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Intimate Ecologies: Symbioses in the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2020

Jeanette Samyn Open the ORCID record for Jeanette Samyn [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Studies of symbiosis have been instrumental in recent thinking about bodies and ecologies as open systems. But even before the invention of symbiosis toward the end of the nineteenth century, parasitism helped scientists conceive of open ecologies marked by complex, interdependent intimacies. This essay shows how the invention of symbiosis as an umbrella term for “true parasitisms” and “non-parasitisms” helped to close off previously existing (if precarious) possibilities for reciprocality within the older concept, and suggests that the time has come for a revitalization of parasitism as a conceptual tool in the face of social and ecological crisis

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Type
Microbiome
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 48 , Special Issue 1: Open Ecologies , Spring 2020 , pp. 243 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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