{"id":7942,"date":"2014-12-13T10:44:33","date_gmt":"2014-12-13T15:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=7942"},"modified":"2015-03-24T10:20:15","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T15:20:15","slug":"anthropocene-multispecies-other-trends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/12\/13\/anthropocene-multispecies-other-trends\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropocene, multispecies, & other trends"},"content":{"rendered":"

Academic trend watchers will be interested to see how\u00a0the digital<\/a> and the Anthropocene<\/a> have catapulted to the top of hot topics at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference.\u00a0(A few others are mentioned here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>, Bruno Latour’s keynote being one of them. Here’s a collection of tweets on Latour’s talk<\/a>, most of them by Jenny Carlson. And for those with more catching up to do, see the series on the ontological turn<\/a> last year, and my own account<\/a> of missing Latour then.)<\/p>\n

John Hartigan has an interesting\u00a0post on Somatosphere<\/a> that compares the suddenly off-the-scale theoretical cachet attained by the term “Anthropocene” against the funkier, more earthbound, and more discipline specific term “multispecies” (its disciplinary specificity still mostly confined to anthropologists and STS folks).<\/p>\n

“What just happened in Anthropology?” Hartigan asks. <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“In the\u00a0<\/span>2013 annual meeting<\/a>\u00a0there were zero abstracts or paper or panel titles featuring the word \u201cAnthropocene\u201d;\u00a0<\/span>this year<\/a>\u00a0there were 64! Compare that with \u201cmultispecies,\u201d which has held steady at between 16-23 invocations after it first made its appearance in the program in 2010.<\/span>[i]<\/a>\u00a0Why the surge of interest? More importantly, given overlapping concerns highlighted by these two keywords, why the sudden prevalence of one over the other?”<\/span><\/p>\n

Hartigan argues that the “charismatic mega-category” (I love it) of “the Anthropocene”<\/p>\n

takes in millennia and it frames the vast scale of industrialization and globalization. Also, because it focuses on climatic change and risk, the term orients to policy forums and managerial practices concerning environmental resources. In contrast, \u201cmultispecies\u201d emerged from more boutique fields, cultural studies broadly (e.g. philosophical posthumanism and Donna Haraway\u2019s companion species, etc) and ethnography in particular. Plus it\u2019s mostly still associated with a method: ethnographic accounting for located relationships and encounters among species. But also its connotations are just weird and disconcerting, in a way that even global apocalypse is not, since that\u2019s been lushly imagined actively over the last two thousand years at least.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where the Anthropocene is, as its critics have pointed out, an anthropocentric category,<\/p>\n

\u201cmultispecies\u201d is first and foremost an effort to dethrone the dominance of the human, which solutions to the crisis of the Anthropocene must entail.<\/p>\n

I’ve been seeing “multispecies” as part of the larger mix of discourses and methods drawn upon by post-humanists, new materialists, new (\/political) ontologists, critical animal scholars, actor-network theorists, Deleuzians, biosemioticians, and others. Hartigan’s comparison suggests that “multispecies” has the potential to rise to the top and perhaps even unify the others around it.<\/p>\n

Among empirical scholars utilizing ethnographic methods, I think it could do that (to a degree), but I’m not sure how it would do that among more abstract theorists. (I tried to suggest something like that several years ago<\/a> with the term “multicultural ecology,” where culture wouldn’t be confined to the human; but that needed more development.)<\/p>\n

Hartigan, unfortunately, doesn’t develop the idea further in the blog post mentioned above. But it’s worth reading and building on. Read his\u00a0post\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Academic trend watchers will be interested to see how\u00a0the digital and the Anthropocene have catapulted to the top of hot topics at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference.\u00a0(A few others are mentioned here\u00a0and here, Bruno Latour’s keynote being one of them. Here’s a collection of tweets on Latour’s talk, most of them by Jenny Carlson. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688615,688977],"tags":[123553,123667,16795,123555,123554],"class_list":["post-7942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropo_scene","category-geo_philosophy","tag-aaa","tag-anthropocene","tag-anthropology","tag-hartigan","tag-multispecies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-246","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11559,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/01\/29\/eco-humanities-seminar\/","url_meta":{"origin":7942,"position":0},"title":"Eco-humanities seminar","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 29, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I will be making parts of my \"Advanced Environmental Humanities\" course open to the EcoCultureLab community and a limited broader public. 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Taylor's coral reef art is beautiful. See also the discussion of Donna Haraway's \"String Figures\" lecture and Bruno Latour's 11 theses on capitalism.\u00a0 \u00a0 Last week, Lee led us through an\u00a0exercise\u00a0that helped to contextualize the minuteness of the period in which humans (and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"anthropocene-001-jason-decaires-taylor-sculpture","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/files\/2014\/04\/anthropocene-001-jason-decaires-taylor-sculpture-300x206.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7038,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/11\/24\/querying-natural-religion-responses-to-latour\/","url_meta":{"origin":7942,"position":2},"title":"Querying Natural Religion: Responses to Latour","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 24, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The following are my notes from \"Querying Natural Religion: Immanence, Gaia, and the Parliament of Lively Things.\" (Live-blogging did not work, as we didn't have a live internet connection.) 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But that's no reason not to try.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8271,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/01\/anthropocene-equity\/","url_meta":{"origin":7942,"position":4},"title":"Anthropocene & equity","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 1, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've reported previously\u00a0on how\u00a0critics see the \"Anthropocene\" concept as overgeneralizing from the causal nuances of actual\u00a0responsibility for climate (and global system) change. 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