This essay principally meditates on the scholarship published by sociocultural anthropologists in 2019. In 2019, the field of anthropology confronted anthropogenic climate change and authoritarian governance both as objects of scholarly inquiry and as existential threats to the reproduction of the discipline. Taking the 2018 American Anthropological Association meeting in San Jose as a point of departure, this essay posits the California wildfires as an immanent challenge to anthropological practice. Pace Mike Davis, the case for letting anthropology burn entails a call to abandon its liberal suppositions. As a discourse of moral perfectibility founded in histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, liberal humanism and its anthropological register of ethnographic sentimentalism proved insufficient to confront the existential threats of climate catastrophe and authoritarian retrenchment in 2019. The case for letting anthropology burn is fortified by efforts to unsettle the conceptual and methodological preoccupations of the discipline in service of political projects of repatriation, repair, and abolition. By abandoning the universal liberal subject as a stable foil for a renewed project of cultural critique, the field of anthropology cannot presume a coherent human subject as its point of departure but must adopt a radical humanism as its political horizon. [sociocultural anthropology, settler colonialism, afterlives of slavery, climate change, the human]

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This essay serves as an introduction to the special section “States of Crisis.” Principally a meditation on political and ecological crisis in the Caribbean, this introduction revisits two concurrent events—the devastation of The Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian, and the arrival of the first oil production vessel in Guyanese territorial waters—and probes the contradictions between the extractive imperative of economic nationalism and the existential threat of Caribbean extinction. Engaging “flags of convenience” as a practice of merchant ship registration and a metaphor for the ideal of postcolonial sovereignty, this essay considers how climate crisis demands a refusal of the state form as the limit to a regional political horizon and a rejection of nationalist historiography as a basis for the project of Caribbean criticism.

Resumen En Trinidad y Tobago, los caminos funcionan como un medio estatal para traducir los beneficios de petróleo y gas a fuentes de apoyo popular y electoral. Como resultado, las carreteras funcionan como sitios de confrontación entre funcionarios parlamentarios y ciudadanos descontentos sobre cuestiones de contratación pública, desarrollo y gobernanza. Basado en trabajo de campo prolongado con el Movimiento de Re‐Ruta de la Autopista (HRM)—un grupo de residentes movilizados contra el proyecto de autopista más grande en la historia de Trinidad y Tobago—este artículo propone el trabajo vial como un enfoque metodológico y teórico en la antropología política del Caribe. A partir de la interpretación dual de “vial” en la jerga trinitaria como vía material de tránsito y espacio carnavalesco de potencialidad democrática, este artículo define el trabajo vial como una práctica insurgente que desafía las lógicas instrumentales del estado rentier a través de una atención crítica a las infraestructuras materiales y las redes burocráticas que avalan el orden político postcolonial. [antropología social, desarrollo, movimientos sociales, politica, Trinidad y Tobago]

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