The Sustainability of an Anthropology of the Anthropocene

Abstract

The societies studied in early social and cultural anthropology were by default considered what we would now call sustainable, in that they were assumed to be capable of reproducing themselves indefinitely, changing only incrementally and almost imperceptibly. Change was considered to be caused by exogenous factors such as colonialism. The contrast with the contemporary practices and theories of anthropology is striking: The anthropology of the Anthropocene accepts globalisation as a fact, seeing societies as interlinked and culture as unbounded, and threats to sustainability are mainly conceptualised in terms of ecological devastation and climate change. The notion of sustainable development, introduced in 1987 and later elaborated in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, shares the global vision of contemporary anthropology but presupposes economic growth and brackets cultural diversity. To this discourse and its associated practices, anthropology is making major contributions, profiting from the methodological advances made a century ago, but contextualising ethnography in the global Anthropocene, using the tools of the discipline to critique facile universalism, engaging in dialogue with local worlds and showing that there are many alternatives. The methodologies devised for research in ostensibly unchanging village societies are still relevant for research on global crises, but the new anthropology is by necessity interdisciplinary.