[JOTO Tableware Recommendation]

[JOTO Tableware Recommendation]
Rethinking Our Relationship with Matter — Toward a Multi-Species Future of Coexistence

Recent multi-species thought reminds us that humans are not isolated beings, but open systems—constantly intertwined with and shaped by the nonhuman world. “Nonhuman” here includes not only the animals who share our cities and mountains but also the objects, infrastructures, chemicals, and invisible microbes that inhabit our everyday lives.

When we think of “I” as a sharply bounded entity, daily experiences quietly blur that line: a pair of glasses, a smartphone, a vaccine, an allergy, even a passing scent—all act as hyphens connecting the body and the world. The multi-species turn in anthropology and the “more-than-human” perspective don’t just patch a gap in knowledge—they rewrite the relationship itself. We are not the center of the world but part of its flow; not the masters of all things but nodes in the network of everything.

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Edmund Husserl once noted that an object in experience is never isolated—it gains meaning only through relation. A desk is not “a desk” because of an abstract definition but because it becomes, in my embodied practice, an instrument for reading, writing, and thinking. Conversely, my body finds its own position through its interaction with the desk—it becomes a body that reaches, leans, and turns pages.

The desk is not a pure object; the body is not a pure subject. Their meanings arrive together on a shared horizon of reference. This insight is not only philosophical but deeply practical: when a desk is piled with drafts and papers, time thickens over it; when it is cleared, it becomes the open stage for a new beginning. Objects and humans co-define each other—the world is enacted through this collaboration.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty took this further—freeing the body from being a “transparent observer.” We do not watch the world through a clear lens; we dwell in it through a body that touches and is touched. The body is both the origin of perception and a material that can be retuned by the cool edge of a desk, the dryness of paper, or the elasticity of a keyboard.

Perception, then, is not a one-way line from subject to object but an interweaving—a chiasm: I touch the world, and the world touches back; I look at the mountain, and its shadow and wind reshape my stance. Through this intertwining, the self becomes porous—our very capacity to feel is a landscape sculpted by the world’s crossings through us.

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Anthropology offers vivid paths for moving from “objects within humans” to “humans among all beings.” In Wild Dog Dreaming, Deborah Bird Rose writes about the Australian dingo to ask an ethical question: in an age of mass extinction, how can humans maintain relationships of commitment and mourning with the nonhuman? In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn follows the Runa people of Ecuador to show how forests “remember” and “respond” through signs, challenging the idea that only humans think.

These works do not anthropomorphize but decentralize—they place humans back into the ecological, semiotic, and historical webs where meaning circulates among many forms of life. When we listen to the grammar of forests and the fates of wild dogs, “society” ceases to be purely human, and the boundaries of politics and ethics begin to expand outward.

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Donna Haraway’s cyborg metaphor reminds us that technology and biology have long been fused in us. Our identities are not defined solely by flesh and blood but by material and mechanical extensions: contact lenses correct our depth of field, cardiac stents adjust our rhythm, medication rewrites metabolism, and microbes and viruses continuously redraw the borders of our bodies and memories.

The “I” of this moment does not own matter—it exists with matter, in a web of hinges, repairs, substitutions, and dependencies. The cyborg framework is not a celebration of technology but a call for honesty: to recognize that the human is already a hybrid across species, substances, and scales. Once we admit this, responsibility must also expand—beyond human-to-human ethics to include the bonds among humans, materials, and environments.

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When the boundaries between human and nonhuman become porous, our sense of justice must widen too. If a desk gains meaning in our lived world, if forests respond in their own ways, if wild dogs’ survival shapes our stories, and if our cyborg selves co-assemble with matter—then social justice can no longer be only a human affair.

It must also be a human–nonhuman covenant: to coexist with rivers, winds, migratory birds, and bacteria, we must cut carbon emissions, redesign urban scales, and slow our resource consumption so that material and biological cycles can breathe. This isn’t about diminishing humanity but about repositioning it—not as ruler, but as participant in the theater of coexistence.

When we reorient daily choices and institutional designs through this lens, “civilization” ceases to mean buildings and machines—it becomes the capacity for mutual flourishing among all things.

May we remember, each time we touch a tabletop, walk beneath trees, or swallow a pill: matter is not a backdrop. It co-authors our existence—and our future must be one where many species can live together.

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