Editor’s introduction

Abstract

On the day of this writing, an otherwise normal muggy summer day, the trending news items were that the son of the president of the United States, acting on behalf of his father’s campaign, met with a Russian agent to obtain information harmful to the Clinton campaign; and that the largest chunk of ice yet had separated from the Antarctic ice sheet. As pundits are fond of saying, especially regarding the Trump clan, this is not normal. But it seems that abnormal has become the new normal. Welcome to the Anthropocene! Two questions emerge immediately: How do we define the Anthropocene, and what do we do about it? Climate scientists generally define it with reference to parts per million (ppm) of carbon in the atmosphere, or to particular temperature thresholds. Historians and many others, including anthropologists, would use the term to refer to the period beginning with the Industrial Revolution. Both have good justification. But given the complex and holistic nature of our discipline, I would offer a definition of the Anthropocene as the unraveling of structures—philosophical, political, social, and economic— inherited from the Enlightenment, which defined and regulated humanity’s relation to the natural world, and the relations of groups of humans (classes, nations, races, sexes, etc.) to one another. Thus, it is possible to view the breakup of Antarctic ice and the breakdown of American electoral democracy as analogous events. Responses to the Anthropocene (to those who believe it has arrived; remember that Trump was elected primarily by those who think climate change is a “hoax”) have varied considerably, from a sort of giddiness seen in the precincts of Silicon Valley that this crisis is a variant of their beloved “creative disruption” that is begging for technological fixes ranging from the already tangible, such as Tesla’s electric car and battery technology scaling up to take advantage of the economies of mass production, to the fartherfetched but quite conceivable (and terrifying to those who are wary of technological fixes) geoand bio-engineering. Beyond even that, a version of post-humanism is imagined in which humans meld with technology to extend lifespan and capabilities far beyond the biological inheritance. Within anthropology and adjacent disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, two main approaches have been followed. On the one hand, critical social science employs approaches deriving ultimately from the Marxist critique of capitalism, which is, undeniably, the driver of forces leading to our current none defined