart of the decolonial critique is the recognition that these dynamics of Indigenous identity and knowledge are inseparable from enduring colonial hierarchies (e.g., Hunt, 2014; Smith, 1999/2021).

The stakes of this discussion are not abstract. As argued in the previous section, colonial narratives often positioned Indigenous peoples as closer to nature and as less human. These ontological framings justified material dispossession and epistemic exclusion. Today, critiques that reject nonhuman agency on ontological grounds risk reproducing that same logic – by denying the legitimacy of worldviews in which rivers, mountains and stones are seen as agents in their own right.

Addressing these epistemic asymmetries and their histories is crucial for developing the framework of strategic posthumanism, which this article proposes as a way to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives while engaging critically with broader post-humanist debates. This approach responds directly to critiques like those of Zoe Todd (Red River Métis), who challenge many posthumanist scholars for overlooking or marginalizing Indigenous contributions and perspectives (2016). By centering Indigenous intellectual thought not as peripheral and instrumental but as foundational, strategic post-humanism seeks to redress this omission and foster a more inclusive and decolonial post-humanist discourse.

Strategic posthumanism: Resisting asymmetries

As I have shown in the previous sections, the denial of Indigenous peoples’ humanity was historically coupled with the denial of their epistemic agency, often portraying their knowledge systems as irrational or ignorant due to differing conceptions of nature. This epistemic injustice, as Indigenous scholar Rebecca Tsosie (of Yaqui descent) explains, stems from Western knowledge systems rooted in ‘a rationalist, secular epistemology that elevates the importance of science, economics, and technology’, while dismissing Indigenous knowledge as mere faith or religion (Tsosie, 2017: 359).

At its core, marginalization is a form of invisibilization. Thus, those who were considered as lacking agency, as nonhuman, or as lesser humans, were pushed into the realm of nature and were obscured from view. Restoring their visibility and honouring their epistemic values requires deliberate and strategic intervention to challenge these historical asymmetries.

To better address the far-reaching histories of how both nature and native peoples came to be othered, I suggest that we be more transparent about the historical marginalization we seek to undo. The paradigm of human exceptionalism is central to what needs undoing, as it pervades most engagements with the nonhuman world. Many of us across the so-called Global North have been taught to see the world as separate, devoid of sentience or agency, and unlearning this is central to the task ahead.

To unlearn these patterns of thought, and to counteract their profound influence on our contemporary world, we might wish to strategically redirect more of our attention away from the human condition per se, in which we have been so thoroughly immersed. To that end, I propose the concept of strategic posthumanism, drawing inspiration from Gayatri Spivak's concept of strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1984). Spivak coined the term to describe a provisional and politically useful essentialism – a way for marginalized groups to temporarily adopt a unified identity to advance specific political goals, without indefinitely subscribing to the essentialist logic that often underpins such identities. It suggests not any grand theory or system but it is rather a context-specific strategy where one can choose to further essentialist ideas to amplify certain minority positions.

While Spivak later distanced herself from this concept (Spivak and Rooney, 1989), its strategic dimension remains relevant. In this context, it signals a tactical move: a reimagining of nonhuman entities not as inert or passive matter, but as vital, living and kindred beings, as posthumanist thought urges. The strategic dimension goes further still, as it also aims to shed light explicitly on Indigenous and other alternative epistemologies that have been marginalized and suppressed, often specifically due to their nondualist characteristics.

One might be less inclined to use up earthly resources purely for monetary profit if these were no longer perceived as mere resources for the taking, but instead redefined, re-understood and indeed re-experienced as alive and vital, as posthuman philosophers propose. Engaging in storytelling with more-than-human beings and other-than-human entities, enlivened and with agency, is a careful balance between attentive listening and a bold, strategic move to actively ‘make something that was absent present’ (Haraway, 2016: 131). This dual aspect is precisely why the term strategic matters: post-humanism is not merely an ontological claim but a political project aimed at destabilizing dominant hierarchies and creating space for suppressed modes of knowing and being, especially Indigenous ones.

From a posthumanist perspective, the impoverishment of nature extends far beyond the material realm and deeply affects our ability to imagine alternative worlds. This results in poorer conceptualizations of natural phenomena, a diminished presence of nature in our everyday imaginings and a language increasingly stripped of nature's richness, which reduces nature to a mere reservoir of resources or land to be exploited. Hence, a crucial strategy must include broadening our perspectives, to foster a greater sensitivity and attunement to the natural phenomena surrounding us.

And it is exactly this conviction that leads many affiliated with posthumanism to use language that may sometimes seem outlandish, ¹² but that takes this form because it attempts to grasp new ways of categorizing and thinking, new ways of noticing and listening to all the ‘critters’, as Haraway would say, excluded from the anthropocentric gaze.

As demonstrated throughout this article, human exceptionalism also constrains our ability to meaningfully engage with Indigenous perspectives, many of which are grounded in relational ontologies that resist such hierarchical distinctions altogether. In this respect, both eco-Marxists and posthumanists, despite their theoretical differences, may find common ground: one does not need to reject all ontological distinctions between humans and nonhumans to challenge the political and material consequences of human exceptionalism as a dominant, organizing principle. That is precisely the intervention that the concept of strategic posthumanism aims to make.

The strategic aspect of posthumanism also draws from ecofeminist thought, where reclaiming human closeness to nature often involves contesting nature's devaluation rather than deconstructing it (e.g., Braidotti, 2022: 74). In such a move, common to ecofeminists and posthumanists, a ‘strategic re-naturalization of the human’ may be a methodological intervention that allows for ‘transversal alliances of human and nonhuman entities’ (Braidotti, 2022: 77; Larsen, 2023).

Not all scholars embrace these emerging alliances. Hamilton critiques the reverence for Indigenous cultures as fetishizing, dismissing Indigenous ontologies as incapable of addressing modern challenges: ‘There is no need to reject the historical truth of modernity and go looking among pre-modern ontologies for an alternative’ (Hamilton, 2017: 106). ¹³ Speaking in sweeping generalizations and without reference to Indigenous scholars, he asserts that ‘most Indigenous peoples understand that old worlds cannot be preserved’ (2017: 105) – a claim that is emblematic of the very epistemic hierarchies this article seeks to challenge.

In stark contrast to Hamilton, Indigenous scholars like Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi) emphasize that Indigenous knowledges offer crucial insights for navigating environmental crises (2017: 157). Similarly, leading scholars behind the 2019 UNESCO publication Indigenous Knowledge for Climate Change Assessment and Adaptation do not seem as inclined as Hamilton to dismiss the valuable contributions of Indigenous peoples. With descriptions of an ‘enlivened cosmos’, multispecies co-existence, and dialogues with nature, their Indigenous collaborators present their ‘worlds’ not as outdated but as vital and relevant (e.g., Kain, 2018; Panduro, 2018).

Eco-Marxist scholars rightly highlight the roles of class, capitalism and inequality in ecological destruction, yet they often neglect the colonial foundations upon which these processes were historically built. As Stefania Barca argues, the struggles against coloniality, gender, class and species oppression are inseparable and must be addressed together (Barca, 2020).

This critique motivates terms like Plantationocene, coined by Anna Tsing and Haraway, to emphasize the systemic violence of ecological simplification, extraction and expropriation that so characterized European colonialism, long before any steam engine was produced (Tsing, 2012: 148; see also, e.g., David and Todd, 2017). As Tsing puts it, ‘plantations were the engine of European expansion’ (2012: 148). Similarly, Ghosh insists on the historical entanglement between racism and resource extraction, showing how both colonialism and capitalism relied on the suppression and erasure of nonhuman and Indigenous agency (Ghosh, 2021: 190, 201).

When some eco-Marxist theorists dismiss the idea of nonhuman agency or maintain some version of human exceptionalism – and insist that only humans can be held accountable for ecological collapse – they conflate moral responsibility with ontological agency. Soper argues that decentering the human ‘is likely to confound rather than advance the ecological cause’, and with a reference to Alf Hornborg, she makes the case that attributing agency to non-living entities undermines and withdraws the responsibility of human subjects (Soper, 2020: 26).

In doing so, some eco-Marxists reject forms of perception and imagination that seek to relate empathetically to more-than-human worlds. This move not only undermines the political potential of posthumanism but also reveals a strategic blind spot: a refusal to consider how ontological hierarchies are reproduced through conceptual frameworks.

Strategic posthumanism offers a different approach. It reframes the debate by sidestepping the question of whether one can truly and wholly overcome anthropocentrism, focusing instead on degrees of difference: one can be more or less posthuman, more or less anthropocentric. If this premise holds, then it becomes not only possible but imperative to engage posthumanist thinking in concert with Indigenous scholarship – taking both more seriously as mutually reinforcing tools for confronting the planetary crises of our time.

Conclusion: The exceptional nonhuman

At the heart of posthumanist thought lies a shift in perspective and an active practice of solidarity with all those who are subjugated, whether human or nonhuman. This is especially significant because much of marginalization has historically stemmed from the denial of certain groups’ humanity, or from the denial of their agency – whether epistemic or political.

For this reason, a philosophy of climate and nature that seeks to address the imminent environmental crises should take Indigenous knowledges seriously, along with those who strive to transcend the divide between nature and culture, or humans and nonhumans. The historical consequences of such separations have certainly not been beneficial. But even so, it is difficult to deny the extent to which the distinction between the human species and all other species has been utterly naturalized. Posthumanism springs from the conviction that it is time for a thorough de-naturalization (of nature's status as other). As Lorraine Daston has phrased it: ‘Only from a parochial human point of view does it make any sense to divide up all that exists into our species on one side and everything else, from microbes to pulsars, on the other’ (Daston, 2019: 58).

The history of humanism serves as a stark reminder that we must exercise great caution when defining the categories of ‘human’, ‘agency’ and ‘sentience’. Historical records reveal that we are far more inclined to exclude a vast number of beings than to include too many. In that sense, posthumanism offers not just a philosophical position but a heuristic – a critical tool to interrogate entrenched categories. However, as this article has shown, inadvertently or not, eco-Marxist critiques of posthumanism can reproduce epistemic asymmetries and effectively delegitimize many perspectives of Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders.

It is crucial to emphasize that the concepts discussed throughout this article, particularly ‘Indigenous peoples’ and ‘Indigenous knowledges’ are collective terms that tend to obscure the vast diversity of different groups. Indigenous peoples inhabit all continents, live in rural areas, biodiverse regions and bustling cities. Therefore, these terms conceal significant differences, yet they have considerable political value, as they enable the strategic expression of a unified, collective voice in diplomatic contexts. Thus, it does make sense to refer to the collective in this instance, although one should bear in mind that while I argue that posthuman ontological elements are found in many Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and worldview, this is certainly not the case for all.

With strategic posthumanism, I offer a framework that advocates complementarity rather than competition. Neither posthumanism nor eco-Marxism can provide all the answers, but both are indispensable to the environmental humanities. However, neither will have much value if most of our energy is spent undermining one another.

The long history of dehumanizing Indigenous peoples globally is deeply entwined with the same history that has denied them epistemic agency. The ‘common sense’ associated with rejections of what is thought to be anthropomorphism dissolves in its historical connection to this epistemic injustice. Disregarding the ontological aspects of posthumanism – elements embraced by some of the most influential climate and nature advocates in Indigenous communities today – only serves to perpetuate this colonial legacy of exclusion. Sometimes, flawed concepts are preferable to no concepts at all.

Strategic posthumanism is a theoretical framework that is not only decidedly anti-anthropocentrist but also acutely mindful that paradigms are not isolated, impermeable structures, and they are not easily dismantled. While it may be true for many that no individual can escape their human body, this is not universally the case – especially when we consider Indigenous epistemologies. Therefore, epistemic justice calls for the inclusion of plural ontologies. In this context, we come to understand that anthropocentrism is not a binary but a spectrum. Moreover, it is a historical and dynamic mode of thought, one that is open to intervention and transformation.

This does not mean that anthropocentrism can be abandoned at will, but it does mean that we as scholars in the environmental humanities can choose how we tell stories about the world around us. To envision a forest not as a commodity but as a multi-species community with its own needs and perspectives is already a strategic intervention. To look a little closer at the nonhuman world is not to demand that everyone sees rivers as thinking beings or stones as desiring subjects. Rather, it is to recognize that such perceptions and lived experiences exist, that they carry meaning and agency, and that they call us to expand our sense of what life and mind might be. In this space of openness, some of us might just find that stones can harbour desires and rivers can possess brains.