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Paper short abstract:

This paper will present historical and ethnographic data on Indigenous Wixárika communities to engage with theoretical debates about the gender of the Anthropocene, or “Earth Stalked by Man”.

Paper long abstract:

The gender of the Anthropocene is barely theorised or made visible when we consider how it has produced human health impacts and their differential embodiment. Tsing writes of “Earth Stalked by Man” (2016), to speak of our current predicament and its enlightenment origins. Anthropology became the discipline from which to generalise about Mankind, a category claimed by white Christian men, ensuring that the modern, capitalist era was defined, policed and stalked by this specific Man.

Although concepts such as decolonisation are now mainstreamed into anthropological theory and practice, the details of how Man became universalised in specific locations and the gendering of structures and processes within what Brand and Wissen refer to as the ‘Imperial mode of living’ require empirical as well as theoretical disentangling.

In this paper the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene will serve as a location from which to unpack and decolonise universalised gendering, revealing invisibility, violence and categorical orderings of people and place that have not served the wellbeing of specific groups. Drawing on ongoing historical and ethnographic research I will present an overview of how “Man” stalked Indigenous Wixárika people, gendering their mode of incorporation into the Capitalist world economy and in his wake, creating uneven and messy patterns of human experience and existence. These preliminary findings suggest a hypothesis for why violence against women has been extreme in this context that can be traced back to Man’s mission to dominate, extract and rule.