Author: Arne Johan Vetlesen Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429594097 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 378
Book Description
This book engages with the classic philosophical question of mind and matter, seeking to show its altered meaning and acuteness in the era of the Anthropocene. Arguing that matter, and, more broadly, the natural world, has been misconceived since Descartes, it explores the devastating impact that this has had in practice in the West. As such, alternatives are needed, whether philosophical ones such as those offered by figures such as Whitehead and Nagel, or posthumanist ones such as those developed by Barad and Latour. Drawing on recent anthropological work ignored by philosophers and sociologists alike, the author considers a radical alternative cosmology: animism understood as panpsychism in practice. This understanding of mind and matter, of culture and nature, is then turned against present-day posthumanist critiques of what the Anthropocene amounts to, showing them up as philosophically misguided, politically mute, and ethically wanting. A ground-breaking reconceptualization of the natural world and our treatment of it, Cosmologies of the Anthropocene will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, philosophy and anthropology with interests in our understanding of and relationship with nature.
Author: Anu Valtonen Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing ISBN: 1839108703 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Featuring an international, multidisciplinary set of contributors, this thought-provoking book reimagines established narratives of the Anthropocene to allow differences in regions and contexts to be taken seriously, emphasising the importance of localised and situated knowledge. It offers critical engagement with the debates around the Anthropocene by challenging the dominant techno-rational agenda that often prevails in socio-political and academic discussions.
Author: Earl T. Harper Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000453502 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
Bringing together scholars from English literature, geography, politics, the arts, environmental humanities and sociology, Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene contributes to the emerging debate between bodies of thought first incepted by scholars such as Mouffe, Whyte, Kaplan, Hunt, Swyngedouw and Malm about how apocalyptic events, narratives and imaginaries interact with societal and individual agency historically and in the current political moment. Exploring their own empirical and philosophical contexts, the authors examine the forms of political acting found in apocalyptic imaginaries and reflect on what this means for contemporary society. By framing their arguments around either pre-apocalyptic, peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives and events, a timeline emerges throughout the volume which shows the different opportunities for political agency the anthropocenic subject can enact at the various stages of apocalyptic moments. Featuring a number of creative interventions exclusively produced for the work from artists and fiction writers who engage with the themes of apocalypse, decline, catastrophe and disaster, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of climate change, the environmental humanities, literary criticism and eco-criticism.
Author: Amanda H. Lynch Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262038706 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
A proposal to reframe the Anthropocene as an age of actual and emerging coexistence with earth system variability, encompassing both human dignity and environmental sustainability. Is this the Anthropocene, the age in which humans have become a geological force, leaving indelible signs of their activities on the earth? The narrative of the Anthropocene so far is characterized by extremes, emergencies, and exceptions—a tale of apocalypse by our own hands. The sense of ongoing crisis emboldens policy and governance responses that challenge established systems of sovereignty and law. The once unacceptable—geoengineering technology, for example, or authoritarian decision making—are now anticipated and even demanded by some. To counter this, Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland propose a reframing of the Anthropocene—seeing it not as a race against catastrophe but as an age of emerging coexistence with earth system variability. Lynch and Veland examine the interplay between our new state of ostensible urgency and the means by which this urgency is identified and addressed. They examine how societies, including Indigenous societies, have understood such interplays; explore how extreme weather and climate weave into the Anthropocene narrative; consider the tension between the short time scale of disasters and the longer time scale of sustainability; and discuss both international and national approaches to Anthropocene governance. Finally, they argue for an Anthropocene of coexistence that embraces both human dignity and sustainability.
Author: Marisol de la Cadena Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478004312 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 150
Book Description
A World of Many Worlds is a search into the possibilities that may emerge from conversations between indigenous collectives and the study of science's philosophical production. The contributors explore how divergent knowledges and practices make worlds. They work with difference and sameness, recursion, divergence, political ontology, cosmopolitics, and relations, using them as concepts, methods, and analytics to open up possibilities for a pluriverse: a cosmos composed through divergent political practices that do not need to become the same. Contributors. Mario Blaser, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Déborah Danowski, Marisol de la Cadena, John Law, Marianne Lien, Isabelle Stengers, Marilyn Strathern, Helen Verran, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Author: Gabriele Dürbeck Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000432505 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
The Anthropocene concept draws attention to the various forms of entanglement of social, political, ecological, biological and geological processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The ensuing complexity and ambiguity create manifold challenges to widely established theories, methodologies, epistemologies and ontologies. The contributions to this volume engage with conceptual issues of scale in the Anthropocene with a focus on mediated representation and narrative. They are centered around the themes of scale and time, scale and the nonhuman and scale and space. The volume presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, geography, political sciences, history and literary, cultural and media studies. Together, they contribute to current debates on the (re-)imagining of forms of human responsibility that meet the challenges created by humanity entering an age of scalar complexity.
Author: Virginia Burrus Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812295722 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 404
Book Description
In our age of ecological crisis, what insights—if any—can we expect to find by looking to our past? Perhaps, suggests Virginia Burrus, early Christianity might yield usable insights. Turning aside from the familiar specter of Christianity's human-centered theology of dominion, Burrus directs our attention to aspects of ancient Christian thought and practice that remain strange and alien. Drawn to excess and transgression, in search of transformation, early Christians creatively reimagined the universe and the human, cultivating relationships with a wide range of other beings—animal, vegetable, and mineral; angelic and demonic; divine and earthly; large and small. In Ancient Christian Ecopoetics, Burrus facilitates a provocative encounter between early Christian theology and contemporary ecological thought. In the first section, she explores how the mysterious figure of khora, drawn from Plato's Timaeus, haunts Christian and Jewish accounts of a creation envisioned as varyingly monstrous, unstable, and unknowable. In the second section, she explores how hagiographical literature queers notions of nature and places the very category of the human into question, in part by foregrounding the saint's animality, in part by writing the saint into the landscape. The third section considers material objects, as small as portable relics and icons, as large as church and monastery complexes. Ancient Christians considered all of these animate beings, simultaneously powerful and vulnerable, protective and in need of protection, lovable and loving. Viewed through the shifting lenses of an ancient ecopoetics, Burrus demonstrates how humans both loomed large and shrank to invisibility, absorbed in the rapture of a strange and animate ecology.
Author: Yohan Yoo Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000392848 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 175
Book Description
This collaboration between two scholars from different fields of religious studies draws on three comparative data sets to develop a new theory of purity and pollution in religion, arguing that a culture’s beliefs about cosmological realms shapes its pollution ideas and its purification practices. The authors of this study refine Mary Douglas’ foundational theory of pollution as "matter out of place," using a comparative approach to make the case that a culture’s cosmology designates which materials in which places constitute pollution. By bringing together a historical comparison of Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions, an ethnographic study of indigenous shamanism on Jeju Island, Korea, and the reception history of biblical rhetoric about pollution in Jewish and Christian cultures, the authors show that a cosmological account of purity works effectively across multiple disparate religious and cultural contexts. They conclude that cosmologies reinforce fears of pollution, and also that embodied experiences of purification help generate cosmological ideas. Providing an innovative insight into a key topic of ritual studies, this book will be of vital interest to scholars and graduate students in religion, biblical studies, and anthropology.
Author: Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1003815952 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 151
Book Description
This book presents an innovative and imaginative reading of contemporary Australian literature in the context of unprecedented ecological crisis. The Australian continent has seen significant, rapid changes to its cultures and land-use from the impact of British colonial rule, yet there is a rich history of Indigenous land-ethics and cosmological thought. By using the age-old idea of ‘cosmos’—the order of the world—to foreground ideas of a good order and chaos, reciprocity and more-than-human agency, this book interrogates the Anthropocene in Australia, focusing on notions of colonisation, farming, mining, bioethics, technology, environmental justice and sovereignty. It offers ‘cosmological readings’ of a diverse range of authors—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—as a challenge to the Anthropocene’s decline-narrative. As a result, it reactivates ‘cosmos’ as an ethical vision and a transculturally important counter-concept to the Anthropocene. Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell argues that the arts can help us envision radical cosmologies of being in and with the planet, and to address the very real social and environmental problems of our era. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and postcolonial, transcultural and Indigenous studies, with a primary focus on Australian, New Zealand, Oceanic and Pacific area studies.
Author: Frank Biermann Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108481175 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 261
Book Description
Explores the significance of the Anthropocene for environmental politics, analysing political concepts in view of contemporary environmental challenges.
Author: Arne Johan Vetlesen
Author: Anu Valtonen
Author: Earl T. Harper
Author: Amanda H. Lynch
Author: Marisol de la Cadena
Author: Gabriele Dürbeck
Author: Virginia Burrus
Author: Yohan Yoo
Author: Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell
Author: Frank Biermann