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This panel brings anthropologists and geographers into dialogue about how we can productively make use of (re)scaling both as object of analysis and a methodological device to explore how the Anthropocene is experienced, contested and negotiated across multiple settings.
Long Abstract:
The Anthropocene has been described as a profoundly 'scalar project' (Hecht 2018), in which (inter)personal, local, regional, national, global, and planetary scales constantly emerge and collapse. Emerging from social, cultural, economic, technopolitical, and scholarly processes, scales are mutable, function discursively yet have material effects: they reveal and conceal; they support political claims; and they both define and defy disciplinary boundaries.
This panel brings anthropologists and geographers into dialogue about how a focus on scale can produce more nuanced understandings about the Anthropocene and enrich different disciplinary perspectives. Concretely, we ask: how we can productively make use of (re)scaling both as object of analysis and a methodological device to explore how the Anthropocene is experienced, contested and negotiated across multiple settings? How can (re)scaling help anthropology to bring its traditional focus on the local to engage with the planetary? How does the Anthropocene reconfigure relations between the human and the non-human at multiple levels? How can such a rescaling be mindful of the conceit of the Anthropos as a universal subject position (Nixon 2017), and bring decolonial, feminist and queer analyses into its understanding (Davis and Todd 2017)? What distinctive tools and perspectives can more-than-human geography and multi-species ethnography bring to these questions?
We are particularly interested in papers that sit at the intersection of anthropology and geography and address the question of (re)scaling in the Anthropocene. Possible topics could include (but are not limited to):
This paper explores the layering of scaled perspectives made perceptible through the interdisciplinary collective project: Mississippi: An Anthropocene River. It offers methodological reflections on the project's epistemic ambitions to read planetary changes through the Mississippi River basin.
Paper long abstract:
The Anthropocene Curriculum (AC) is an long term interdisciplinary project which has convened academics, artists and activists in curatorial and experimental research and pedagogical exercises into the Anthropocene since 2013. Its avowed goals are to cultivate experimental transdisciplinary collaboration to investigate how such epistemological experiments can help make readable the trans-scalar conditions and mutual independencies that comprise the Anthropocene. Recently, AC undertook an ambitious project involving hundreds of participants to negotiate the epistemic demands of reading planetary changes through the Mississippi River basin. Configured as a series of Field Stations striating the length of the river, "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River" sought to decipher the highly contested and lived realities of human impacts through the industrial and agricultural corridor of America.
Participating within an independent, temporary and experimental research and publishing collective, documenting and mapping the events of the project, in this paper I will present some of my methodological thoughts arising from the experience. I will note, in particular, the observed effects and affects achieved through the convening of such a radically interdisciplinary and large collective fieldwork exercise. Refracted through the methodological, epistemological and political considerations that the project raises, specifically I will discuss its rendering legible the converging scales (temporal, geographic, political) of the Anthropocene at these sites—and the perspectives thus enabled. By exploring the layering of scaled perspectives made perceptible through this process, the paper discusses the potentials and pitfalls of collective institutional research and engagement experiments such as AC for enriching disciplinary experiences and knowledge the Anthropocene.
The contribution shows how the Anthropocene is shaped and contested on multiple intersecting scales by pointing to the multi-species relationships between people and eel that develop in the context of biodiversity conservation, hydropower production, gourmet cuisine, riverine and marine lifeworlds.
Paper long abstract:
This contribution explores the re-scaling of the Anthropocene by looking at German and Luxemburgish eel conservation initiatives along the Moselle, Saar and Sauer rivers. Since the 1970s, the European eel population has decreased by more than 90% and is listed on the IUCN's red list of endangered species. Although at first sight, the eel is not the most charismatic animal, learning about its transatlantic migration, its life in local river systems and its physical metamorphoses through different life stages reveals a fascinating story about this mysterious fish. Over the course of its life, the eel crosses different scales where it interacts e.g. with local fishermen, national energy companies, transnational scientists, regional government bodies and international smugglers. Additionally, the eel is subject of European policies and global biodiversity discourses. The relational processes in the in-between spaces where people, organizations, fish and discourses meet are crucial for understanding environmental perceptions and practices that form and reshape the Anthropocene. This so called "patchy Anthropocene" (Tsing et al. 2019) is characterized by uneven overlaps, intersections and frictions of more-than-human relations between, across and along fuzzy scales. By investigating this inter- and cross-scalar human-eel assemblage, the analysis follows diverse knots and threats that tie people and fish together in power-laden social, political and economic relations.
This paper encourages a radical (re)scaling of the Anthropocene across multi-species relations, via a consideration of the specific and situated intersection of Indigenous Knowledge whale strandings, tree pathogens and mycorrhizal networks in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores and extends what we might consider as in meaningful relation within the profoundly 'scalar project' of the Anthropocene (Hecht, 2018). It considers human-whale encounters in the Anthropocene era and how they might be framed within a posthuman or more-than-human ontology, before making case for a more thorough indigenizing of the Anthropocene. In doing so, I adopt the tools Zoe Todd suggests for employing indigenous ontologies with care and respect: accounting for one's own location; engaging with specific indigenous ontologies; focusing on locally informed responses to in situ challenges; and finally, reading and citing Indigenous scholarship (Todd, 2014). The paper encompasses the phenomenon of mass whale stranding as it is understood within a Māori ontology. It then reconsiders notions of scale by incorporating the forests of Aotearoa New Zealand and the plight of the kauri tree within the analysis, following the anthropogenic spread of a deadly pathogen in recent years. The paper then considers how Māori have approached this 'biosecurity' threat within an articulation of holism; contemplating how Indigenous Knowledge can open up surprising connections between humans, trees and whales, extended further here via a discussion of mycorrhizal networks. It is argued that in approaching specific and situated application of indigenous ontologies in some of its grounded everyday complexity, there is the potential to open up the Anthropocene imaginary to a more radical and ethical biocentric relationality.
Analyzing the history of climate knowledge production in Vanuatu, including the historical establishment of sensors and contemporary climate capacity building programs, provides a compelling space to rescale climate knowledge production temporally and geographically.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that Pacific Islands have not significantly contributed to greenhouse gas emissions but bear significant climate impacts, Pacific Islanders are largely absent from speaking in climate research and discourse. Theorists in political ecology and science and technology studies emphasize studying the historical determinants and multi-scalar processes that bring particular regimes of knowledge into place. Drawing from this approach this paper analyzes the history and spatiality of climate knowledge production, answering the question: to what extent is there an uneven geography of climate knowledge production and what are the implications of such inequities? Drawing from Vanuatu as a case study of contemporary knowledge politics and processes of accumulation by degradation, this paper analyzes the colonial history of climate observation and outlines contemporary concerns from scientists in Vanuatu. Ultimately, this paper argues that contemporary climate change knowledge production cannot be isolated from historical processes of colonialism and accumulation.
Manhunting games performed a type of imperial inversion addressing the question: "What is it like to be a subject people? To be hunted, not the hunter?" This paper asks do we need to perform rituals of our own extinction to provide us with the scaling instrument that generates the global locally?
Paper long abstract:
Manhunting games played in the upland landscapes of northern England emerged within the British outdoor movement at a time of Imperial anxiety about racial fitness to rule. Subject people's ability to defeat imperial powers led to the reassessment of military tactics and new notions of how to move, observe and be concealed within mountain landscapes. These games cultivated an embodied understanding of the imperial dilemma, addressing the question: "What is it like to be a subject people? To be hunted, not the hunter?" They were expressive of a modernity where landscape becomes indispensable to our capacity to know, where new modalities of thinking in movement were explored. They were a response to the totalizing nature of imperialism and are analogous with contemporary dilemmas associated with the emergence of the Anthropocene, not least the problem of asymmetry and scale that Bruno Latour has identified. Latour suggests we need to become attentive to the techniques through which scale is obtained, while lamenting the lack of rituals that will save us from despair. These manhunting games are examined in an attempt to address a contemporary problematic: do we need to perform rituals of our own extinction to provide us with 'the scaling instrument that generates the global locally'?
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