The term anthropocene has generated a tremendous amount of attention in recent years. Bruno Latour has characterized it as a gift to Anthropology. In this seminar we will explore how the anthropocene can be a compelling idea to think with. This seminar examines the idea of the anthropocene and the “end of time” with particular attention given to the peoples and culture groups of the circumpolar subarctic and arctic.
Lessons In The Anthropocene. Fall 2015 – Cornell University
SHUM 4501 and Anthropology 4051
Thursdays: 2:30 – 4:25
Location: Society for the Humanities building
Craig Campbell, PhD
Associate Professor in Anthropology at UT Austin,
2015-2016 Fellow of the Cornell Society for the Humanities
2015-2016 David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future Fellow
Contact: metafactory@gmail.com
Office hours by appointment.
The “Lessons in the Anthropocene” seminar examines the idea of the “end of time” with particular attention given to the peoples and culture groups of the circumpolar subarctic and arctic. We begin with a critical book for thinking about northern worlds: Robin Ridington’s Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology. By examining ethnographies of peoples who have been depicted as being out-of-time or culturally anachronistic with a modern world the seminar seeks to de-center histories and historical methodologies privileging temporal constructs emergent in Euro-American intellectual, spiritual, and popular traditions. This approach is carefully designed to help gaze beyond the common and conventional discursive frames to develop flexible techniques for looking at life as well as responsive modes of expression to describe it. The idea of time and particularly the end of time will be run against central themes that include human and non-human personhood, cosmological and ecological models of belief, spirit worlds (animism, shamanism), and complexities of culture change under the conditions of colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism/communism.
Each of our circumpolar readings are set against current theory and critique, putting ethnography and history into a critical and challenging conversation with concepts from critical and cultural theory like the event, the end of history, the posthuman, and the anthropocene.