Non-Anthropocentric Death

Abstract Oxford dictionary defines anthropocentrism as a worldview that sees humans as the source of all value. As the concept of value itself is a human creation, nature has value merely as a means to the ends of human beings. As a result, legal framework evolved to legitimize and promote the view of nature as an object - as something to be exploited, dominated and controlled. In this episode, we aim to challenge this narrative and explore the boundaries and limitation of human-centred understandings of death on how we perceive loss, extinction, or degradation in non-human beings and entities such as dead forests, extinct species, or contaminated rivers.Dr Saskia Vermeylen, a Reader at Law School, University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Dr Arnar Árnason, a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, and Dr Nevena Jevremović, discuss intellectual history that shaped the human relationship with nature as reflected in law, alternative ways of conceptualising that relationship (such as rights of nature and Earth Jurisprudence), and the implications such alternatives may have in challenging the legal framework in this to recognise non-human centred concepts of death.Death & Law - Interdisciplinary Explorations | School of Law | The University of Aberdeen Biographies Dr Saskia VermeylenDr Saskia Vermeylen is a Reader at the Law School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and a legal phenomenologist with over 20 years of experience working alongside Indigenous communities in Southern Africa. Saskia’s research explores law through a phenomenological and legal pluralist lens, focusing on themes of land and belonging which she studies through the lens of legal pluralism, Levinasian studies, and more recently visual anthropology. Saskia's work also explores the embodied dimensions of law through movement and performative arts. This research also intersects with Africanfuturism, Black Studies, and science fiction, and seeks to expanding the scope of legal inquiry to include arts and arts theory as a means of investigating and expressing complex legal themes. Finally, Saskia is also one of the pioneering legal theorists combining Michel Serres’s natural contract with material ecocriticism, and biosemiotics to develop a new materialist and embodied interpretation of law and the relationality between human and nonhuman agencyLink to profile: https://www.strath.ac.uk/staff/vermeylensaskiadr/#personalstatementDr Arnar ÁrnasonArnar Árnason was appointed lecturer in social anthropology in the Department in September 2004. He has a B.A. degree in Anthropology from the University of Iceland, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Social Anthropology from the University of Durham, England. He has carried out fieldwork in England, Japan, Iceland and Scotland. His research interests include: death, emotion, and psychotherapy and the politics thereof; trauma; subjectivities/subjection; narratives, memory and forgetting; embodiment; identity and landscape.Link to profile: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/people/arnar.arnason#aboutDr Nevena JevremovićDr Nevena Jevremović is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Aberdeen. Her research explores the structural relationship between (private) law, power, and capital in international trade and investment.Link to profile: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/people/nevena.jevremovic Additional ResourcesBooks• Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper & Row 1989)• Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (Spinifex Press 1993)• Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (Bell Tower 1999)• Cormac Cullinan, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice (Green Books 2011)• Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (University of Virginia Press 2011)• Peter D Burdon, Earth Jurisprudence: Private Property and the Environment (Routledge 2015)• Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press 2018)• Maxine Lavon Montgomery, The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination (Bloomsbury 2021)• Margaret Davies, EcoLaw: Legality, Life, and the Normativity of Nature (Routledge 2022)• Alessandro Pelizzon, Ecological Jurisprudence: The Law of Nature and the Nature of Law (Springer 2025)Journal Articles• Anna Grear, 'Deconstructing Anthropos: A Critical Legal Reflection on "Anthropocentric" Law and Anthropocene "Humanity"' (2015) 26 Law and Critique 225• Klaus Bosselmann, 'The Framework of Ecological Law' (2020) 50 Environmental Policy and Law 479Saskia Vermeylen, 'Relational Interdependence: Riffing on Margaret Davies’ EcoLaw: Legality, Life, and the Normativity of Nature through the Poetics of Relations and Symbiotic Knowing' (2024) 27(4) Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy 436