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.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I: Materializing Structures
- 1. Uncommoning Nature: Stories from the Anthropo-Not-Seen
- 2. Contemporary Capitalism and Dominican New Yorkers’ Livery-Cab Bases: A Taxi Story
- 3. Anthropos and Pragmata: On the Shape of Things to Come
- Part II: Material Potential
- 4. Tabu and Bitcoin: Fluctuating (Im) Materiality in Two Nonstate Media of Exchange
- 5. Sperm, Eggs, and Wombs: The Fabrication of Vital Matters through Legislative Acts
- 6. Lithic Vitality: Human Entanglement with Nonorganic Matter
- 7. Traces of Pasts and Imaginings of Futures in St Lucia, South Africa
- Part III: Material Uncertainties and Heterogeneous Knowledge Practices
- 8. Matters That Matter: Air and Atmosphere as Material Politics in South Africa
- 9. The Ghost at the Banquet: Ceremony, Community, and Industrial Growth in West Norway
- 10. When the Things We Study Respond to Each Other: Tools for Unpacking “the Material”
- Contributors
- Index
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