Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene

Abstract

Phytophthora infestans is the basic ingredient for an outbreak of potato late blight, introduced unintentionally into Europe in the 1840s by a steamship carrying fresh seed potatoes from the Americas. Hailed as a population savior, the potato grew into a main staple food in Europe in the following centuries. However, overdependence on potatoes as a subsistence crop created a highly fragile environment in which P. infestans eventually proliferated together with an artificial monoculture regime. In this essay, we follow P. infestans through the history of transatlantic connections. We disentangle three phases of transatlantic exchange through which the Solanum tuberosumwith the fungus-like water mold in its wake-originally departed from the Andes to Europe and most recently announced its comeback. First, we zoom in on an intensified phase of transatlantic exchange that led up to the European potato famine of the 1840s. The import and development of a potato monoculture was intended to sustain a numerous and rapidly growing rural population, albeit with disastrous consequences, as we illustrate with the case of Flanders, where the potato disease made its first entrance in 1845. Second, we contrast the rapid spread of P. infestans across the potato-producing European countryside with its centuries-long containment in the Andes. Third, we unravel the continuing and precarious transatlantic connection between Andean peasants and globalized markets through potato biotechnology. In each phase, multispecies-human and nonhuman-global encounters are identified as driving forces. This allows us to construct an alternative history of the potato and its crucial role in the making of the modern world.

Theories of Postdigital Heterogeneity: Implications for Research on Education and Datafication

“…At the same time, the postdigital condition is one of 'imperial and industrial ruin' (Tsing et al 2021). Precarity threads through many lives, whether due to personal economic circumstances or with a gaze to the future of the planet.…”

Political ecology III: Who are ‘the people’?

“…More recently, Kathryn Yusoff’s (2019) ‘redress to the White Geology of the Anthropocene’ forges a dialogue with critical race theory, and Françoise Vergès (2017: 80) has proposed ‘a history of the racial Capitalocene à la Cedric Robinson’. Such approaches resonate well with those seeking to reframe the Anthropocene as the product of a distinct set of social relations – as the Capitalocene (Moore, 2015), Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016), Plantationocene (Tsing, 2015), or as a distinct form of fossil capital constituted out of historically and geographically specific forms of social struggle (Malm, 2016). 4…”

A sensory approach for multispecies anthropology

“…Tsing's Matsutake Worlds Research Group (2009) and her subsequent Anthropocene project (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene) have involved multidisciplinary collaborations across humanist and naturalist traditions (see, e.g., Bubandt and Tsing, 2018). More recently, Tsing has teamed up with visual anthropologists to form a ‘Feral Atlas’—a digital project designed to convey the perspectives of over 100 interdisciplinary researchers through different narratives relating to feral beings (Tsing et al, 2020). Such projects are a good example of combining interdisciplinary methodologies and theoretical orientations in order to find a way forward in the study of more‐than‐human sociality in the midst of disrupted landscapes.…”