The sun is making headlines as Americans prepare for the last total solar eclipse until 2045 . But eclipse or no eclipse, our solar system’s star is an essential part of life on Earth, and at the same time, the source of drought and demise to the very living things it fuels.
“Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions,” (Punctum Book, 316 pages, $26) a new, open-access book edited by Rice University anthropologist Cymene Howe, examines the many complexities of our solar-dependent world.
“Solarity provides the conditions for all that is organic and alive,” said Howe, a professor of anthropology at Rice . “But it is also integrated into inorganic things, materializing as concrete and plastic, shade and melting ice. And when it is wedded to massive amounts of carbon hung in the atmosphere above us, it is a maker of monstrous heat and the source of all withering and desiccation.”
In “Solarities,” 23 authors (including Rice professor of anthropology Dominic Boyer and Rice professor of English and Vice President of Global Caroline Levander ) take the sun and its power as their starting point to work through complex social and cultural phenomena. From the U.S. prison system to the killing heat of the southern border and from Arctic peoples’ sacred relation to the sun to how concrete, seaweed, chlorophyll and skin each offer us insights into the sun’s power, the book centers the sun as an analytic lens to view the many facets of reliance on it.
Howe and her fellow editors, Jeff Diamanti at the University of Amsterdam and Amelia Moore at the University of Rhode Island, said their goal with the book was not to capture the sun through the metrics of astrophysics, the metaphors of literature or the capturing and harnessing of its energetic powers. Instead, they hope the book illustrates how solarity is a form and a force that plays out across, into and between bodies — human bodies, nonhuman bodies and astral bodies.
More information on the book is online at https://punctumbooks.com/titles/solarities-elemental-encounters-and-refractions.