This thesis explores the lives of Maasai women today in general, and in particular as seen through the lens of one woman, and her social network in Kajiado County, southern Kenya. By using a storytelling approach, I let the women’s own vivid stories, thoughts and priorities stay in focus. While the women’s stories reveal personal details in their lives, I argue that their stories also broaden the perspective of what it is to be a Maasai woman today. Inspired by a framework of multispecies relations, especially the concept of relatedness, I look at the relationships – to both humans and non-humans – which shapes the women's lives, possibilities, decisions, and concerns. As I explore the women's more-than-human worlds, the agency of cows, goats, sheep, and even flies are acknowledged. In combination with inspiration from the framework of feminist political ecology – especially the concepts of resource access and displacement – I bridge understandings about how multispecies relations affect the women, with reflections on education and working situations, and matters of land. With this thesis, I wish to contribute to and broaden the literature and often stereotyped image of what it is to be a Maasai, especially a Maasai woman.

The concept of cosmopolitics identifies a multispecies political practice within the framework of multinaturalism. The dissertation, "Multispecies Thinking from Alexander von Humboldt to Leslie Marmon Silko: Intercultural Communication Toward Cosmopolitics," is concerned with understandings of multispecies relationships, with the human intercultural communication that could prepare for a cosmopolitical practice, and with the ways Native American fiction supports this endeavor. This research draws from Native American literary studies and ecocritical scholarship to illustrate the potential of transdisciplinary thinking about multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and Indigenous paradigms as providing a promising communication zone against the grain of scientific imperialism. It thus traces the development of pluralist and multispecies-oriented thought and its points of connection to Indigenous paradigms from Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos Studies of the early 19th century to 21st century Indigenous cosmopolitics. First, this study discusses the insights and obstructions to Western pluralist and multispecies thinking in relation to Native American paradigms from Humboldt via 19th century nature writers-Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and John Muir-to contemporary interdisciplinary research. Opening to wide potential with Humboldt's holistic Cosmos Studies, intercultural communication was tempered by the colonial enterprise in the 19th century United States, including a nature-culture dualism and the notion of degenerated, vanishing Indigenous peoples. The resulting conceptual understandings, terms, and attitudes have been influential until today and are what contemporary Native American authors and activists are confronted with when engaged in their work. Detailed textual analysis of exemplary Native American literature outlines how contemporary authors criticize, counter-narrate, and/or integrate Western intellectual traditions. Furthermore, this study outlines 20th and 21st century scientific concepts that refine much earlier ideas, provide helpful terminology regarding Western approaches to Indigenous ontologies and multispecies thinking, and facilitate a new, insightful reading of contemporary Native American fiction as cosmopolitical texts. The analyses of works by Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Louis Owens, and Leslie Marmon Silko demonstrate the value of these works to enhance multispecies thinking and respective political practices. Therefore, Native American literature plays a major role worldwide as an educational and critical tool for an intercultural communication toward cosmopolitics.

[pt] Esta tese tem por objetivo investigar, desde um ponto de vista filosófico, a vida política dos animais outros que humanos no contexto do Antropoceno. Entre diversas configurações, a errância, o confinamento, a experimentação e a extinção são privilegiadas como verdadeiras situações conceituais, cuja análise e problematização requerem a abordagem conjunta da filosofia com diferentes discursos, como a etologia, a biologia, a antropologia, a história e a literatura. O primeiro passo consiste em uma exploração do lugar nos animais na pólis a partir da confrontação de ideias clássicas e contemporâneas sobre política; em seguida passa-se a uma análise do zoológico tomado como modelo da política humana, oferecendo-se, como alternativa, feições possíveis de uma política animal a partir dos diversos sentidos do conceito de brincadeira; o terceiro momento examina experimentações multiespecíficas no âmbito das artes, com foco na literatura, e no de práticas científicas, observando seus diferentes modos de mundificação; finalmente, procede-se à elaboração de uma noção de extinção não tanto como um fato, mas como acontecimento, diante do qual o cultivo imaginativo de narrativas de luto e as experiências de continuidade são necessários. Por este percurso, conclui-se que, ainda que acossados por todos os lados, os animais outros que humanos vivem e oferecem possibilidades cosmopolíticas diante das quais a humanidade compreendida como exceção ontológica se evidencia como potência apolítica. / [en] The present thesis aims to investigate, from a philosophical standpoint, the political life of other-than-human animals in the context of the Anthropocene. Amid several configurations, errancy, confinement, experimentation and extinction are privileged as actual conceptual situations, the analysis and problematization of which require a combined approach between philosophy and other discourses, such as ethology, biology, anthropology, history and literature. The first step consists of an exploration of the animal’s place in the polis taking as a starting point a confrontation between classic and contemporary ideas regarding politics; following that, an analysis of the zoo viewed as a model of human politics, to which are offered, as alternatives, possible features of an animal politics taking as a starting point the several meanings of the concept of play; the third section examines multispecies experiments in the realm of the arts, especially literature, and in the realm of scientific practices, noting different modes of worlding respective to each; lastly, we proceed to the elaboration of a notion of extinction, not so much as a fact but as a event in the face of which the imaginative cultivation of grief narratives and experiences of continuity is necessary. So reasoning, we conclude that, although accosted on all sides, other-than-human animals live and offer cosmopolitical possibilities in the face of which humanity, understood as ontological exception, proves itself to be an apolitical power.