Full Description
The destructive effects of modern industrial societies have shaped the planet in such profound ways that many argue for the existence of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. This claim brings into relief a set of challenges that have deep implications for how relations between the human, the material, and the political affect contemporary social worlds. The contributors to Anthropos and the Material examine these challenges by questioning and complicating long-held understandings of the divide between humans and things. They present ethnographic case studies from across the globe, addressing myriad topics that range from labor, economics, and colonialism to technology, culture, the environment, agency, and diversity. In foregrounding the importance of connecting natural and social histories, the instability and intangibility of the material, and the ways in which the lively encounters between the human and the nonhuman challenge conceptions of liberal humanism, the contributors point to new understandings of the capacities of people and things to act, transform, and adapt to a changing world.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction / Penny Harvey, Christian Krohn-Hansen, and Knut G. Nustad 1
Part I: Materializing Structures
1. Uncommoning Nature: Stories from the Anthropo-Not-Seen / Marisol de la Cadena 35
2. Contemporary Capitalism and Dominican New Yorkers' Livery-Cab Bases: A Taxi Story / Christian Krohn-Hansen 59
3. Anthropos and Pragmata: On the Shape of Things to Come / Ingjerd HoËm 81
Part II: Material Potential
4. Tabu and Bitcoin: Fluctuating (Im)materiality in Two Nonstate Media of Exchange / Keir Martin 103
5. Sperm, Eggs, and Wombs: The Fabrication of Vital Matters through Legislative Acts / Marit Melhuus 122
6. Lithic Vitality: Human Entanglement with Nonorganic Matter / Penny Harvey 143
7. Traces of Pasts and Imaginings of Futures in St Lucia, South Africa / Knut G. Nustad 161
Part III: Material Uncertainties and Heterogeneous Knowledge Practices
8. Matters that Matter: Air and Atmosphere as Material Politics in South Africa / Rune Flikke 179
9. The Ghost at the Banquet: Ceremony, Community, and Industrial Growth in West Norway / Marianne Elisabeth Lien and John Law 196
10. When the Things We Study Respond to Each Other: Tools for Unpacking "the Material" / Anna Tsing 221
Contributors 245
Index 249
