Age Of Anthropocene Research Articles

Ought We Not to Establish ‘Access to Food’

Can we establish public policies to ensure access to food? Deciding this basic moral question assumes that we have a proper understanding of the relationship between access to food and survival – a relationship made more complicated by the human-made, climate-ravaged Anthropocene age in which we now live. This article focuses on three stories of projects concerning access to food – two from the Arctic and one from the desert. These investigative projects attempt to build frameworks of resistance to habitat-loss and the revitalization of ‘land-as-home’ that can provide home and food to all the species with whom we share the earth.

Biohazard

Contemporary modes of biopolitical manipulation and commodification entail a radically new political economy of nature, a wholesale shift from the laws of biological evolution and development that have subtended much of the temporal imagination of modernity. In place of the notions of gradual but progressive growth that characterized the industrial age, extreme, fractal changes increasingly characterize our biopolitical age. We live in an era of catastrophic time. If most policy makers seem intent on ignoring or exacerbating the perils of the Anthropocene age, popular culture is gruesomely entranced by the possibility of civilizational collapse. Works of speculative fiction such as Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, on which this essay focuses, play a critically important role today by making the new extreme scales of biopolitical exploitation visible, speeding up the impact of contemporary modes of biocommodification to show their likely denouement in dystopian futures.

Crossing the Indian Ocean and wading through the littoral: Cosmopolitan visions in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘antique land’ and ‘tide country’

This article traces the cosmopolitan structures Amitav Ghosh retrieves from the medieval Indian Ocean world and those he forges along the South Asian littoral in an era of climate change in the narrative works In an Antique Land and The Hungry Tide. Both turn to the Indian Ocean and its coastal delta in search of the permeability that characterises the littoral and the syncretic and/or dialogic cultural and life forms emerging along it, which stand in contrast to geopolitical boundaries and species borders. In this social, political and ecological space they locate a cosmopolitanism that interweaves, elaborates and exceeds the three principle threads in cosmopolitan thought. Reconceiving cosmopolitanism from the South in the ‘Anthropocene Age’, Ghosh – it is argued – pushes beyond the political limits of the ‘citizen of the world’ while immersing this concept in the mud of a local – sticky yet fluid – ecosystem.

Mission in the Context of Empire

The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. … The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay.Romans 8:19–21Introductory RemarksSince the launch at Manila, the Philippines, in December 2008, of Oikotree – a joint initiative of and sponsored by the Council for World Mission (CWM), the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) – founding members, commissioners of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, mission specialists, women and men, Indigenous Peoples, and people from the four corners of the world, representing different Christian traditions, took part in the Oikotree study process toward a new WCC ecumenical mission affirmation.I would like to express my wholehearted thanks to all involved for their collaboration and common efforts that led to the present text.The document starts with “faith and empire” and examines the meaning of evangelion, a term with its origin in the Roman Empire. Then follow deliberations on the development and implications of the issues of “mission and economic justice” and “mission and ecological justice”, from the past centuries of the Christian era till today. In its last part, the paper points to “alternative visions: from a life‐destroying to a life‐enhancing culture for the twenty‐first century”.What can churches from the South, the East, Indigenous Peoples, contribute to addressing the crisis and ecological disasters of this age, which scientists call the anthropocene age, in which human beings have become a central global force and to which (as the document notes) “the worldwide expansion of Western civilization through Christian mission” is seen as one of the major contributors?The text refers to recent ecumenical initiatives, such as AGAPE, the Accra Confession, Transforming Economic Globalization, Mission in the Context of Empire, as well as the Buddhist “International Network of Engaged Buddhism”. It introduces peoples' wisdoms: the African culture of Ubuntu (“I live because you live – you live because I live”); the Asian concept of Sangsaeng (“living inter‐supportive”); the Andean el buen vivir (sumaq kawsay in Quechua, “living well”); as well as Martin Buber's “Love your neighbour – it is yourself!”.“As we move into this new Creation Community, based on God's upside‐down evangelion, an alternative epistemology, both holistic and inclusive, is needed. … We must understand, with Mercy Amba Oduyoye, that we need to expand the human vision of neighbourliness … to include all creation, seen and unseen. … The earth is, willy‐nilly, our common neighbourhood'. We must abandon the capitalistic, divisive, egocentric, independent ideology of consumerism and competition.” As stated by “the Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, … ‘There is an order and a structure to the universe … All things are dependent upon each other. This is why reciprocity and remembering to hold the relations among all people, and all things as sacred balances the universe. Any actions that destroy life lead to imbalance, which is what we are facing in today's world'”.Seong‐won PARK

Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder

800 1. MichaelWilliams,The EighthMan (Oxford, 2002), p. 163.Williams is also the general manager of the Cape TownOpera at the Artscape Theater, one of Cape Town’s premier cultural centers. His detective novels, one of which has been dramatized for local schools, are published in the Oxford University Press Southern African Fiction series. 2. In our forthcoming study, Policing the Postcolony: Crime, the State, and theMetaphysics of Disorder (esp. chaps. 1 and 5), we interrogate patterns of crime and their representation in South Africa, past and present—and annotate, in detail, both primary and secondary data on the topic. Given constraints of space in this context, we are compelled to offer a relatively sketchy set of references in support of our statements here and below. For further relevant evidentiarymaterials, andmaterials on evidence, see theNedbank ISS Crime Index and the monographs published by the Institute of Security Studies; these are to be found on the web at www.iss.org.za Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder