LAUSR

existence, an agent whose actions are dependent on and conditioned by manifold networks of ecological, institutional, social, and symbolic relations” (p. 13). Frost’s biocultural human is a complicated enfolding of multiple dynamic processes where humans are still conceptually distinct from other entities, but without the hierarchical assumptions built into prior models (e.g., Evans’s theological and philosophical anthropologies) that fundamentally separated human culture from our animal and biochemical nature. Frost’s chapter titles can give a flavor to her itinerary, as she takes readers through (in order) “Carbon,” “Membranes,” “Proteins,” “Oxygen,” and “Time.” The chapter on “Membranes,” for instance, offers the reader a lesson in how “the distinction of an organism vis-à-vis its habitat is a function of activity rather than substance” (p. 53), which reveals the myriad ways that creatures normally taken to be discrete individuals, separated from their environments, are in fact biochemically entwined with their surroundings via their “porous bodies.” This leads to some passages where a reader may wonder about the connection to practical politics or specific debates in democratic theory, and Frost’s acknowledgment that she is merely “gesturing” to human politics at the conclusion of the text might leave some readers looking for more direction. Let me say here clearly, however, that this is an extraordinarily valuable undertaking for political theory, and we should be grateful that Frost is engaging the conversation at this level. As Evans shows us (if, perhaps, less dramatically than he thinks), there is a lack of imagination in most popular biological accounts of the human, and this lack is present in the Ph.D. students no less than the general public. Simplistic reductionism haunts both Richard Dawkins and his theological critics, and we have a dramatic need, in the Anthropocene, for a textured conception of the human (or posthuman) that can locate us as creatures in complex interdependence with our habitats, without dissolving particular human responsibilities (say, for global warming) into the ether. Frost’s text is a salutary beginning in this effort to “find our ethical and political bearings” (p. 159) by reconceiving how our matter—seen more as processes that comprise us, rather than substance—“matters.” It offers us no easy prescriptions, though I think an additional chapter that directly addressed “language” in furtherance of this reorientation could have been useful. Since so much of our biocultural habitus turns on how our fantasies of mastery play out through the linguistic separation of the higher human self from its abject “animal” other, I worry that even a nuanced account like Frost’s can still leave space for the genie of anthropocentrism to find purchase. To put is somewhat differently: we need a biocultural account of the functionality of resistance to acknowledge that we are biocultural. That said, Biocultural Creatures will be an important touchstone for works in posthumanist ethics and politics that succeed it—for while our biochemistry issues no clear programmatic instructions, our political institutions and ideals ought, at the least, to reflect engagment with our best efforts to understand our place in the universe—even (or especially) if that humbles rather than elevates us.