Comments on: Anthropologies #21: Is There Hope for an Anthropocene Anthropology?

By: Lee Drummond

Lee Drummond — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 20:08:07 +0000

Todd,
Thanks very much for your thoughtful response to my criticism of arguments in your and Elizabeth Hall’s essay.
While you’ve added subtle flavors to the “Anthropocene” concept – inviting us to engage forests that think, glaciers that listen – I’m afraid I find it still has a disagreeable aftertaste. Despite the nuance, “Anthropocene” seems basically a new label for the very old idea of a human-centered world in which Man is Master or at least Steward of the Earth and its creatures (Ozymandias or Old Testament, take your pick – neither satisfies us today). It’s just hard for me to disregard that association, which led me to write that the concept is shot through with arrogance: Are we really ready to believe that our couple of hundred years of industrial / technological development are directing the course of a planetary ecosystem billions of years old? George Carlin’s argument, though he phrased it in more colorful language. Also, if the important point about humans’ relationship to the natural world is the delicious and delicate symbiosis of thinking along with forests, listening along with glaciers, why not just embrace and build on Bateson’s brilliant theory regarding the “unity of mind and nature”? Humans do not possess a distinct, walled-off identity from the natural world; we are a part of it and it is a part of us, joined in a complex process of co-evolution that has gone on for a long, long time.
This brings me to what I think is the real flaw or misdirection of “Anthropocene.” Hominin co-evolution with natural and technological domains is responsible for the emergence of our species, Homo s. s., and that co-evolution – the push-and-pull of our interactions with animals and machines (technology) – continues to this day and will continue, most likely at an accelerated rate, into the future. “Humanity” is not a fixed entity, an Archimedean fulcrum from which to move and control the world; it is a mercurial flow, process rather than substance, which has issued from decidedly non-human beings and which is destined to become something not recognizably “human” in the future. “Man is a thing that will pass.” Thus spake Zarathustra.
So, no Anthro to be Cene.

By: Todd Sanders

Todd Sanders — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 13:06:33 +0000

Hi Lee,
Thanks for your question. We share your concerns with ‘the Anthropocene,’ and agree it might create more problems than it solves. No right-minded anthropologist wants a universe spinning around humanity. Again. And if that’s all ‘the Anthropocene’ can do, banish it now! The concept raises other potential problems, too: refusing to differentiate between rich and poor, powerful and powerless; and pretending that power and politics are somehow absent. As you know, these and other problems are being debated across the social sciences and humanities just now. ‘The Anthropocene’ may ultimately fail to provide adequate theoretical purchase over our changing world. Personally, we are not wedded to the concept. Yet in spite of its patent problems, we are struck by the possibilities the Anthropocene’s conceptual architecture is enabling. We’re intrigued by how trees might cultivate mushrooms; forests might think; glaciers might listen; and how humans become humans through such relations. We also appreciate that this scholarship is productively raising, yet again, perhaps the oldest of anthropological questions: What should we study? While one relatively safe answer used to be ‘people,’ this is no longer so. It’s tempting to blame Latour for all this. But he is only one amongst others long concerned to theorise the emergences and entanglements of human and nonhuman forms of life (think M. Strathern, Gell, Ingold, etc). There may be a better term to capture such processes and relations – one without the offending Anthro- – but for now we find the Anthropocene useful to think with.

By: Lee Drummond

Lee Drummond — Sun, 06 Sep 2015 05:32:57 +0000

Todd and Elizabeth,
I’m sure we’ll have an opportunity to discuss the “Anthropocene” in more detail as this series of posts unfolds, but for now I am puzzled: Haven’t anthropologists of yore cautioned their young changes in Anthro 101 courses across the land to renounce the twin sins of ethnocentrism and, yes, anthropocentrism? Is it now okay, thanks to the good and authoritative discourse of Latour, to claim that the planet revolves, not around the Sun, but around us? Does accepting the existence of the Anthropocene rehabilitate what was formerly an unfortunate prejudice — anthropocentrism — to the status of new and important wisdom? Label me confused.

By: Fakunle Oluwatoni

Fakunle Oluwatoni — Sat, 05 Sep 2015 21:01:09 +0000

Check out The Applied Existential Anthropology Project’s World Crises Analysis on our entrance into the sixth mass extinction(http://www.theappliedexistentialanthropologyproject.com/p/the-aea-projs-woe.html)