[11-1] Connecting the health humanities and the environmental humanities?
Presentation language：Japanese
The environmental humanities are an interdisciplinary study whose focus differs from the health humanities (i.e., environmental vs. medical, non-human vs. human) but whose scope is similar, as both disciplines encompass literary studies, history, philosophy, and the social sciences. The terminology used by both overlaps as well, including not only “pain,” “suffering,” and “care” but also “posthuman,” “bioethics,” “intraspecies/transspecies,” and “cripistemology.”
The issues that the two disciplines encounter also overlap. A good example is that both have faced questioning as to how they contribute to addressing actual environmental and health issues.
Their themes overlap as well. Food is one such example. Some health humanities scholars look at eating disorders, while ecocriticism—a discipline within the environmental humanities that studies environmental literature—addresses the foodscape as depicted in such literature.
Indeed, in ecocriticism, it has been a practice to analyze patient journals in relation to environmental issues. Furthermore, it is possible to reinterpret environmental literature from a health/medical perspective. Japanese works suited to this include Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow and Nashiki Kaho’s Tsubaki-shuku no Atari ni.
In this paper, I will use the above-mentioned similarities and differences as a basis for proposing potential collaborations between the two disciplines.