Anthropocene

Chua, Liana, and Hannah Fair. 2019. “Anthropocene”.
In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by 1

Felix Stein. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/19anthro.
Anthropocene
LIANA CHUA, Brunel University London

HANNAH FAIR, Brunel University London
‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the
dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes. Although it originated in the Earth Sciences, it has
since been widely adopted across academia and the public sphere as a catch-all description for the overwhelming impact of
human activity on the planet. This entry examines how anthropologists have engaged with the Anthropocene, both as a set of
phenomena (e.g. climate change, mass extinction) and as a politically and morally loaded concept. It identifies four main
anthropological approaches to the Anthropocene, those that: 1) take the Anthropocene as a context for or backdrop to
ethnographic inquiry; 2) interrogate ‘the Anthropocene’ as a socially and politically constructed idea; 3) treat the Anthropocene
as an opportunity for creativity and hopeful speculation; and 4) view the Anthropocene as the outcome of long-standing global
political and socio-economic inequalities. Such approaches entail distinct methods, analytical frameworks, concepts, and ethico-
political programmes. Collectively, they form a large and still-evolving body of work that destabilises divisions between ‘nature’
and ‘culture’ and ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, as well as the scholarly disciplines traditionally built around them. In this capacity,
they are also pushing anthropologists to ask what distinctive methodological, analytical, and ethico-political contributions their
discipline can make to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of Anthropocene studies.
Introduction
‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary era: one in which humans
have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes. Initially
[1]
emerging in the Earth Sciences as the name for a proposed new geological epoch (Crutzen & Stoermer
2000), the Anthropocene has been widely adopted across academia as a catch-all description of the
overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. Its key markers include climate change and its
consequences (e.g. sea level rise), the effects of plastic pollution on marine and terrestrial processes,
unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss and extinction, and the changing chemical composition of soils,
oceans, and the atmosphere.
Academic interest in the Anthropocene has been paralleled by a growing awareness of its existence in the
public sphere. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) dedicated an entire journal issue to the Anthropocene (UNESCO 2018), while many of the
United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Sustainable Development Goals (2016-present) are
built around key Anthropocenic concerns, such as global emissions, ecosystem damage, and overreliance
on fossil fuels. At the same time, productions such as Edward Burtynsky’s film Anthropocene: the human
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Liana Chua, Hannah Fair. Anthropocene. CEA 2
epoch (2018) are drawing public attention to both the term and the challenges that it poses in the
contemporary world. The Anthropocene has thus become a ‘charismatic mega-concept’ (Turpin & Davis
2015: 6) that bridges the natural and the social sciences, and academia and the public realm, igniting
heated debates across all of them.
This entry provides a short and necessarily partial account of anthropological engagements with the
Anthropocene—an immense, burgeoning, and still-embryonic field of study (Gibson & Venkateswar 2015;
Swanson, Bubandt & Tsing 2015). After briefly considering what the Anthropocene is, we shall examine
four key anthropological approaches to it: those that a) put ethnography to work in spaces most directly
affected by Anthropocenic phenomena; b) critically interrogate the idea of the Anthropocene: its
discourses, truth-claims, politics, and ethical injunctions; c) take the Anthropocene as an opportunity for
speculation, creativity, and hopeful regeneration; and d) treat the Anthropocene as a political and socio-
economic problem and symptom of global inequalities and injustices.
These approaches are characterised by distinct methods, analytical frameworks, conceptual vocabularies,
and ethico-political agendas. However, they also share certain key traits. First, they point to how the
Anthropocene destabilises dichotomies between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, as
well as the academic disciplines built around them. At a time when microplastics have infiltrated marine
food chains and ‘natural disasters’ like floods and coastal erosion are precipitated by human-induced
climate change, such dichotomies have become increasingly hard to maintain. Many anthropologists have
responded to this problem by transcending their own disciplinary boundaries, and engaging with methods
and frameworks from other disciplines, such as biology and art.
Secondly, none of these approaches can be said to be agnostic about their subject matter. Rather, they
exemplify what has become an increasingly pervasive tendency in this field: the imbrication of the
analytical with the political and the ethical. More than analyzing the Anthropocene, anthropologists are
increasingly asking what can and should be done in response to the threats and opportunities that it poses.
Their agendas and interventions, however, vary significantly—as do the demands that they make on
themselves. The upshot of all this, thirdly, is that anthropologists are increasingly pushed to ask what
exactly their discipline can bring to the evolving ‘Anthropo-scene’, i.e. the intellectual field that has
emerged around the concept (Lorimer 2017), and vice-versa. This entry suggests that classic
anthropological methods, such as small-scale participant-observation and the critical juxtaposition of
‘strange’ and ‘familiar’ insights, are well suited to adding empirical depth and nuance to this
multidisciplinary field. Yet the same time, it is also becoming clear that engagements with the
Anthropocene are reshaping anthropological practices and imaginaries, with profound ethical and political
implications.
What is the Anthropocene?
Since the early-2000s, the Anthropocene has received increasing scientific attention as a proposed new
geological epoch: one dominated by the impact of human activity on planetary systems. These impacts
include anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss leading to mass extinction, and the ubiquity of
microplastics in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Proposed bio-geophysical evidence for these and other
features of the Anthropocene includes increasing global average temperatures and carbon dioxide
concentrations, rising sea levels and ocean acidification (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008; Lewis & Maslin 2015). On
the basis of such evidence, in 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on
Stratigraphy (founded in 2009) provisionally recommended that the Anthropocene be formally recognised
as a distinct unit of geological time (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). However, debates continue regarding its
starting point.
Events as early as the extinction of mammoths through human predation 13,800 years ago (Doughty et al.
2010) and forest clearances and rice cultivation 5,000-8,000 years ago (Ruddiman 2003) have been
proposed as boundary points that mark the start of the Anthropocene. While Paul Crutzen and other
members of the working group previously endorsed the Industrial Revolution and the development of the
steam engine as the Anthropocene’s origin (Crutzen 2002; Zalasiewicz et al. 2008), the working group’s
members now largely favour the ‘Great Acceleration’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015)—the period of extensive
technological, demographic, economic, and resource use expansion from 1945 onward—as the origin point.
Members of the working group contend that the Great Acceleration represents a global synchronous
phenomenon (a key criterion for selecting a stratigraphic marker), compared to earlier suggestions, which
they argue were merely regional or did not occur simultaneously across the world.
Alternatively, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015) have proposed 1610 as a starting date, due to the
[2]
profound alterations to ecosystems produced by the Colombian Exchange as well as the dip in CO2
concentrations most likely caused by reforestation in the Americas, due to the enormous loss of Indigenous
life. As well as identifying an event they deem stratigraphically significant, Lewis and Maslin therefore
foreground colonial violence as a foundation of the Anthropocene. This position is endorsed by feminist
scholars Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017), who contend that selecting this starting date would create
space for Indigenous thought within the Anthropocene debate.
Decisions regarding the formal boundaries of the Anthropocene have political and socio-economic
repercussions. Depending on the starting date that is chosen, particular processes will come to be held
responsible for our current planetary predicament. This will suggest certain avenues for action, and
foreclose others. For instance, selecting the Industrial Revolution as a start-date suggests that capitalism
as a socio-economic system is primarily culpable for the Anthropocene, whereas 1610 foregrounds
colonialism and the historic and ongoing exploitation of the majority world, [3] suggesting that former
imperial nations have a particular responsibility to mitigate Anthropocenic problems. These debates reflect
how the Anthropocene is not simply a natural scientific phenomenon, but a methodological, conceptual,
and ethico-political challenge for scholars across a range of disciplines. The following sections examine
how anthropologists have both approached and intervened in these debates.
The Anthropocene as context
While the Anthropocene encompasses many different processes, anthropogenic climate change is often
treated as its main ‘yardstick’ due to the scale and ubiquity of its impacts (Rudiak-Gould 2015: 48).
Ethnographic research into the effects of, responses to, and understandings of climate change constitute
some of the earliest anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene. These approaches draw upon
anthropology’s traditional strengths of rich qualitative research in small scale societies, focusing
particularly on regions mostly critically threatened by climate change impacts, such as low-lying small
island states. Such ethnographic research provides insights into how Anthropocenic phenomena are
apprehended, experienced, and conceptualised in specific settings. In this way, they point to the
heterogeneous nature of the Anthropocene, and the need to examine its social and cultural dimensions,
rather than approaching it as a purely natural scientific concern.
Anthropologists have commonly tried to understand how climate change is experienced in particular local
settings (Crate & Nuttall 2009). In these studies, the Anthropocene is treated as a backdrop to social life or
a key factor shaping social relations, rather than as a purely geophysical phenomenon. For example,
Heather Lazrus (2009) documents how, in Nanumea, Tuvalu, the tips of islands, which are associated with
particular family lineages and corresponding levels of community prestige, are shifting due to coastal
erosion, potentially causing changes in familial status and social hierarchies. Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall
argue that climate change is ‘ultimately about culture’ (2009: 12) as it has emerged from a culture of mass
consumerism, requires cultural change to mitigate it, and threatens Indigenous cultural practices by
disrupting cosmologically significant human-environment relations. This emphasis on culture chimes with
the work of geographer Mike Hulme (2008), who contends that climate change discourse is dominated by
natural scientific frameworks, and consequently has been stripped of cultural context (see also Malm &
Hornborg 2014). Instead, he argues both that the climate must be understood culturally, and that climate
change must be locally situated and rendered culturally and ethically meaningful for those that it impacts.
Thus, culture can be understood as both a cause of climate change, integral to understanding it, and a
means of influencing responses to it. This latter process has been explored in relation to Christian
responses to climate change, with ethnographies analyzing the use of Biblical stories in challenging the
hegemony of predictions of sea level rise in Kiribati (Kempf 2017) and advocating for greater preparedness
in the face of intensifying cyclones in Vanuatu (Fair 2018).
Many researchers advocate bringing Indigenous knowledge of climate change into dialogue with scientific
knowledge, for example by drawing on Athapaskan and Tlingit oral histories of glacial travel in the Gulf of
Alaska (Cruikshank 2001), or organising community knowledge exchanges that bring together
ethnographic accounts and scientific data regarding changes to the permafrost in northeastern Siberia
(Crate & Fedorov 2013). This approach, however, raises more fundamental questions about the distinction
between local and scientific knowledge. There have been calls to recognise how scientific knowledge of
climate change is shaped by specific local and cultural conditions, rather than accepting it as a ‘view from
nowhere’ (Hulme 2008), as well as recognising that local knowledge itself is not isolated, static, or sealed
off from scientific discourse. In this vein, anthropologists have explored how scientific knowledge is
received, interpreted,and incorporated within specific local cultural settings. For example, Jerry Jacka
(2009) shows how the impacts of El Niño in the Porgera Valley in Papua New Guinea have been
accommodated within Christian narratives of punishment and apocalypse and understood as revenge for
the destruction of significant ritual sites through road building. These local understandings can render
problematic the anthropogenic dimension of climate change. While they concur regarding the human
responsibility for global warming, they do not agree which specific human actions have caused it.
Peter Rudiak-Gould’s (2012) work in the Marshall Islands also highlights how scientific understandings are
combined with local understandings and used to bolster existing moral frameworks, a process he describes
as ‘promiscuous corroboration’. He identifies a prevalent Marshallese understanding of climate change as
symptomatic of wider, pre-existing cultural decline, due to increasing American influences and the loss of
traditional knowledges, lifestyles,and practices. Similar understandings have been identified in the Pacific
Island nation of Vanuatu (Fair 2018) where climate change impacts, including the intensification of
cyclones, have been attributed to deviations from both Christian morality and kastom (traditional
knowledge, beliefs, and practices). Climate change as rendered intelligible through these existing ethical
frameworks therefore also lead Islanders to hold themselves morally culpable for Anthropocenic impacts, in
distinction to their nation’s minimal contributions to carbon dioxide emissions.
Rudiak-Gould’s work reveals some of the tensions that can emerge between research and political
advocacy. He argues that while most anthropologists subscribe to a narrative of climate change blame
focused upon the responsibilities of industrialised nations, researchers should be open and alert to
alternative narratives, even those that challenge their own politico-ethical standpoints. While the
Marshallese narrative of Islander responsibility is at odds with conventional framings of small island states
as victims of climate injustice, it is also empowering on a local level, as ‘innocence implies impotence’
(Rudiak-Gould 2015: 58).
This raises a broader question: what political and ethical demands does the Anthropocene make of social
scientists? Crate and Nuttall (2009) argue that anthropologists have a privileged point of engagement:
many are already working with communities who are experiencing the severest impacts of climate change
while being some of the least responsible for those impacts. Consequently, some researchers have focused
their energies not just on analysis but advocacy, engaging with legislation and policy (Fiske 2009), setting
up university sustainability initiatives (Bartlett & Stewart 2009), and participating in climate justice
movements (Chatterton et al. 2012). Their efforts exemplify a form of engaged research that seeks to
alleviate, or at least highlight, the deleterious effects of the Anthropocene.
Studying ‘the Anthropocene’ as a concept
Much of the work cited above is situated in the Anthropocene, which serves as an encompassing, real-life
backdrop to ethnographic inquiry. However, there is also a growing body of scholarship that advocates a
critical understanding of the Anthropocene as an idea (Moore 2015: 28). Drawing partly on critical
traditions such as science studies and post-structuralism, these writings examine how Anthropocenic
knowledge practices and truth-claims are constructed, circulated, contested, and strategically deployed—as
well as how these can bring new realities and relations into being.
This approach is marked by a commitment to rendering the familiar strange by showing how apparently
clear-cut Anthropocenic ‘facts’, such as ‘climate change’, ‘carbon emissions’, and ‘biodiversity loss’, are
inherently partial and dynamic constructs. Rather than assuming their veracity, anthropologists ask: how
are such concepts defined, made visible or knowable, and formalised, and to what effect? In recent years,
for example, scholars have examined how the Anthropocene is made ‘imaginable and comprehensible’
(Marzec 2014: 249) through specific technologies, including narratives, photography (Kember 2017),
infographics (Houser 2014), and environmental visualizations (Carruth & Marzec 2014). Another fecund
area of inquiry is that of climate science, with anthropologists examining the scalar, spatial, temporal, and
speculative dimensions of climate modelling (Hastrup & Skrydstrup 2013), the universalization of carbon
as a metric through which to quantify (and thus compare) a vast array of human activity (Günel 2016), and
the impact of ideals of accountability (Hall & Sanders 2015) and expertise (Vaughn 2017) on climate
science research. Their insights into the all-too-human production of scientific knowledge are exemplified
by Jessica O’Reilly’s discussion of Antarctic research (2016), which reveals how scientific data about the
shifting Antarctic landscape is indelibly shaped by scientists’ intimate, sensory engagements with the ice,
national research logistics and nationalism, guesswork, and, often, pure chance.
By treating scientific practices and categories as objects of ethnographic scrutiny, such scholars highlight
the vital point that
[k]nowledges do not ﬂoat free from their contexts of production, and cannot arrive any old way.
They travel well-worn paths, and are preconditioned by other academic knowledges, knowledge-
producing apparatuses, and institutional arrangements (Hall & Sanders 2015: 454).
These approaches thus reveal how seemingly ‘factual’ Anthropocenic discourses, categories, and
epistemologies are in fact malleable, fragile, and socio-historically specific (see, e.g., Last 2015). Moreover,
the truth-claims that they generate are often tied up with profoundly moral ideas that evoke specific ways
of thinking and feeling. Some of these, such as paintings of scenes from the Industrial Revolution,
romanticise and naturalise the very conditions of human dominance over nature that fuelled the
Anthropocene (Mirzoeff 2016). Others, notably public discourses about climate change, are apocalyptic
(Swyngedouw 2010), depicting the Anthropocene as a threat to humankind’s very survival.
More than making the Anthropocene knowable, such ideas and imaginaries can have powerful social,
political, and material effects in multiple settings. Narratives of low-lying island states being imminently
engulfed by rising sea levels, for example, can disempower affected communities and inhibit effective
mitigative action by representing Islanders as helpless victims and their homelands as inevitably lost
(Farbotko 2010). Rather than reflecting an inherent vulnerability to climate change, these discourses can
actually encourage people in affected areas to produce and perform their vulnerability in order to receive
development funding (Webber 2013), and in doing so divert resources from other areas. Other studies show
how discourses of climate change vulnerability have been mobilised in order to reinforce existing
stereotypes of certain places and groups of people as vulnerable, hazardous, and disadvantaged (Yamane
2009).
It is here that anthropologists are well-placed to intervene in ongoing conversations by producing detailed
ethnographic accounts of the
events animated by the Anthropocene idea, from emergent political alliances and spatializations to
modes of subjectivity and citizenship, from forms of scientific objectification and naturalization to
shifting research methods and narratives, from green markets, products, and flows of capital to the
materialization and embodiment of these ideas in spaces, places, bodies, and earthly relations
(Moore 2015: 40).
Through such accounts, Amelia Moore suggests, anthropologists can begin to treat ‘the
Anthropocene idea as a problem space’ (2015: 41; italics in original) that needs to be explored rather than
taken for granted.
Moore’s work on the growth of sustainability, conservation, and eco-tourist initiatives in the Bahamas (e.g.
Moore 2015) exemplifies the value of such an approach. Taking the Bahamas as one particular
‘Anthropocene space’ (2015: 31), she traces how rising sea levels, notions of sustainability, and concerns
about biodiversity loss have collectively reframed and literally reworked the islands’ ecological, spatial, and
socio-economic makeup—for example, through the promotion of sustainable fisheries, the establishment of
new marine protected areas, and the growth of ecotourism initiatives. In her work, the Anthropocene is not
simply a backdrop to ethnographic inquiry, but a material and imaginative space that constantly generates
new relations and effects.
Similar approaches can be found in Jason Cons’ (2018) ethnography of the pre-emptive restructuring of
Bangladeshi borderlands in the name of climate security; Cymene Howe’s discussion of multiple claims to
‘anthropocentric ecoauthority’ in the context of wind power development in Mexico (2014); and Nayanika
Mathur’s description of the political work performed by Anthropocenic categories like ‘climate change’ in
the context of human-wildlife conflicts in the Indian Himalayas (2015). Rather than asking how
anthropology can illuminate small-scale responses to the Anthropocene, these writings push us to
interrogate the very idea of the Anthropocene, the truth-claims and the ethical demands that it makes, and
the effects of such claims and demands in multiple settings. By adopting this critical perspective, they
imply, anthropologists can not only challenge the deleterious effects of oversimplified concepts such as
‘anthropogenic’ or ‘climate change’, but can also begin to explore ‘alternative visions’ (Cons 2018: 286) and
possibilities for life in the Anthropocene. On this point, their work converges with that of another form of
scholarship, to which speculation and creativity are central.
Remaking the Anthropocene: speculation, creativity, and experimentation
Rather than critically unpack the ‘Anthropocene’ idea, other scholars have opted to play with the
speculative and regenerative possibilities that it presents. While not uncritical of its horrors and injustices,
their writings approach the Anthropocene as an opportunity: as a still-emergent entity to be appropriated,
recast, and even redone (Buck 2015: 372).
This diverse body of work is often animated by a shared concern with unsettling, reworking, and
transcending dominant scholarly categories such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘human’, and ‘nonhuman’. Although
social scientists have long questioned these categories’ universality, the Anthropocene has thrown their
contingency into starker relief: if ‘human agency has become the main geological force shaping the face of
the earth’ (Latour 2014), how, then, can we tell what is ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’?
By thrusting this vital question into the public spotlight, the Anthropocene has, as Bruno Latour puts it,
been a gift to contemporary scholarship—an invitation to ‘renegotiate the shape, boundary, limit and
extent’ of anthropology’s core concern, ‘humanity’ (2014), and much more besides.
A common response to this invitation is to embrace rather than abhor the Anthropocene’s human-
nonhuman hybrid ‘monsters’ (Latour 2011; Swanson et al. 2017: M4), from bacteria that have evolved to
resist human-synthesised drugs to ‘blasted landscapes’, such as sites of oil spills, that are simultaneously
‘natural’ and ‘social’ (Kirksey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014). Many scholars point out that the Anthropocene
has simply made visible the complex webs of relations in which humans and nonhumans have always been
enmeshed, while also generating new, inescapable hybrids and relations in the present. Apprehending
these old and new hybrids and relations means finding ways to transcend anthropology’s traditional focus
on humans, and asking: on what other terms can the Anthropocene be approached? To this end, many
anthropologists draw on methods and analytics developed in ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey &
Helmreich 2010), a field of scholarship that foregrounds how all humans and nonhumans on the planet are
‘entangled’—tied together and interdependent in various ways (e.g. Haraway 2008; Mitchell 2016; Reinert
2016; Rose 2011; Tsing 2015; van Dooren 2014). Rather than shunning such entanglements, they posit,
why not use them to engender new possibilities for thinking about and living in the Anthropocene?
Such calls are often underpinned by a distinct ethical injunction: to elevate nonhuman entities into subjects
worthy of scholarly attention, and also care and solidarity. Musing on the presence of penguins and flying
foxes in urban spaces, for example, Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose refute the assumption that
such animals are ‘out of place’ (2012: 2), advocating instead an ‘ethic of conviviality for a genuinely
inclusive multispecies city…that provides a space for the flourishing of as many different forms of life as
possible’ (2012: 17). Similarly, Anna Tsing (2011, 2015) propounds a form of ‘multispecies
love’—‘passionate immersion in the lives of…nonhumans’ (2011: 19)—as an antidote to the destructive
excesses of global capitalism. For her, multispecies entanglements offer a glimpse of how life, like
mushrooms in abandoned anthropogenic landscapes, can emerge from ruined places (2015: 6). Indeed, ‘in
a global state of precarity’, she argues, ‘we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin’ (2015:
6).
For many of the scholars mentioned in this section, then, the interdependence of humans and nonhumans
is not simply an ontological fact, but it may be a potent conceptual and ethical way of moving forward on a
‘damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017). As Swanson et al. put it:
Our continued survival demands that we learn something about how best to live and die within the
entanglements we have. We need both senses of monstrosity: entanglement as life and as danger
(2017: M4).
In such work, the Anthropocene is thus an opportunity to: 1) right old wrongs, particularly the
anthropocentric hubris that caused such planetary ruination; and 2) create and experiment with new
modes of understanding, living with/in, and transforming the Anthropocene, so as to make it plural, livable,
even charming (Buck 2015). Here, hope and possibility (Kirskey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014) are key motifs;
correctives to what Donna Haraway calls the ‘game over’ attitude (2016: 2) that characterises more
cynical, hopeless responses to the Anthropocene.
Such hopeful interventions are often accompanied by an impulse to play and experiment with existing
scholarly methods and frameworks. Rather than writing straightforward ethnographies, anthropologists are
increasingly turning to cross- and trans-disciplinary engagements—with art and artists (Davis & Turpin
2015; Kirksey, Schuetze & Helmreich 2014), natural sciences and scientists (Tsing 2015), and stories and
storytelling (Haraway 2016; van Dooren & Rose 2012)—to overcome the limits of disciplinary knowledges,
practices, and barriers. These experimental, collaborative projects are generally characterised by two
attributes.
First, many are ‘transgressive’ (Kirksey, Schuetze & Helmreich 2014: 17) and ‘speculative’ (Davis & Turpin
2015: 17; Haraway 2016). Defying, rather than conforming to, academic conventions and expectations,
they experiment with different methods, forms of knowledge, and aesthetics to ‘imagine alternative
[Anthropocenic] futures’ (Lorimer 2017: 131). For example, Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson (2015),
creators of the art installation The Museum of the History of Cattle (2013), use the narrative of an
imaginary cow in a way that urges the reader to reimagine the world’s history, animal sociality, and the
Anthropocene in bovine terms. In the process, they invite us to consider how we relate to nonhuman others
in the Anthropocene, and what a non-anthropocentric Anthropocenic future might look like.
Second, as we saw above, these interventions are commonly framed as ethico-political manifestos that
implicate their audiences in the urgent project of finding new ways to live and survive in the Anthropocene
(see esp. Gibson, Rose & Fincher 2015; Kirksey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014; Tsing et al. 2017). Treating the
ethical, the political, and the scholarly as of a piece, such speculative discussions impel anthropologists to
embrace their connections with other entities and to formulate ‘alternative political visions, modes of
relation and opportunities for ethical responsiveness’ (Mitchell 2016: 39). In contrast to the critical,
deconstructionist agendas of the works cited in the previous section, these interventions are self-
consciously experimental and collaborative—and always ethically and politically loaded. Yet, as the next
section shows, they have their own limitations.
Re-politicising the Anthropocene
While enthusiastically adopted in some quarters, creative approaches to the Anthropocene have also been
criticised for failing to rigorously interrogate the relationships between capitalism, power, inequality, and
the Anthropocene. Such critiques typify a fourth main response to the Anthropocene in our discipline: one
that emphasises historical contingency, political contestation, and socio-economic inequality. Contributors
to this field have reproached both speculative and dominant scientific approaches for depoliticising their
subject matter at a time when political engagement is most needed.
Three major concerns have been expressed regarding the dominant narrative generated by the
Anthropocene Working Group. The first concerns its portrayal of the Anthropocene as a moment of rupture.
In The shock of the Anthropocene, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016)
contend that the dominant narrative perpetuates a historically inaccurate myth: that humans have suddenly
awoken to the negative consequences of their actions upon the environment (see, e.g., Steffen et al. 2011).
This awakening narrative, they argue, presumes that environmental inaction emerges from ignorance, as
opposed to an ideological battle over how humans engage with the non-human world. It conceals
longstanding environmental consciousness and previous grassroots political struggles against ecological
degradation in the Global North and Global South, thereby depoliticising the contested history of the
Anthropocene (Swyngedouw & Ernstson 2018). Bonneuil and Fressoz further argue that such narratives
glorify the position of scientists, placing them above society and suggesting that science can provide
straightforward solutions to the Anthropocene while concealing a need for political choices. This narrative
frames the Anthropocene in terms of human accomplishments, rather than taking it as an opportunity for
humility and recognising the distinction between human influence and human control (Nixon 2017). The
notion that the Anthropocene represents a sudden new era of ecological dystopia has also been critiqued by
Indigenous scholars. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2018), for example, argues that this fails to recognise
that, from one Indigenous perspective, the Anthropocene is a perpetuation of environmental destruction,
displacement, and extinction due to the violence of colonialism: for some Indigenous communities, he
argues, the apocalypse already arrived long ago.
Secondly, scholars have argued that the dominant Anthropocene narrative treats humanity —the
Anthropos —as a ‘unitary species actor’ (Nixon 2017: 24), or a singular universal subject. In this capacity,
the imaginary of ‘the anthropogenic’ covers over the global and historical inequalities between humans
that caused the Anthropocene, and that continue to structure global politics today (Sayre 2012). It thus
fails to recognise the inequity of responsibility for anthropogenic climate change, as well as the unequal
distribution of exposure to its impacts, thereby depoliticising analysis. Moreover, far from being universal,
this vision of the Anthropos has been criticised for making wealthy European perspectives stand in for the
experiences of all of humanity, thereby replicating the homogenising violence of colonialism (Davis & Todd
2017). Métis scholar Zoe Todd argues that the Eurocentrism of the dominant Anthropocene narrative is a
consequence of its emergence from white Eurocentric institutions, and instead advocates a decolonization
of the Anthropocene through bringing in Indigenous knowledges that emphasise the ‘reciprocal, ongoing,
and dynamic relationships’ (2015: 251) between humans and nonhumans.
Thirdly, dominant Anthropocene narratives may also naturalise the development of the Anthropocene,
depicting it as inevitable rather than identifying it as a consequence of contingent historical developments
and particular political choices. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) note how, in some accounts, a
linear trajectory is drawn from the discovery of fire to the development of the steam engine. This
presentation of the Anthropocene as a natural, inevitable, teleological development depoliticises its origins,
and limits political responses to it. Instead, they argue that the Anthropocene should be understood as a
‘sociogenic’ phenomenon, emerging from particular social relations and an uneven distribution of power
between different nations, social groups, and species. Naturalising the Anthropocene can lead to an
understanding of human domination of the planet and of nonhuman life as inevitable, with the epoch’s very
name maintaining an anthropocentric perspective to the exclusion of all others (Crist 2016). This failure to
recognise the Anthropocene’s historically contingent conditions can be attributed to a ‘consequentialist
bias’ (Moore 2016) of dominant scientific approaches, reflecting their greater emphasis upon evidence of
biophysical changes as opposed to systemic causes.
Responses to this singular Anthropocene grand narrative vary. Bonneuil and Fressoz advocate producing
multiple histories of the Anthropocene, which recognise the different political choices that have been and
can be made (2016). Bringing analyses of power into the Anthropocene and rejecting the homogenised
figure of the Anthropos, Malm and Jason Moore present contrasting accounts of a ‘Capitalocene’, an epoch
defined by the impacts of Capitalism upon planetary systems, as opposed to those of all of humanity. While
Malm (2016) focuses on the Industrial Revolution and the role of fossil fuels in capital accumulation, Jason
Moore (2016; but c.f. Hornborg 2017) identifies 1450 and the mercantile capitalist era as the starting point
of the Capitalocene. He argues that this period witnessed the production of ‘Nature’ as an abstracted
object of power, and that it was the violent exclusion of ‘Nature’ from ‘Society’ that enabled the
development of capitalism. Meanwhile, Hann (2017) urges an even more long-term perspective on the
development of capitalism, one that overcomes what he perceives as the Eurocentrism of existing analyses.
He focuses on Jack Goody’s work and urban revolutions of the Bronze Age, arguing that the emergence of
commodity as opposed to gift economies can be seen as part of the social, political, and cosmological
preconditions of the Anthropocene.
Like the speculative scholarship discussed earlier, such writings undermine the Euro-American modernist
division between ‘nature’ and ‘society’. However, their interventions take a markedly different form. Rather
than treating the Anthropocene as an opportunity for hopeful, creative speculation, they view it as a spur to
unmasking and contesting long-standing political and socio-economic inequalities in the present. But does
this entail entirely dissolving the differences between ‘nature’ and ‘society’? Hornborg (2017), for one,
rejects Moore’s view of nature and society as entirely entangled. He contends that without a clear
analytical separation of nature and society, capitalism cannot be critiqued, thereby diminishing the
possibility for political action. Similarly, Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson (2018) challenge what they
label as a post-humanist rejection of nature/society distinctions. For them, an understanding of nature as
entirely part of society and capitalism creates a view of nature that can be too easily managed and co-opted
by neoliberalism. This depoliticises the Anthropocene, as it perpetuates the fantasy that life and capitalism
can continue as they are, ignoring the need for decisive, radical socio-economic transformation.
Such neo-Marxist concerns about depoliticising the Anthropocene extend to their critiques of the
speculative and creative approaches discussed above. Hornborg (2017), for example, accuses scholars like
Tsing (2015) and Haraway (2016) of ‘dithering’ in the face of ecological crisis: producing poetic yet
inaccessible, theoretically imprecise interventions that preoccupy the attention of critical scholars rather
than critiquing inequality or encouraging political action. While blunter than most, Hornborg’s critique
typifies a specific kind of ethico-political position on the Anthropocene. Underpinned by the insights of
political economy and political ecology, such scholarship treats anthropological critique as an intervention
in the world: as a means of highlighting ongoing inequalities and historical contingencies and continuities,
as well as the basis of a direct, engaged form of political action.
Conclusion
Jason Moore describes the Anthropocene as having ‘two lives’: one as a scientific concept and object of
geological debate; and another as an idea that has moved beyond its natural science origins, permeating
the social sciences and public discourse, and raising questions about the relationship between humans and
the non-human world (2016: 80). This entry has offered a glimpse of the Anthropocene’s second life as it is
playing out in various anthropological quarters.
As we have seen, the Anthropocene is apprehended in multiple ways within anthropology: as an
encompassing, threatening backdrop to ethnographic inquiry; as an idea and ‘problem space’ to be
interrogated; as an opportunity for creativity, speculation, and experimentation; and as the outcome of
historical inequalities and injustices. These varied figurations of the Anthropocene give rise to equally
varied ethico-political positions and interventions. As the approaches above reveal, there are different, and
differently scaled, ways of responding to the Anthropocene: to take it apart and focus on its small-scale,
localised challenges; to critique its truth-claims and politics on various levels; or to capitalise on the
Anthropocene as an opportunity to formulate new, hopeful, experimental possibilities for the future.
Embedded in, but also evolving through, these propositions are thus different visions of what anthropology
is, could be, and can do. But such competing visions—and they are likely to be joined by many more—are
not simply about the future of anthropology. As lenses onto the world, they raise much bigger questions
about how the very categories of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ and ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are being reproduced,
transformed, or even dissolved in the present moment. And as Anthropocenic phenomena impact ever more
of the planet, and Anthropocenic discourses gain greater social, political, and moral traction, these are
questions that will animate academic debates and affect the lives of millions of people for years to come.
Notes
Research for this entry was carried out as part of a project funded by the European Research Council
(ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant agreement
No.758494.
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Note on contributors
Liana Chua is Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She has studied conversion to
Christianity, ethnic politics, indigeneity, resettlement and development in Malaysian Borneo since 2003.
She is currently leading a large multi-sited project that explores the global nexus of orangutan conservation
in the Anthropocene. http://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/liana-chua
Hannah Fair’s doctoral research concerned Pan-Pacific climate justice movements and religious
understandings of climate change in Vanuatu. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from University
College London, and is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology at Brunel University London,
investigating interspecies compassion, extinction, and orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene.
Anthropology, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlesex,
UB8 3PH, United Kingdom.
[1] At the time of writing (late 2018), ‘the Anthropocene’ has yet to be formally recognised by the International Union of
Geological Sciences or the International Commission on Stratigraphy as a distinct geological epoch.
[2] A term that refers broadly to the movement of plants and animals such as potatoes, tomatoes, cattle, and sugarcane between
the Americas and Europe, Africa, and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
[3] The term ‘majority world’ collectively refers to the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania – who make up the
majority of the world’s population – without defining them negatively in comparison with Europe and North America (unlike the
categories ‘third world’ or ‘developing world’).

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Chua, Liana, and Hannah Fair. 2019. “Anthropocene”.

In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by 1

LIANA CHUA, Brunel University London

oceans, and the atmosphere.

heated debates across all of them.

economic problem and symptom of global inequalities and injustices.

and frameworks from other disciplines, such as biology and art.

anthropological methods, such as small-scale participant-observation and the critical juxtaposition of

What is the Anthropocene?

space for Indigenous thought within the Anthropocene debate.

how anthropologists have both approached and intervened in these debates.

The Anthropocene as context

rather than approaching it as a purely natural scientific concern.

in the face of intensifying cyclones in Vanuatu (Fair 2018).

as ‘promiscuous corroboration’. He identifies a prevalent Marshallese understanding of climate change as

distinction to their nation’s minimal contributions to carbon dioxide emissions.

(Rudiak-Gould 2015: 58).

alleviate, or at least highlight, the deleterious effects of the Anthropocene.

Studying ‘the Anthropocene’ as a concept

the vital point that

(Swyngedouw 2010), depicting the Anthropocene as a threat to humankind’s very survival.

ethnographic accounts of the

(Moore 2015: 40).

taken for granted.

new relations and effects.

scholarship, to which speculation and creativity are central.

Remaking the Anthropocene: speculation, creativity, and experimentation

their writings approach the Anthropocene as an opportunity: as a still-emergent entity to be appropriated,

recast, and even redone (Buck 2015: 372).

‘damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017). As Swanson et al. put it:

cynical, hopeless responses to the Anthropocene.

section shows, they have their own limitations.

Re-politicising the Anthropocene

subject matter at a time when political engagement is most needed.

argues, the apocalypse already arrived long ago.

and dynamic relationships’ (2015: 251) between humans and nonhumans.

depicting it as inevitable rather than identifying it as a consequence of contingent historical developments

recognise the Anthropocene’s historically contingent conditions can be attributed to a ‘consequentialist

biophysical changes as opposed to systemic causes.

preconditions of the Anthropocene.

label as a post-humanist rejection of nature/society distinctions. For them, an understanding of nature as

as well as the basis of a direct, engaged form of political action.

playing out in various anthropological quarters.

As we have seen, the Anthropocene is apprehended in multiple ways within anthropology: as an

encompassing, threatening backdrop to ethnographic inquiry; as an idea and ‘problem space’ to be

Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

Geographers 105(2), 369-77.

ethics. Public Culture 26(2), 205-11.

antagonism, the commons, and solidarity. Antipode 45(3), 602-20.

borderlands. Cultural Anthropology 33(2), 266-94.

change knowledge in Northeastern Siberia. Arctic 66(3), 338-50.

Creek: Left Coast Press.

the crisis of capitalism (ed.) J. Moore, 14-33. Oakland: PM Press.

Crutzen, P. 2002. Geology of mankind. Nature 415, 23.

International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4), 761-80.

epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press.

experimentation. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 51(1), 47-60.

Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

review. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 6, 5-27.