Terms and their consequences
By OrbitThyme5
I’m reading a book about Indigenous cultural values, and they use the phrase “other-than-human” (including spiritual beings too) instead of the usual “non-human” for animals and stuff. I’m guessing they do that because of how they think about things that aren’t strictly “either/or,” but I’m not totally sure. I’m really interested in what difference it makes in your thinking when you use one term over the other. Like, maybe “non-human” tends to line up with a more Western/European way of framing the world, and that might have helped shape more speciesist views of other sentient beings. I wonder if changing the categories could actually shift people away from that kind of human-centered, “we’re the default” perspective and move toward something more equal and anti-speciesist, even within a Western mindset.