杏吧论坛

Dr Gisa Weszkalnys

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in Social Anthropology, Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Cape Town), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Fudan), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Melbourne) and Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Tokyo). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

In August 2016, scientists participating in the Anthropocene Working Group put forward an official recommendation to rename our present time interval ‘the Anthropocene’. It postulates that humans now exert recognisable influences on the earth’s bio- and geophysical systems sufficient to warrant the naming of a distinct geological epoch encompassing the earth’s present, recent past, and indefinite future. The Anthropocene thus echoes contemporary anxieties about climate change, the deterioration of global ecologies, and other environmental crises on unprecedented scales, as well as humans’ capacity to devise adequate solutions to the problems they face. The scholarly and popular debate on the Anthropocene has exploded in recent years, with anthropologists contributing both theoretical and important ethnographic insight into how people apprehend and deal with the repercussions of anthropogenic environmental change. It now seems that the continued successful existence of humanity on this planet will require us to live differently both with each other and with the earth: ‘We will go onwards in a different mode of humanity or not at all’ (Val Plumwood 2007).

In this course, we will approach the Anthropocene as a contested category, with evident political and ethical implications. We will begin by examining the dramatic changes in the relationship between humans and their natural environments brought about by industrialisation, specifically, the increased exploitation of natural resources as well as the production and use of fossil fuels on a large scale. We will attend to the practices and cosmologies of people who in their everyday lives – for example, by digging, polluting, and wasting – participate in the work of anthropogenic alterations, drawing on case studies from across the world. We will consider alternative labels, such as the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Plasticene, Eurocene, Misanthropocene, and Neologocene, each of which tells a different origin story for what Donna Haraway has called ‘the trouble’. However, we then move