AN376      Half Unit
Anthropology and the Anthropocene

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Mutually exclusive courses:

This course cannot be taken with AN276 at any time on the same degree programme.

The Anthropocene is a concept increasingly used to describe a new planetary epoch, one in which humans are leaving an irreversible mark on the earth’s bio- and geophysical systems. Although not formally recognised by stratigraphic scientists, the concept has already altered how we imagine and inhabit time. It has stirred much scientific, philosophical, and popular debate, echoing anxieties about climate change, the deterioration of global ecologies, and other environmental crises, as well as our political and cultural (in)capacity to devise adequate solutions. It has noticeably shifted popular discussion and scholarly theorising about more-than-human relations, human responsibility to sustain life on Earth, and, more generally, what it means to be human.

This course approaches the Anthropocene as a contested category, with evident political and ethical implications. We will explore, for example, the dramatic changes in the environment due to shifts in resource extraction and energy use, and how they co-constitute racialised and patriarchal systems of power. Ethnographic studies from across the world will enable us to see how everyday practices of consumption, pollution, waste, and recycling are shaped by intersectionalities of gender, race, and class. We will inspect scientific controversies and grievance politics provoked by toxic contamination and climate change, and the forms of power, evidence, and authority that underpin them. We will ask whether there is a risk of the Anthropocene becoming less a marker of epochal transformation than of a profound anti-politics in the debate about the future of the planet, and to what extent alternative labels, such as the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, or Plasticene might help recuperate the term’s critical potential. What modes of sensing and knowing are available to apprehend and assess past and present processes of environmental change? What types of collaborative knowledge production, mutual care, and forms of social and economic justice might a critical Anthropocenic outlook encourage?

Students will be expected to engage with a variety of resources, including online publications, blogs, documentary and feature films, and other media, and an emergent interdisciplinary literature, spanning the social and natural sciences.. We will assess how this literature expands on longstanding anthropological interrogations, for example,  of binaries of human/nonhuman, subject/object, and nature/culture, and examine the critical valence of anthropologists’ enquiry into the Anthropos  for an age so profoundly shaped by humans. What methods and modes of analysis are required to comprehend the diverse more-than-human interactions and seemingly incommensurable scales that the Anthropocene invokes? How do we anchor the manifold theoretical proposals that have been put forward not just in ethnographic examples but also in own experiments for living?

7 hours of lectures, 9 hours of workshops and 7 hours of classes in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

The course is comprised of three cycles of three weeks plus an additional, concluding week. Each cycle consists of two weeks taught in the traditional lecture/class format, and a third week with a two-hour workshop in a larger group. While the one-hour classes will focus on core readings set by the lecturer, the two-hour workshop will, in addition, offer space for viewing other resources (films, online material), discussing students independently researched material, student presentations, etc.

Essay (1500 words)

Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.

Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 3 of term.

T.L. Goffe (2025) Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Origins of Climate Crisis

D. Haraway (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

G. Hecht (2023) Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures

K. Hetherington (2019) Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene

E. Kohn (2013) How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human

N.C. Kawa (2016) Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests

J. Salazar Parreñas (2018) Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation

A.L. Tsing, J. Deger, A.K. Saxena, and F. Zhou (2024) Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in Spring Term Week 1