The Affirmational Turn to Ontology in the Anthropocene A Critique (original) (raw)
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In this talk I want to raise some questions concerning the status of knowledge and the role of anthropology in the production and dissemination of knowledge in a globalising, changing world. More specifically I will address the so-called ‘ontological turn’, which asks what kinds of knowledge are considered legitimate or ‘true’ and what is to be marginalised, ignored, or seen as ‘false’. The role of ethnography and anthropology in gathering, validating and giving expression to different sorts of knowledge and different ways of acting and being in the world is a theme that runs through the discussion. I frame the talk in terms of the Anthropocene, a recognition that human activity is a major driver in changing not just human societies but also the planet on which we live. I end with a case study of spirit possession in popular Chinese religion taken from Fabian Graham's book 'Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell deity worship in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia', Manchester University Press 2020
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The possibility of formalizing the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphic unit by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) has been intensely debated. The aim of this paper is to explore and assess some of the stakes of this process from a philosophical point of view. In order to do this, I distinguish and explicate two senses of formalization, namely the descriptive and the evaluative senses. With this distinction at hand, I conclude the following. First, I submit that there are formalizations of the Anthropocene, in both descriptive and evaluative senses, beyond the confines of the ICS, which reveals a disunity of the sciences. Second, I suggest that some calls for rejecting the formalization of the Anthropocene in the context of the ICS are concerned with a lack of descriptive formality of the proposals in the form of incoherencies. I argue that these incoherencies are not a decisive reason for rejection. Third, I claim that the ICS could take a stance in terms of the ev...
Introduction: Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen.docx
We write in the midst of a dramatic revaluation of the epoch at hand, as a subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy weighs whether to identify this era with the deeds and tracks of the human species-as an Anthropocene. While the geologists continue their deliberations, this name has already spread into domains as disparate as history (Chakrabarty 2009), poetry , and contemporary art (Davis and Turpin 2015) with astonishing speed, dislodging familiar terms like nature and environment from their customary preeminence as signs of the world beyond ourselves. Of course, the point is precisely this: that that world exists no longer, or makes less sense than it ever did, given the pervasive and undeniable presence of human activity or consequence wherever we turn now on this planet of ours. What can anthropology contribute toward these urgent concerns? We hope this lexicon may grow into a resource helpful for this task.