Patchy Anthropocene: Special Issue from Current Anthropology

March 12, 2020 by Leave a Comment

I’m sure my ‘copy-and-paste’ will have some issues below [or not! many of the links seem to be working properly], so the direct link to this interesting set of papers is here. The special issue in Current Anthropology is titled “Patchy Anthropocene: Frenzies and Afterlives of Violent Simplifications” and looks to be open-access so far as I can tell.

 

Free AccessPatchy Anthropocene: Frenzies and Afterlives of Violent Simplifications: Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement 20

Danilyn Rutherford

pp. S183–S185

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Introduction
Free AccessPatchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt

pp. S186–S197

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Landscape Structure: Reading Extinction and Toxicity
Free AccessLearning to Read the Great Chernobyl Acceleration: Literacy in the More-than-Human Landscapes

Kate Brown

pp. S198–S208

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Free AccessThe Tree Snail Manifesto

Michael G. Hadfield and Donna J. Haraway

pp. S209–S235

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Modular Simplification and Feral Proliferation: Inhabiting Nondesigned Effects
Free AccessCoffee Landscapes Shaping the Anthropocene: Forced Simplification on a Complex Agroecological Landscape

Ivette Perfecto, M. Estelí Jiménez-Soto, and John Vandermeer

pp. S236–S250

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Free AccessLivestock Revolution and Ghostly Apparitions: South China as a Sentinel Territory for Influenza Pandemics

Frédéric Keck

pp. S251–S259

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Free AccessCattle, Capital, Colonization: Tracking Creatures of the Anthropocene In and Out of Human Projects

Rosa E. Ficek

pp. S260–S271

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Systems and Their Limits: Thinking with Models
Free AccessAn Unexpected Politics of Population: Salmon Counting, Science, and Advocacy in the Columbia River Basin

Heather Anne Swanson

pp. S272–S285

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Free AccessBeing Affected by Sinking Deltas: Changing Landscapes, Resilience, and Complex Adaptive Systems in the Scientific Story of the Anthropocene

Atsuro Morita and Wakana Suzuki

pp. S286–S295

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Free AccessOn Models and Examples: Engineers and Bricoleurs in the Anthropocene

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

pp. S296–S308

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Radical Hope: On Not Giving Up
Free AccessPlants, Politics, and the Imagination over the Past 500 Years in the Indo-Malay Region

Michael R. Dove

pp. S309–S320

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Free AccessFilthy Flourishing: Para-Sites, Animal Infrastructure, and the Waste Frontier in Kampala

Jacob Doherty

pp. S321–S332

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Beyond Man/Change/Earth: Imagining Otherwise
Free AccessAt Play with the Giants: Between the Patchy Anthropocene and Romantic Geology

Naveeda Khan

pp. S333–S341

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Free AccessFarming Odd Kin in Patchy Anthropocenes

Yen-Ling Tsai

pp. S342–S353

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Andrea Ballestero’s new book! A future history of water

May 31, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Ballestero.jpgIf, like me, you’ve been waiting for this title, it will be out next month. Details below on Andrea Ballestero’s fascinating research:

From Duke University Press here:

Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses.

Praise:

“Andrea Ballestero masterfully brings analytic complexity to wide-ranging fields while simultaneously showing us that these fields are not as separate as they first seem. If this sounds like ethnographic magic, that’s because it is: the magic of a most creative method carefully and brilliantly pursued to provide awareness of scholarly habits of thought, in the process, offering alter-inspiration.” — Marisol de la Cadena, author of Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds

“Andrea Ballestero is one of the most eloquent environmental ethnographers of her generation and one of the most important ethnographers of scientific practice that I have ever encountered. Her writing is beautiful, her theoretical and analytic ability are stunning, and the connections that she makes between her empirical evidence and larger conversations in the social sciences are breathtaking. While there are other anthropologists who write about the kinds of techniques that Ballestero dissects, historicizes, and theorizes, nobody does it while always grounding them in social relations and social reproduction.” — Paige West, author of Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea

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Eduardo Kohn–Anthropology as cosmic diplomacy: Toward an ecological ethics for the Anthropocene

December 22, 2017 by Leave a Comment
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Anna Tsing on, The buck, the bull, and the dream of the stag: some unexpected weeds of the Anthropocene

January 6, 2017 by Leave a Comment
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Tim Ingold: One World Anthropology

June 15, 2016 by Leave a Comment
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Ontological ‘turns’ and colonialism

October 27, 2014 by 8 Comments

I’ve mentioned previously the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology and the growing literature around it, like this special issue from HAU. Last week, a PhD student from Aberdeen, Zoe Todd, wrote a post on her take on the ‘ontological turn’ as an indigenous scholar. In it, she considers the ‘ontological turn’ yet another way of applying colonial forms of domination to indigenous thought, practice, and forms of social and legal order. It is an interesting post and worth the read. It was circulated widely on social media over the weekend.

A number of the themes of the post are worth taking up, such as whether the ‘ontological turn’ is intrinsically related to colonialism such that considerations of difference within it displace and dispossess indigenous forms of thought. I think the folks in the UC Davis group working on indigenous cosmopolitics might have something to contribute on this front. We’re going to have a get together this morning to discuss some of these issues here in Halifax so I’ll try to write an update later this week.

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Mohawk Interruptus: Audra Simpson on the refusal of the settler state

November 26, 2013 by 2 Comments

Audra Simpson has an excellent new book out that pushes on anthropologists and political scientists to stop assuming the colonial project is complete. Here is a description of the book from Duke University Press. And, below, a talk Dr. Simpson gave earlier this year at the University of Victoria.

Mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states

Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that a sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into Indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.

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Race, politics and the biosocial being

June 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

There has been a lot of controversy over Jason Richwine’s work on race lately (in short, he sought to link IQ and race in his PhD thesis and then, it would seem, in some work on U.S. immigration. If you want the Cole’s notes (that is, the Colbert notes) have a quick watch of Stephen Colbert May 15 show, which is really quite good. View in America here, Canada here, elsewhere, I’m not sure.

At any rate, the controversy is taken on over at the blog Living Anthropologically in a political context, and I’ve put in the first bit of a post from there below. Following that is a lecture from Ian Hacking on the Biosocial Being, which talks about the intersections of biology and socialization, partly in the context of race.

From Living Anthropologically:

Update June 2013: In the light of Jason Richwine and anthropological responses like What Jason Richwine Should Have Heard from his PhD Committee from Elizabeth Chin and How to Not Be Racist from Agustín Fuentes, I’ve re-read the post below written in August 2012. Really, if you just tweak the dates and the references, everything I wrote then applies to the current situation, and is consistent with the comment streams that pop up when people try to confront these issues intelligently.

[original post begins]

The assertion and oft-caricatured mantra that race is a social construction, or the social construction of race, is quite old. Regularly pilloried and attacked, the social construction of race is also defended and celebrated as the backbone of not just scientific understandings of human variation but as a liberal political plank.

As this ritualized game is rehearsed and replayed, it is worth taking stock of an essential but overlooked fact: the social construction of race is a goldmine for conservative political positions. The social construction of race is the gift that keeps on giving, far more helpful for conservative politics than for a progressive-liberal front.

First, there is the unbelievable advantage gained from denouncing and mocking the social construction of race. Second, this denunciation is almost always linked to promoting delusions that the balance of power has shifted to an anti-white bias. Finally, since the social construction of race was never connected to concrete political change, the reality of power imbalances favoring whites is met by naïve hand-wringing, with little understanding of what went so wrong in the post-civil rights era. READ MORE HERE.

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