In Animate Planet Kath Weston shows how new intimacies between humans, animals, and their surroundings are emerging as people attempt to understand how the high-tech ecologically damaged world they have made is remaking them, one synthetic chemical, radioactive isotope, and megastorm at a time. Visceral sensations, she finds, are vital to this process, which yields a new animism in which humans and "the environment" become thoroughly entangled. In case studies on food, water, energy, and climate from the United States, India, and Japan, Weston approaches the new animism as both a symptom of our times and an analytic with the potential to open paths to new and forgotten ways of living.

Kath Weston is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. A Guggenheim Fellow and two-time winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize, Weston is the author of several books, including Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor; Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age; and Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship.

-- Patricia Wald Critical Inquiry

-- L.E. Sponsel Choice

-- Stephanie Bunn Times Higher Education

-- Marlene Schäfers Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

-- Teresa Lloro-Bidart American Ethnologist

-- Garrett Bunyak Quarterly Review of Biology

-- Nicolas Sternsdorff-Cisterna Anthropological Quarterly