Anthropologies of the present and the presence of anthropology

Global humanity in the new millennium is faced with growing knowledge of the material consequences of anthropocentric forms of life. The accumulated and envisioned effects of anthropogenic activity threaten not only the sustainability and flourishing of fragile ecosystems and biodiversity, but that of humankind itself. The proposal of a new planetary epoch called the Anthropocene challenges anthropology to not only rethink the relationships between nature and culture, but to shift away from these and other binary oppositions all together. Returning to anthropology's defining question – what is the human being? – in light of the Anthropocene hypothesis, this paper critically endorses the posthumanist call for a more than human social science that seeks to do just that. While non-anthropocentric perspectives and corresponding practices are called for in the Anthropocene age, this paper considers the extent to which overcoming anthropocentrism is possible. Transcending the anthropocentric versus non-anthropocentric dichotomy while considering the work of philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, I argue that understanding the uniquely 'eccentric positionality' of human beings is what is needed in the Anthropocene.

ProFil, 2024

The paper focuses on identifying the possible, and assumed, implications of the concept of the Anthropocene for thinking about the human in a philosophy that accepts the transition from Holocene to Anthropocene thinking. The aim of the paper is to produce a systematic treatment of the philosophical-anthropological presuppositions of the concept of the Anthropocene. Illuminating the relationship between the concepts of the Earth System, the planetary boundaries and the Anthropocene has to be the focus if we are to delineate the basic anthropological issues so that they can be further conceptually elaborated from a philosophical-anthropological perspective. Such an approach aims to highlight the various interpretive disagreements not only in understanding the concept of the Anthropocene but also in understanding the meaning of the concept of humanity as a geobiophysical force.

Journal of Biological Research - Bollettino della Società Italiana di Biologia Sperimentale, 2022

The dramatic changes brought by the relationship between humans and their natural environments by different human activities such as the exploitation of natural resources and use of fossil fuels threatens humanity at large. Beside considerable disagreements on when Anthropocene began, it is considered an epochal transformation linked to deterioration of global ecologies, loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation. Environmental anthropologists are contributing both theoretically and by important ethnographic insights in analyzing and understanding the consequences of climate changes in socio-ecological systems worldwide. In this article we provide an overview of main theoretical contributions during the development of environmental anthropology as a discipline. In addition, we highlight the possible Cultural Evolution theory (CE) contribution in climate changes consequences to a socio-ecological system.

L. Valera and J. C. Castilla (eds.), Global Changes, Ethics of Science and Technology, 2020

The Anthropocene-term proposed by the scientific community for the current geological epoch to signal humans as a leading geological force in earth history-has open intense debates across the sciences and humanities, in that the traditional gap between natural and social phenomena, occurring respectively at slow and fast temporal rates, have been questioned. Despite the enthusiasm, an irre-solvable conceptual limitation marks the term. Irrespective of the very heterogene-ity-human and other-than-human-that is currently at risk in this new epoch, the term often refers to a universal male human, sitting above nature. Humans are to be found simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, which risks diluting environmental responsiveness. This global dilemma resonates with the epistemic distance on which knowledge of the Anthropocene is constituted, which requires achieving a cosmic view on earth at the expense of ecological intimacy. Such cosmic view resonates, in turn, with the place the built environment affords humans, as ex-habitants of the earth. Yet, life-human or any other-is not lived on the exterior of a globe but in the Earth, nurtured by sensory attunements to the material transformations of an environment in constant becoming. Acknowledging the immanence of life, this chapter argues, requires a redefinition of what it means to be human. It is through this immanence that environmental responsiveness remains possible in a world in crisis. The chapter concludes by distinguishing responsibility from responsivity, two contrasting modes of engaging with environmental change, defined respectively as a retrospective act resulting from the achievement of epistemic distance and a forward-looking capacity related to knowing intimately the ongoing transformations of the environment.

■ In this article, anthropology is seen as a Western cosmopolitics that consolidated itself as a formal academic discipline in the 20th century within a growing Western university system that expanded throughout the world. Like other cosmopolitics, anthropology reflects the historical dynamics of the world system, especially those related to the changing roles 'alterity' may play in international and national scenarios. Some of the most fundamental changes in anthropology in the last century were due to changes in the subject position of anthropology's 'object' par excellence, native peoples all over the planet. But, currently, there is another element which was never duly incorporated by previous critiques and is bound to impact anthropology: the increased importance of the non-hegemonic anthropologists in the production and reproduction of knowledge. Changes in the conditions of conversability among anthropologists located in different loci of the world system will impact the tension between metropolitan provincialism and provincial cosmopolitanism, increase horizontal communication and create more plural world anthropologies. Keywords ■ global diversity and anthropology ■ metropolitan provincialism ■ provincial cosmopolitanism ■ world system of anthropology À memória de Eduardo Archetti I view the issues that anthropologists address, their theoretical preoccupations, contributions to knowledge, dilemmas and mistakes, the heuristic and epistemological capabilities of the discipline, as embedded in certain social, cultural and political dynamics that unfold in contexts which are differently and historically structured by changing power relations. The main sociological and historical forces that traverse anthropology's political and epistemological fields are connected to the dynamics of the world system and to those of the nation-states, especially regarding the changing roles that 'otherness' or 'alterity' may play in such international and national scenarios.

The Anthropocene is the label given by some Earth scientists to the current Epoch of unprecedented anthropogenic planetary change. The Anthropocene is also a label designed to call attention to this change and evolving notions of agency and responsibility in contemporary life. As a small island state, biodiversity hotspot, and global destination for both tourists and research scientists, The Bahamas is increasingly defined by the emergent problem space of the Anthropocene. Starting with The Bahamas as a location increasingly shaped by planetary change and global change science and utilizing scholarship from sociocultural anthropology and related fields, this article describes recent engagements with and within the Anthropocene in order to chart a path towards a global change research framework for anthropologists. I argue that there are under examined divisions in the existing body of work on anthropogenic planetary change, with some scholars working in a mode I call “in the Anthropocene” and some working in a mode that is “of the Anthropocene.” By comparing events in The Bahamas today to these modes and their characteristics, I arrive at an alternative orientation that I call simply Anthropocene anthropology. Rather than advocating for the creation of a new subfield of research, this mode of engagement represents a broad framework for the examination of global change ecobiopolitics.

introduction and bibliography, 2023

This Environmental Humanities thesis is emerging from attentiveness to the paradoxes that the Anthropocene posits as problems to be solved, tamed. It first questions the possibility of bounded, stable entities by drawing on the idea of becoming as conceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari. By attending to edges and bodies as shifting and possible, always on the verge of falling apart and renewing, this dissertation challenges the security, determinability that is required by practices of categorisation, ordering and control. Attending to entities as possible also highlights that they cannot strictly constitute an either/or, rather they are paradoxically and strangely both. The four chapters of this dissertation dwell in the paradoxes of touching the untouchable, measuring the unmeasurable, saying the unsaid, and seeing life where no ‘life’1 can be seen. By staying with the strangeness of these paradoxes, as opposed to trying to make sense of them by abstracting them into either/or categories, this dissertation unsettles the Anthropocene in its practice of constructing dualisms such as nature or culture, human or more-than-human. This dissertation is asking how learning to dwell in paradoxes without trying to fit them into either/or categories, taking them seriously in their strangeness, may offer a radical resistance to the Anthropocene?

European Journal of Social Theory

Noting a lack of consensus in the recent literature on the Anthropocene, this paper considers how social anthropologists might contribute to its theorizing and dating. Empirically it draws on the author's long-term fieldwork in Hungary. It is argued that ethnographic methods are essential for grasping subjectivities, including temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal transformation. When it comes to historical periodization, however, ethnography is obviously insufficient and proposals privileging the last half century, or just the last quarter of a century, seem inadequate. Influential theories which define "modernity" in terms of developments emanating from countries of the North Atlantic in the 16 th-19 th centuries (Gellner, Polanyi, Wolf) remain partial and Eurocentric. To comprehend the social preconditions of the Anthropocene in holistic fashion (the crucial contribution of comparative anthropology), it is necessary to follow Jack Goody and trace how the urban revolutions of the Bronze Age united Eurasia through the diffusion of new forms of economy, polity and cosmology.

Critique of Anthropology, 2006

In this article, anthropology is seen as a Western cosmopolitics that consolidated itself as a formal academic discipline in the 20th century within a growing Western university system that expanded throughout the world. Like other cosmopolitics, anthropology reflects the historical dynamics of the world system, especially those related to the changing roles ‘alterity’ may play in international and national scenarios. Some of the most fundamental changes in anthropology in the last century were due to changes in the subject position of anthropology’s ‘object’ par excellence, native peoples all over the planet. But, currently, there is another element which was never duly incorporated by previous critiques and is bound to impact anthropology: the increased importance of the non-hegemonic anthropologists in the production and reproduction of knowledge. Changes in the conditions of conversability among anthropologists located in different loci of the world system will impact the tensio...

Anthropological Notebook, 2020

The present time is a witness to uncertainties and upheavals caused by the social and political tensions on the one hand, and the ecological crisis widespread across the globe, on the other. Whether it is a natural calamity or socioeconomic instabilities caused by the rise of repressive state agencies, anthropology as a discipline has responded to this phenomenon in its own ways. Seeing the human in relation to other terrestrial beings is a concern anthropology has raised since its inception. How does, then, anthropology carry on with this tradition of moral connection with other beings on the planet and what methodological promises does it make to comprehend the enterprise of humanity in contemporary times? Anand Pandian's, A Possible Anthropology is an ethnography gleaned through experiences of anthropologist ranging from canonical and marginal figures of ethnographic storytellers and contemporary scholars to the activists and artists engaged in the diverse field of inquiry.