| Abstract: | In the Anthropocene – an age troubled by global processes of material degradation – anthropology is constrained by its emphasis on local experience. Rather than confine itself, like mainstream economics, to the study of signs and subjectivities, it needs to develop its capacity to deal with the interaction of the symbolic and the material. This should include unravelling how economic ideas and the semiotics of consumption are entwined with the materiality of the biosphere and the physical metabolism of world society. |
