Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology

The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. "Patchy Anthropocene" is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call "modular simplifications" and "feral proliferations." This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; "structure" here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being system characteristics. Indeed, we discuss "systems" as thought experiments, that is, imagined holisms that help make sense of structure. Ecological modeling, political economy, and alternative cosmologies are systems experiments that should rub up against each other…

• WF
  Wenner-Gren Foundation