Ecomyopia in the Anthropocene

The authors apply longue durée and semiotic approaches to a case study of flood management in the American Midwest to critique the suggestion that naming the current geological epoch the ‘Anthropocene’ might encourage global environmental sustainability. It is unlikely that the Anthropocene moniker has the symbolic power to correct ecomyopia, which the authors define as the tendency to not recognize, to ignore, or fail to act on new information that contradicts political arrangements, social norms, or world views. Anthropogenic transformation of the Mississippi River watershed shifted world views toward the human domination of nature and afforded opportunities for social stratification and the consolidation of capital and control over resources, which has biased social responses to increasing flooding. Globally, biological systems have been replaced with technological systems of increasing complexity creating canalized trajectories of practice and thought in which societies become insulated from ecological realities. The global capitalist response to the Anthropocene will likely be to embrace technological hubris.     

The Diffusion of Sovereignty

Summary

The transmission of ideas about sovereignty and its related practices from one time, place, or intellectual context to another is sometimes characterised as a process of ‘diffusion’ or even ‘contagion’. Intellectual historians may use such metaphors but the explanations they provide are historical, not scientific. Sovereignty was transmitted when European states brought their forms of government to other peoples and when those peoples embraced such forms in declaring their independence from imperial rule. It was also transmitted when the idea of sovereignty was itself transformed in the course of these and other historical passages. In Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage explores some of these historical passages, the outcome of which he sees as the world of sovereign states that defines the modern period and the disappearance of which would signal its end. In doing so, he illuminates the larger enterprise of writing the history of international thought or, as he prefers to call it, international intellectual history, inviting reflection on its relationship to other kinds of historical inquiry and the opportunities and dangers it poses.     

An Interdisciplinary Human-Environmental Examination of Effects Consistent with the Anthropocene in the Lower Illinois River Valley

Using archaeological and ecological data of animal communities, and fish communities in particular, we test for evidence consistent with the Anthropocene in the lower Illinois River valley across millennia. Environmental impacts by preindustrialized peoples may be minor compared to current alterations; however, this hypothesis is untested and should be assessed. Using the relative abundance of fish taxa, we tested for differences among archaeological and modern time periods, taking advantage of published zooarchaeological data sets and newly analyzed data. Collections from all archaeological time periods differed significantly from modern collections, but the relative abundance of fishes did not differ significantly among archaeological time periods. Sociopolitical context, material culture, plant-based subsistence patterns, and the use of animal classes shifted temporally, but these differences did not extend to the relative abundance of fish families. Our results suggest that dominating human influences on fish communities did not occur prior to the Late Woodland period in the lower Illinois River.     

ANTHROPOCENE TIME

Beginning with the question of how a sense of geological time remains strangely withdrawn in contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene in the human sciences and yields place to the more human‐centered time of world history, this article proceeds to discuss the differences between human‐historical time and the time of geology as they relate to the concept of the Anthropocene. The article discusses the difficulty of developing a mode of thinking about the present that would attempt to hold together these two rather different senses of time and ends with a ground‐clearing exercise that might enable the development of such thought.     

Islands,the Anthropocene,and Decolonisation

The Anthropocene is deployed as incontrovertible fact, yet its foundations merit strong critique to challenge how particular voices and locations are absented, silenced, or enrolled in the fallacies that attend this epochal framework. Other placed, grounded, and scale-sensitive explanations exist for present and future state scenarios, including on islands—often the focus of apocalyptic thinking. Dealing with historical and contemporary struggles to decolonise is more powerful than engaging with a reified framework that is part of ongoing colonial-imperial excesses, uneven development, and racial capitalism. This work considers how four of us, as instigating authors, worked with five others, as collaborating authors, to understand academic works, activism, and artistic expressions of island life and concerns. Our aim was to learn about how and why their efforts to prioritise decolonisation is at the heart of what is needed to shore up island peoples’ futures.     

Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Gender History: Or,Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?

This essay is a methodological evaluation of the procedures and presuppositions informing the social and cultural history of gender, as exemplified in recent scholarship about the transformations of sex and gender in Britain from the early modern period through the long eighteenth century. It suggests answers to two questions: how can we write the cultural history of gender while maintaining both rigour in the enterprise and an awareness of its limits? And where might we go when these limits suddenly appear to undermine the very foundational presuppositions on which the whole cultural‐historical project is built?     

Beyond the Mirrored Horizon: Modern Ontology and Amodern Possibilities in the Anthropocene

Early talk of the Anthropocene has been prompted by material evidence of the incoherence of ontological divisions between humanity and the rest of Earth. Yet, ironically, it has also been dominated by modern narratives about human distinction, autonomy, and dominion. Along with recrimination about the death of nature, the modern Anthropocene carries hope of human redemption through natural evolution or technological progress. The resulting narratives of enlightened planetary stewardship reduce earthly multitudes to a common denominator, shoring up the mirrored horizons within which modern humans encounter only themselves. In response, I explore amodern possibilities for action in an Anthropocene beyond modern referents of nature and culture. These possibilities open up choices within planetary dynamics that are inherently human but not reducible to human agency. This is a politics of sustenance attuned to difference and relation and directed to the multitude of human‐other‐than‐human collectives, to the specific shared projects of existence, in which human interests are composed.     

Co‐Producing (a Fearful) Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is not amenable to the senses but, like many modern concepts, must be made visible. We explore the ‘Great Acceleration’ imagery as an immutable mobile to explore how this human‐made geological epoch is constituted through the aggregation of disparate elements of extreme complexity. Our analysis explores how disparate issues such as ‘telephone use’ and ‘coastal zone biogeochemistry’ can be associated and enrolled into the same argument. We write as concerned observers, who are concerned with the way that recognition for phenomena is enrolled into a fear‐based narrative. This risks reproducing the governance structures at the heart of the Great Acceleration and, if so, we ask what this might mean. Using fear is a risky strategy that is as likely to lead to relatively poor behaviours as it is to some ‘awakening’. We make this case as a way of contributing to the Anthropocene debate, challenging those promoting the idea to consider the co‐productive relationship between the knowledge they are proposing and the governance that knowledge entails.     

The natural hazard sector's engagement with Indigenous peoples: a critical review of CANZUS countries

Natural hazard management agencies across the settler countries Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (or CANZUS countries) are presently involved in an increasing range of collaborative and consultative engagements with Indigenous peoples. However, perhaps because these engagements are diverse and relatively recent, little has been written about how they emerged and, from these agencies' perspectives, little is known about how these engagements find their motivation within government natural hazard management frameworks. In this article, we review existing academic and grey literature to categorise the origins of recent and present engagements and then identify and elaborate on the key rationales informing natural hazard management agencies' interactions with Indigenous peoples. We argue both that the broad principles of sustainability and inclusion have transformed these interactions and that developmentalist approaches and an overemphasis on Indigenous peoples' traditional knowledge can sometimes undermine this work. Incorporating critiques of settler colonialism relevant to the CANZUS context, this review aims to support established, emerging, and future collaborative engagements by investigating and analysing the literature to date.     

Dithering while the planet burns: Anthropologists’ approaches to the Anthropocene

This review article argues that styles of thinking and writing recently encouraged in the environmental humanities are not conducive to analytical clarity, theoretical rigor, or effective critique of the practices and discourses that generate global inequalities and unsustainability. Critically discussing how global environmental change is being approached in anthropology and other human sciences, it concludes that the haziness, inconsistency, and inaccessibility of so-called posthuman deliberations on the Anthropocene ultimately serve to promote the destructive economic forces that are responsible for such change. A recent attempt to bring together approaches from posthumanism and Marxism is also deeply flawed, failing to present a coherent theoretical outlook on the environmental history of capitalism. The article argues for more responsible efforts to build interdisciplinary theory of the Anthropocene.     

Critical development studies in the Anthropocene

In this short commentary, the ramifications of the Anthropocene for a broadly defined critical development studies are considered. The likely anthropogenic roots of increasing cyclonic intensity and associated impacts in the Pacific are drawn upon to propose four research agendas. The first focuses on how places are becoming connected through human‐induced changes to planetary systems. While direct causal relationships are difficult to draw, research efforts can highlight the disproportionate contributions particular development models, actors, and lifestyles are having on more distant socioecological systems. A second more conventional theme focuses on the uneven impacts of the Anthropocene on people and places, as well as on how development is practised and prioritised. A third theme explores how the Anthropocene can be used to retheorise development in creative and more‐than‐human ways, recognising non‐human agencies and the co‐production of development processes. A final agenda involves asking how critical development researchers can strategically use and repurpose the Anthropocene to pursue socially and environmentally progressive ends.     

The Buffalo Nations/Luxton Museum: Tourism,Regional Forces and Problematising Cultural Representations of Aboriginal Peoples in Banff,Canada

This paper examines the cultural representations of Aboriginal peoples at the Buffalo Nations/Luxton Museum in Banff, Canada. The museum has been part of the cultural landscape of the tourism industry in Banff since 1952. Using interviews, newspaper articles and analyses of the exhibits, I problematise the museum's representations of Aboriginal peoples by focusing on the challenges associated with navigating regional power relations while participating in forms of capitalist exchange. My findings suggest that the museum's representations engender complex readings of Aboriginal peoples that need to be interpreted considering the processes of production, but also the broader conditions that are embedded in this history. This paper puts cultural representations of Aboriginal peoples into socio‐economic, political, cultural and historical contexts in ways that may interest scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines and specific fields such as museum, recreation, tourism, heritage and Indigenous studies.     

Betwixt and Between: Trauma,Survival and the Aboriginal Troopers of the Queensland Native Mounted Police

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about the history of the Queensland Native Mounted Police, mostly focussing on its development, its white officers, how much the Colonial Government genuinely knew about the actions of the Force, and how many people were killed during the frontier wars. Far less attention has been given to the Aboriginal men of the force, the nature of their recruitment, and the long-term traumatic impacts on Aboriginal peoples’ and communities’ psyches rather than broadscale changes to Aboriginal culture per se. This article examines the historical and ongoing psychological impacts of dispossession and frontier violence on Aboriginal people. Specifically, we argue that massacres, frontier violence, displacement, and the ultimate dispossession of land and destruction of traditional cultural practices resulted in both individual and collective inter-generational trauma for Aboriginal peoples. We posit that, despite the Australian frontier wars taking place over a century ago, their impacts continue to reverberate today in a range of different ways, many of which are as yet only partially understood.     

Anecdote And History

Although the term “anecdote” entered the modern European languages fairly recently and remains to this day ill‐defined, the short, freestanding accounts of particular events, true or invented, that are usually referred to as anecdotes have been around from time immemorial. They have also always stood in a close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives of history, sometimes in a supportive role, as examples and illustrations, sometimes in a challenging role, as the repressed of history —“la petite histoire.” Historians' relation to them, in turn, varied from appreciative to dismissive in accordance with their own objectives in writing history. It appears that highly structured anecdotes of the kind that are remembered and find their way into anecdote collections depend on and tend to confirm established views of history, the world, and human nature. In contrast, loosely structured anecdotes akin to the modern fait divers have usually worked to undermine established views and stimulate new ones, either by presenting material known to few and excluded from officially authorized histories, or by reporting “odd” occurrences for which the established views of history, the world, and human nature do not easily account.     

Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change

In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a “technology of government” operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly “green” mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of “vulnerability” in adaptation policies; and the governing of “climate migrants”. We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as “in need of improvement”. And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations.     

EXEMPLIFYING ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION: MINING AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN THE PHILIPPINES

Using a case study from the Philippines, this article applies David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession to show how neoliberal policies enable mining corporations to locate, lay claim to, and develop mineral resources in formerly inaccessible areas, which for centuries have provided safe haven for indigenous peoples and their cultures. It explains why these factors are leading to an increase in armed conflict between military forces and guerrilla groups, which recruit their members from displaced indigenous people. The article concludes that the theory of accumulation by dispossession offers an appropriate analytical tool for understanding these processes.     

The Indigenous Land Corporation's First Land Management Policy: Reconciling National Policy with the Contingencies of Local Context

The Indigenous Land Corporation was established to acquire lands for Indigenous peoples who were unlikely to benefit from recognition of native title. The Corporation is also charged with assisting Indigenous peoples manage their lands. The First Land Management Policy of the Indigenous Land Corporation is examined, and the strengths as well as the omissions and flaws of this initial policy approach to land management are noted. Ways to improve the assistance that the Corporation provides to Indigenous landowners in the management of their lands are proposed. The paper suggests that the Corporation's approach to land management needs to resolve the demands of a national policy mandate with the contingencies of local context.     

A HISTORY OF THE SPECIES?1

By rejecting the old divide between prehistory and history, the group of scholars behind Deep History opens a new window on the problem of the unity and diversity of human experience over the very long run. Their use of kinship metaphors suggests not only a link between modern society and the deep past, but also perhaps a way to imagine the common legacy of the human species. But what emerges from Deep History is hardly a sunny story about the distant origins of social justice and ecological harmony. The other central metaphor of the book—the fractal—uncovers the slow prelude to the Anthropocene. Rather than seeing a sharp break in the Industrial Revolution from an “organic” to a fossil fuel‐burning economy, these scholars stress the history of environmental destruction that has accompanied human expansion. My critical reading presents an alternative understanding of deep history as an arena for a new politics of species. Here a cornucopian understanding of human adaptation clashes with a new pessimism about the climatic fragility of Neolithic civilization.     

His Brother’s Keeper: Charles Livingstone and the ‘Failure’ of David Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition

David Livingstone’s Second Expedition to Africa (1858 to 1863) began with lavish promises and expectations and ended ignominiously, with official Britons castigating the once greatly esteemed explorer of Africa. To what extent did Charles Livingstone, an ordained Congregational minister and David’s American-trained younger brother, help to diminish the Expedition’s successes? Were David Livingstone’s promising exploring and scientific efforts compromised by his seemingly troubled, racist, brother? American-trained and an ordained minister, with a supposed ‘ascendancy’ over his elder brother, how did Charles’ prejudices and actions undermine his brother’s leadership and the accomplishments of the Zambezi project?     

试论刘大年的中国近代史研究

刘大年在美国侵华史、台湾史、抗日战争史等领域均有开拓之功。他所构建的中国近代史诠释体系,以反帝反封建为主线,同时并未忽视近代以来的经济变动、尤其是资本主义发展历程。他主持编纂的《中国史稿》第四册及《中国近代史稿》,以革命为基调,同时力图克服片面性,为中国近代通史体系做出了可贵的探索。他倡导、支持西方史学理论研究,追踪近代史的研究前沿,弘扬实事求是的学风。作为中国近代史研究领域的拓荒者,刘大年力图将中国作为研究、叙述的主体,反对亦步亦趋地追随西方思潮,其方法与路向值得继承、弘扬。