This article is part of the following series: Book forum
This book forum brings together seven scholars to discuss Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke 2019), a story of what grows alongside “growth” and the price of “a good life.” Botswana offers lessons that are peopled and elemental; lessons that tug between the local and the global. Livingston shows how water, food, transportation…
As the stark realities of our planetary predicament – ecological crisis, global pandemics, species extinction, intractable social inequality – become daily more visible, it is now widely argued that humanity’s appreciable mark on the earth system has culminated in a geological epoch of our own making: the ‘Anthropocene’. Geologists continue to examine the stratigraphic signals left by the Anthropocene, while …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
We have been discussing the prospects of catastrophes of our own making for decades. We have been debating risks linked to anthropogenic climate change and runaway technologies, trying to fathom even those futures that we otherwise deem unfathomable. Yet it is a known natural risk that wreaks havoc around the globe today.
Events of Surprise
Despite the fact that we …
In late December 2019, health authorities in China confirmed dozens of pneumonia cases in Wuhan city. Preliminary investigations suggested the infection was likely transmitted from animals to humans. On January 22, 2020, experts declared that the etiological agent 2019-nCoV (SARS-CoV2) originated from bats (Gralinski & Menachery 2020). By early February, molecular epidemiologists identified a genetic similarity between 2019-nCoV in horseshoe …
This Somatosphere forum features essays written in the wake of a debate held at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. The debate was organized around the following motion: “Lacking empirical traction and heuristic power, the distinction between life and nonlife is one that anthropology needs to discard.” We hope …
Carbon: a chemical element, C, fifteenth most abundant element in the earth’s crust, fourth most abundant element in the universe, second most abundant element in the human body, the key element for all known human and non-human life on earth.
What might persuade you that anthropology should discard the distinction between life and non-life if not carbon?
415 Parts …