Shimmer

By Deborah Bird Rose

• Draws on etho-ethnographic fieldwork with flying fox scientists, conservationists and rehabilitation carers, as well as with Australian Aboriginal communities – a leading example of interdisciplinary, multispecies scholarship
• Paints a vivid portrayal of the art of multispecies care amidst ongoing peril
• Eloquently reflects on death and persecution in a time of extinctions
• Elaborates Aboriginal philosophies of ancestral power, brought into contact with other philosophical and scientific traditions
• Engages with decolonial ecological ethics and contributes to environmental philosophy
• The highly anticipated final book by the leading anthropologist and environmental humanities scholar Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018)

Deborah Bird Rose explores the shimmer of life – the iridescent pulse of beauty and power, the processes of transition and transformation – that flows across and between generations. Grounded within this insight, she develops and advocates for an ethics of attention, that is in the world within everyday practices, and in this case for and with flying foxes and their worlds. A deeply personal book, her struggle with cancer is gently woven into the account she offers of flying fox life and death.

Combining her research expertise in a number of fields – multispecies studies, extinction studies, anthropology and environmental philosophy – Rose paints a vivid portrait of flying fox life and death in the Anthropocene that has important wider lessons for ecological and decolonial ontologies and ethics.

Building from sources such as Hoffmeyer’s biosemiotics, Lévy-Bruhl’s philosophical anthropology, Levinas’ post-Holocaust ethics, Shestov’s existentialism, Stengers’ cosmopolitics and the many insights of her Indigenous Australian friends and teachers, she articulates her own uniquely situated testament to the intergenerational gifts of ancestral power, ever more threatened, yet preciously shared and affirmed.