Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology

Abstract

The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. "Patchy Anthropocene" is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call "modular simplifications" and "feral proliferations." This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; "structure" here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being system characteristics. Indeed, we discuss "systems" as thought experiments, that is, imagined holisms that help make sense of structure. Ecological modeling, political economy, and alternative cosmologies are systems experiments that should rub up against each other in learning about the Anthropocene. We address the misleading claim that studies of nonhumans ignore social justice concerns as well as suggesting ways that ethnographers might address "hope" without rose-colored glasses. This introduction offers frames for appreciating the distinguished contributions to this supplement, and it traces key changes in anthropological thinking from the time of this supplement's predecessor, the Wenner-Gren Foundation-sponsored 1956 volume, Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Rather than interrogating philosophies of the Anthropocene, the supplement shows how anthropologists and allies, including historians, ecologists, and biologists, might best offer a critical description.

Koralteori, eller hvad koraller kanlære antropologien om multispecies socialitet

“…Deri ligger modellernes realisme og deres magi, hvad enten de er animistiske eller computerskabte. Hvis vi vil forstå den antropocaene tidsalders krise i al dens miljø-epistemologiske, klima-ontologiske, natur-politiske anarki, er der brug for at tage begge slags modeller, ånder og computergrafer, alvorligt (Tsing et al, 2019). At tage noget alvorligt er netop ikke at tage det bogstaveligt.…”

Filthy Flourishing

“…Rather than uncovering a hidden world below, positing a sturdy material base upon which an ideological superstructure is erected, or signaling residual practices bound to give way under the weight of modernization, thinking through para-sites brings into focus the multiple world-making projects that take shape alongside one another, albeit in unevenly valued and violently inegalitarian ways. 4 As spatial fragments made in relation to other sites (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019), para-sites reveal the patchiness of urban infrastructures and economies. Para-sites are contact zones that exist with and alongside mainstreams, although hardly on equal terms, facilitating flows while diverting materials toward unanticipated ends.…”

“…While this ethnographic literature has been focused almost exclusively on human economic activity, understanding these practices as para-sites emphasizes not only their relational entanglement with mainstream economies and their active relegation to a secondary status but also the more-than-human composition of these worlds. This is vital for understanding how urban infrastructures work and how they are embedded in and constitutive of patchy urban ecologies, "mosaics of difference" structured by ongoing dynamics of simplification and proliferation (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019).…”

“…The aim here is to understand urban infrastructures as multispecies workplaces, constituted through the dynamics of simplification and proliferation characteristic of the Jacob Doherty is Research Associate in Urban Mobility at the School of Geography and the Environment, Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford (South Parks Road,Oxford OX1 3QY,United Kingdom [jacob.doherty@ouce.ox.ac.uk]). This paper was submitted 27 V 18, accepted 24 I 19, and electronically published 2 V 19. patchy Anthropocene (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019). I argue that storks are both waste infrastructure and waste themselves, rendered disposable by the same state-centric views of infrastructure that make informal waste pickers precarious, cast out from the imaginary of a clean, green, urban future.…”

Disability Worlds

“…The Wenner-Gren symposium program has a history of charting new directions in anthropology. We have hosted conversations on militarism, masculinity, Atlantic slavery, and the Anthropocene, to name just a few of the topics covered in recent years (Gusterson and Besteman 2019;Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019). One of the strengths of this symposium lay in the encounter it staged between anthropology and disability studies, a field whose commitments differ in subtle ways from those of anthropology.…”