Layla AbdelRahim


Layla AbdelRahim is a Russian-Sudanese comparatist anthropologist and anarchoprimitivist author, whose works on narratives of civilization and wilderness have contributed to the fields of literary and cultural studies, comparative literature, philosophy, animal studies, ecophilosophy, sociology, anarcho-primitivist thought, anarchism, epistemology, and critique of civilization, technology, and education. She attributes the collapse in the diversity of bio-systems and environmental degradation to monoculturalism and the civilized ontology that explains existence in terms of anthropocentric utilitarian functions.
Her books Children’s Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation: Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness and Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education make a contribution to children’s literary theory and a critique of education as rooted in the civilized need for the domestication of children as resources.

Education

AbdelRahim received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College and, upon graduation in 1993, received the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to pursue an anthropological project in Europe. She did graduate work in 1993-94 at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences or l'EHESS and master studies in social sciences at Stockholm University where she later worked as Visiting Researcher at the department of social anthropology. She completed her Ph.D. at the Université de Montréal, Department of Comparative Literature. Her dissertation entitled Order and the Literary Rendering of Chaos: Children’s Literature as Knowledge, Culture, and Social Foundation, examines the effect of ontological premises on human self-knowledge and the repercussions of such knowledge on the anthropogenic destruction of the world’s life systems and diversity.

Thought

AbdelRahim traces the root of all oppression to the ontological premises of domestication that define the raison d'être of living and non-living beings in terms of consumption and co-existence in a hierarchy of food chain. Drawing on paleontological studies, ethology, and biological anthropology, she challenges the precepts in the narrative of anthropology that constructs the human as predator and consumer. This critique extends to civilized economic and socio-political cultures and their effect on the environment as well as on systems of education and parenting. Her examination of civilized and wild narratives is relevant to a variety of domains and disciplines, such as philosophy of science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, environmental economics, education, literary theory.

Media appearances

AbdelRahim is featured in anOther Story of Progress, a documentary film by Thomas Toivonen, as one of the world's leading contemporary anarcho-primitivist philosophers.

Selected works

Books

Articles