Shimmer - (Animalities) by Deborah Bird Rose

About the Book

In this deeply personal book, the last one she wrote before her death in 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 in her work with flying foxes in Australia.

Book Synopsis

In this deeply personal book, the last one she wrote before her death in 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 in her work with flying foxes in Australia.

From the Back Cover

'Rose entices us all to care about the often despised, sometimes loved, and now comprehensively threatened flying foxes of Australia. Perhaps they have a materially better chance of a future because Rose was a flying fox woman, a human being who used the hard-earned power to tie together Aboriginal teaching and kinship, settler science, and everyday complexities of caring and responding to others of truly different kinds that is carried on by ordinary people. I love Rose's work; I love this book.' Donna J. Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz 'Deborah Bird Rose's last book is a message shimmering with the passion, intimacy, cruelty, horror, complexity, generosity and wild beauty she encountered responding to the call of flying foxes. It powerfully affirms knowledge as co-becoming, a commitment to become knowledgeable witnesses and responsible participants in the intricate mutualistic giving and receiving that make up earth life. A unique and vital legacy.' Isabelle Stengers, Université libre de Bruxelles 'Shimmer is an inspiring and moving tour de force. Love, care, ethics, connectivity, and crucially non-innocence are the analytical-affective intentions with which Deborah Bird Rose experiences and makes us experience flying-foxes and the myriad blossoms they enable as they meet Aboriginal wisdom, science, the state, and the biosphere. Reading this book, being inspired by it, has been an honor, an immense pleasure, and a complex beam of hope.' Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis 'Gifted to us at the precipice of her death, Deborah Bird Rose's Shimmer embodies everything we have valued about her writing--its calm and uncompromised ethical compass; its fidelity to Indigenous worlds and their more than human kin; and its arts of care for forms of existence, here the majestic worlds of flying foxes, declared enemies of settler expansion. Shimmer will hold a precious place in her singular corpus.' Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University Professor Deborah Bird Rose (1946-2018) was a world-renowned anthropologist and leading figure in the emergence and shaping of the interdisciplinary environmental humanities. Cover image: Fruit Bats or flying foxes over Cairns in Queensland, Australia (c) Ashley Cooper/Getty Images Cover design: Bekah Dey and www.hayesdesign.co.uk [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-9038-2 [PPC] ISBN 978-1-4744-9039-9 [cover] Barcode

Review Quotes

Shimmer is an inspiring and moving tour de force. Love, care, ethics, connectivity, and crucially non-innocence are the analytical-affective intentions with which Deborah Bird Rose experiences and makes us experience flying-foxes and the myriad blossoms they enable as they meet Aboriginal wisdom, science, the state, and the biosphere. Shimmer is a forceful affirmation of life pronounced as our worlds face many ends, but also--if we are with Deborah Bird Rose--not only. Reading this book, being inspired by it, has been an honor, an immense pleasure, and a complex beam of hope.-- "Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis"

Deborah Bird Rose became kin, real kin, to flying foxes when a flying fox matriarch at Lingara named her as sister during her first period of serious study, called ethnography, with the people of Yarralin. That kinship--its ethics, responsibilities, corporealities, passions, and terrors--is embodied in this wonderful book. Rose entices us all to care about the often despised, sometimes loved, and now comprehensively threatened flying foxes of Australia. I am in her capacious hands, as she shows me the animals, the people, the trees, the flowers, the dry and the wet, and those who care and those who destroy. She does not fail me; she does not fail the flying foxes. Perhaps they have a materially better chance of a future because Rose was a flying fox woman, a human being who used the hard-earned power to tie together Aboriginal teaching and kinship, settler science, and everyday complexities of caring and responding to others of truly different kinds that is carried on by ordinary people. I love Rose's work; I love this book. It proposes a still barely possible way to live together for flying foxes and people in the face of the killing of generations that pervades our times. This small situated refusal of killing, this small situated fulfilling of obligations, might ramify across our troubled times and places.-- "Donna J. Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz"

Deborah Bird Rose's last book is a message shimmering with the passion, intimacy, cruelty, horror, complexity, generosity and wild beauty she encountered responding to the call of flying foxes. It draws its reader to experience her passionate embrace of the ongoing-ness of life, her profoundly ethical "yes" to its reality as it bursts forth through abstract categories ensuring our pseudo-objectivity. It powerfully affirms knowledge as co-becoming, a commitment to become knowledgeable witnesses and responsible participants in the intricate mutualistic giving and receiving that make up earth life. A unique and vital legacy.-- "Isabelle Stengers, Université libre de Bruxelles"

Gifted to us at the precipice of her death, Deborah Bird Rose's Shimmer embodies everything we have valued about her writing--its calm and uncompromised ethical compass; its fidelity to Indigenous worlds and their more than human kin; and its arts of care for forms of existence, here the majestic worlds of flying foxes, declared enemies of settler expansion. Shimmer will hold a precious place in her singular corpus.-- "Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University"

About the Author

Deborah Bird Rose (1946-2018) was a world-renowned anthropologist and leading figure in the emergence and shaping of the interdisciplinary environmental humanities. Over the course of a career spanning almost 40 years, Rose published many widely read, cited, award-winning and often-reprinted books, including Hidden Histories (1991), Dingo Makes Us Human (1992), Nourishing Terrains (1996), Country of the Heart (2002), Reports from a Wild Country (2004) and Wild Dog Dreaming (2011). She also edited numerous significant volumes, including Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions (1988), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene (2015), and Extinction Studies(2017), and co-founded the journal Environmental Humanities. Through this work Rose made major contributions in a range of important fields: from the environmental humanities, and the anthropology of indigenous Australia, to extinction studies, animal and multispecies studies, and philosophies of ethics, justice, religion, temporality and place. Rose was a Fellow of the Australian Social Sciences Academy (ASSA) and was for most of her career based at the Australian National University (1995-2008) and Macquarie University (2008-2013).