AN476      Half Unit
Anthropology and the Anthropocene

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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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. 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 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  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, 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? , Eurocene, Misanthropocene, and Neologocene, each of which tells a different origin story for what Donna Haraway has called ‘the trouble’. However, we then move to ask whether the Anthropocene might be less a marker of an epochal transformation than a signal of a profound anti-political shift in discussions about the future of the planet. We will inspect the scientific and non-scientific controversies the Anthropocene has provoked, and the particular forms of power, authority, reason, imagination, and subjectivity it has generated.

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., which we will read in relation to a more long-standing engagement with the environment within the anthropological discipline. We will assess how this literature expands on longstanding anthropological interrogations, for example,  of This will lead us to interrogate established binaries of human/nonhuman, subject/object, and nature/culture, and examine, significantly, to ask about the critical valence of anthropologists’ enquiry into the Anthropos ‘anthropos’ for an age so profoundly shaped by humans. What methods and modes of analysis are required to comprehend the diverse human/non-human more-than-human interactions and seemingly incommensurable scales that the Anthropocene invokes? What types of collaboration, knowledge, and mutual care does an anthropocenic outlook make possible? How can do we anchor the manifold theoretical proposals that have been put forward not just in ethnographic examples but also in own ‘experiments for living’?

10.5 hours of seminars, 7 hours of lectures and 9 hours of workshops 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/seminar format, and a third week with a two-hour workshop in a larger group. While the one-hour seminars 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 taking AN476 as an optional course will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 4 of term. These students will receive feedback on their formative essays from the course teacher.

Students on the MSc Culture, Justice and Environment programme and students on the MSc Anthropology and Development programme who are taking AN476 as a core course will be informed of their formative submission deadline by their academic mentor early in term. These students will receive feedback on their formative essays from their academic mentor. 

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

Exam (100%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period