The decade has been conceptually rich for anthropologists. From multi-species ethnography to the practice of care, the past several years have seen a flourish of analytical concepts and theoretical preoccupations. Two key developments among these emergent and often-interlinked topics are anthropology’s focus on international humanitarianism and the Anthropocene. To date these two important research streams have not been linked. This …
Tag Archives: The Anthropocene
Conference Report: ‘Comment penser l’anthropocène?’ at Collège de France, Paris
November 5 & 6, 2015 – Conference Program and Videos
The two-day conference ‘Comment penser l’anthropocène?’ (‘How to think the Anthropocene?’) at the Collège de France in Paris brought together numerous scholars from natural and political sciences, from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history and law. It was chaired by Catherine Larrère and Philippe Descola with the support of the patronage committee …
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins”
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Princeton University Press, 2015, 352 pages
Yeah. What a nice book. Thank goodness there are feminists at the controls as we enter the ecological—which is to say, truly post-modern (note the hyphen) era. This is a profoundly nonviolent, and therefore …
Web Roundup: Weather the Weather
Inspired by yet another prediction of snowfall tonight in Brooklyn, this month’s web roundup will briefly outline some recent looks at climate change. Over at Jacobin, Andreas Malm critiques the Anthropocene narrative’s place in discourse around climate change. Malm writes, “Species-thinking on climate change only induces paralysis. If everyone is to blame, then no one is.” At Aeon, Jedediah Purdy …
Multispecies vs Anthropocene
An earlier version of this post first appeared on the author’s site, Aesop’s Anthropology.
What just happened in Anthropology? In the 2013 annual meeting there were zero abstracts or paper or panel titles featuring the word “Anthropocene”; this year there were 64! Compare that with “multispecies,” which has held steady at between 16-23 invocations after it first made its appearance …
Climate Change and Planetary Health
This article is part of the series: Climate change and health
Five years ago, the University College London Commission concluded that climate change is the biggest threat to human health in the 21st century. Health has entered a new epoch in which environmental factors, under adverse human influence, must become the focus worldwide. This recognition sparked the planetary health initiative, spearheaded by The Lancet, which is motivated by acceptance …