The Anthropocene

Soon, the Anthropocene will be formally submitted as a chronostratigraphic unit of the Geological Time Scale. This means, in effect, that Homo sapiens will be recognized as a dominant geological force on the planet. But how are anthropologists engaging with this concept in ways that inform larger debates? And what vital concerns or challenges are being raised by anthropologists and scholars in related disciplines as the Anthropocene becomes an increasingly familiar framework for understanding humanity and its place on Earth? One of the underlying motives for the recognition of the Anthropocene is to call attention to humanity’s pervasive impacts on the planet, which are understood as largely damaging for humans and other organisms that live on the Earth. However, the Anthropocene’s root causes still remain hotly disputed. Some see the Anthropocene as a broader extension of humanity’s long-established tendency of landscape modification or niche construction while others assert that the capitalist system is the underlying cause of the Anthropocene’s emergence. Extending from these debates, anthropologists and other social scientists have looked into the ways that the Anthropocene intersects with histories of race and racism, colonialism and neocolonialism, extraction and extinction, and what anthropological methods—from archaeological excavation to multispecies ethnography—can tell us about the differing dimensions of this confounding time. In a more philosophical vein, the Anthropocene has prompted academic researchers to question basic disciplinary distinctions, heuristics, and taken-for-granted assumptions. For anthropologists specifically, it has prompted a re-evaluation of human-centered analytics and inherited notions about what constitutes “the human.” Without a doubt, this literature and the scholarly debates that animate it will only grow and evolve with time, but here a focus is placed on the origins and politics of the Anthropocene, with specific focus on its relationship to historical and contemporary inequalities. This bibliography also considers what the Anthropocene means for socio-cultural theory, anthropological methods, and movements toward decolonization and collective liberation in a deeply compromised world.