Cultural History and the Anthropocene Old Turns, New Encounters
Product details
Biographical note
Anders Ekström is a Professor in the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Sweden
Marit Ruge Bjærke is a Researcher in the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen, Norway
Brita Brenna is a Professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, Norway
John Ødemark is Professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, Norway
<i>Cultural Histories of the Anthropocene</i> provides a guide to a new field that remains fertile but is already overgrown with a thicket of specialized terms and insider arguments. It’s comprehensive, but not in the style of a generic textbook; instead, this edited collection provides a distinct perspective on a global phenomenon. The seventeen bite-sized essays represent a complex and ongoing interdisciplinary conversation among the leading Nordic scholars whose work has done so much to make writing critical planetary histories possible. They critically analyze theories, concepts, and methods; reflect on the politics and ethics of writing <i>of</i> the Anthropocene and being a scholar <i>in </i>the Anthropocene; and they provide model ethnographic case studies and close of exhibits and texts. <i>Cultural Histories of the Anthropocene</i> will be a particularly valuable resource in undergraduate and graduate classes in the environmental humanities.
Perrin Selcer, Associate Professor, University of Michigan, USA
No cultural historian or scholar engaged with the environmental humanities can ignore the rich and diverse content of this impressive volume.
Christian Wicke, Assistant Professor, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
This open access collection is a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and contributions of cultural history to contemporary and cross-disciplinary discussions of the Anthropocene.
Organised into three key sections, this volume is a concise and critical overview of interdisciplinary research on the cultural history of the Anthropocene. The first part introduces readers to the key conceptual and theoretical challenges of Anthropocene debates, before the second part analyses a variety of case studies, to highlight how ethnography and cultural history can make certain processes visible and historically tangible. Key case studies explored by the volume range from sustainability in poultry production, to 18th century mining, to natural history and the works of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen. Finally, the third section explores 5 critical approaches to Anthropocene discourse, and the challenges it may pose to alternative styles of cultural history.
Overall, this volume offers a synthesis of conceptual, historical, and critical approaches, that when combined provide a detailed overview of the latest research surrounding the cultural history of the Anthropocene.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the University of Bergen.
Introduction: Writing Cultural Histories in the Anthropocene, Marit Ruge Bjærke, Brita Brenna, Anders Ekström, and John Ødemark
PART I:
UNLOCKING THE FOUNDATIONS: KEY CONCEPTS IN CULTURAL HISTORY
1. Centres of Temporalization: The Tarfala Experience, Anders Ekström
2. Fieldwork: Writing (on) a Damaged Planet, Hugo Reinert
3. Periodization in Cultural History: From the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene, Helge Jordheim
4. Rituals, Environments, and More-Than-Human Relations, Aike P. Rots
5. Multitemporality and Cultural History of Science, Staffan Bergwik
6. Talking About What Anthropocene? How Conflicting Articulations May Inform Cultural History, Hedda Susanne Molland
7. Arctic Heritage: Territory, thing, and the history of it all, Brita Brenna
PART II: CASE STUDIES: CULTURAL HISTORIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
8. Heading for Venus? When Bad Planets Make Good Warnings, Marit Ruge Bjærke
9. Giacomo Leopardi in the Anthropocene: Translating the Non-Human from Animals to AI, Marta Arnaldi
10. Bounding – Economic Thought for the Anthropocene, Sverker Sörlin and Eric Paglia
11. ‘Enlightened Anthropocentrism’ in Early Nineteenth-Century Geology: Henrik Steffens (1773–1845) and Leopold von Buch (1774–1853),Marie-Theres Federhofer
12. Anthropocene Volatility. Ethnographic Discussions of Poultry, Frida Hastrup
13. Don’t Try to be Human! Goethe’s Challenge of Anthropocentrism in Faust II, Siv Frøydis Berg
14. This Thing We Call the Future: The Material Consequences of the Imagination, Bergsveinn Þórsson, Merve Tabur and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
PART III: INTERVENTIONS: CRITICAL ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CULTURAL HISTORY AND THE ANTHROPOCENE
15. Silje Opdahl Mathisen and Åsmund Steinsholm: Control: Attempting to Tame the World, Gro Ween
16. Narrative Cultures in the Anthropocene: Worldmaking as Active Inference, Dirk Johannsen
17. Waiting for the Noösphere: The Cultural History in Crutzen and Stoermer’s ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Åmund Norum Resløkken
18. From Worlding the Earth to Earthing the World: The Anthropocene as a New Metaphysics? Clemet Askheim and Trine K. Haagensen
CODA
Anthropos and Humanitas – Untranslating Cultural History for the Anthropocene,John Ødemark
Product details
Biographical note
Anders Ekström is a Professor in the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Sweden
Marit Ruge Bjærke is a Researcher in the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen, Norway
Brita Brenna is a Professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, Norway
John Ødemark is Professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, Norway