Previous articleNext article FreePatchy Anthropocene: Frenzies and Afterlives of Violent Simplifications Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement 20Danilyn RutherfordDanilyn Rutherford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn June 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey, the Wenner-Gren Foundation hosted the International Symposium “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.” There were only four anthropologists in attendance, two of whom, Sol Tax and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, were trusted advisors of the Foundation. The rest of the seventy participants came in all flavors: there were mining executives, philanthropists, museum directors, botanists, geologists, historians, philosophers, physicists, government officials, the Director of Planning for the Housing Division of the Israeli Ministry of Labor, Darwin’s grandson, a scientist at the American University in Cairo, two social scientists from the University of Lucknow, a dean of the humanities, and a sanitation engineer. The organizers were the famous geologist Carl Sauer, the famous zoologist Marston Bates, and the even more famous city and regional planner and man of letters Lewis Mumford. The number of participants from outside of Europe and North America could be counted on one hand. There were no women other than some secretaries and a few of the participants’ wives.As is still the tradition, the symposium participants distributed their papers ahead of time. Instead of presenting them, they talked freely around a set of shared themes. Discussants summed up each day’s session, and the organizers provided a summary at the end. Along with fifty-three of the papers, the discussions are documented in the 1,236 page volume that came out of the event (see Thomas 1956). At the time of the symposium, there was anxiety in the air: about totalitarianism and the effects of industrial society on the human soul, and about the possibility of nuclear war. But what shaped the conversation in Princeton was a telling of history in which human mastery took center stage. William L. Thomas, the book’s editor, dedicated the volume to “George P. Marsh [the nineteenth-century diplomat and philologist whom many view as the United States’ first environmentalist] and to the earliest men who first used tools and fire, and to the countless generations between whose skillful hands and contriving brains have made a whole planet their home and provided our subject for study” (Thomas 1956:v). Even though they documented the costs of what they quaintly called “civilization,” those who met in Princeton assumed a vision of Earth as the house that man built.As Anna Tsing, Andrew Mathews, and Nils Bubandt explain in the introduction to this special issue, other assumptions guided the fifteen anthropologists, three biologists, and two historians who gathered in Sintra, Portugal, on September 8–14, 2017 (fig. 1). So different, the picture painted by this symposium, in which cattle act as agents of colonial expansion and anticolonial resistance (see Ficek 2019); in which snails seduce scientists, spur activism, and launch the careers of indigenous scholars (see Hadfield and Haraway 2019); in which underground giants sculpt the earth and shape the imaginations of romantic geologists and Bangladeshi farmers alike (see Khan 2019). So different, the vision of the modular simplifications that gave rise to our modern, industrialized world, and the feral proliferations they spawned, born of the violence that created these landscapes, yet evading the order it imposed. Anthropology did more than host a party of disciplinary strangers and nonacademic movers and shakers in this symposium. In calling for a retooling of the discipline, the organizers invited their colleagues to lead the way in pioneering a new way of noticing the social relations, cutting across species, that structure more-than-human worlds. They called for observations that were specific, but not parochial, that documented both damage and hope. A patch, the organizers explained, is a structured element of a broader surround, like a stand of trees growing in a prairie or a breach opened in a forest by an animal trail or a road. They called for an approach to the Anthropocene that attends to its patches: “the uneven conditions of more-than-human livability in landscapes increasingly dominated by industrial forms” (Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt 2019).Figure 1. Participants in the symposium “Patchy Anthropocene: Frenzies and Afterlives of Violent Simplifications.” Front row, from left: Laurie Obbink, Atsuro Morita, Naveeda Khan, Zahirah Suhaimi, Kate Brown, Anna Tsing, Rosa Ficek. Middle row: Andrew Mathews, Natasha Myers, Danilyn Rutherford, Vanessa Agard-Jones, Ivette Perfecto, Donna Haraway, Heather Swanson. Back row: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Frédéric Keck, Nils Bubandt, Mike Hadfield, Jacob Doherty. Not pictured: Michael Dove, Yen-Ling Tsai.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThe discussions in Sintra unfolded in six sessions. Naveeda Khan and Atsuro Morita kicked off the proceedings with a journey into the deep past and contingent future of two major deltas. Khan drew on her research among char dwellers in Bangladesh to explore what it means to place a human present in the context of geological time, drawing together the writings of the Romantic poet Novalis and the insights of scientists and villagers on the role of earthquakes in creating their riverine worlds (see Khan 2019). Morita played with the tension between the stripped-down models embraced by hydrologists and their everyday life in places where urban development is just as consequential as the dynamics they were trained to observe in causing floods (Morita and Suzuki 2019). If the first rubric was eventful landscapes, the second was industrial concentrations, explored through a pair of papers focused on the unexpected effects of the industrial production of three domesticated species: salmon (Heather Swanson), chickens (Frédéric Keck), and coffee (Ivette Perfecto). In each case a violently simplified landscape unleashed boundary-breaching forces: farmed salmon, outcompeting wild salmon in the industrialized waters of the Columbia River (see Swanson 2019); the SARS virus and spirits in and around the industrial chicken farms of Hong Kong (see Keck 2019); leaf rust on plantations and smallholder coffee holdings in Central America (see Perfecto, Jiménez-Soto, and Vandermeer 2019).A further exploration of these feral effects followed industrial concentrations, with three papers focused on creatures of empire that both threaten and sustain local worlds. Rosa Ficek brought us cattle, agents of capital and colonialism in the New World but also unexpected allies of their opponents, from escaped slaves, who sold the hides of errant cattle in what is now Puerto Rico, to Panamanian environmentalists, who managed to halt road building in a protected forest by pointing to the diseases the free passage of cattle could bring (see Ficek 2019). Jacob Doherty brought us storks, which serve as the avian infrastructure of Kampala’s waste system, despised, yet essential to the functioning of this metropolis, like the human waste pickers who join the birds in processing the filth (see Doherty 2019). Michael Dove gave us three snapshots from the Indo-Malay region, where species and farming systems targeted by colonial managers have survived in the face of plantation agriculture, with early colonial kings, late colonial rubber producers, and contemporary smallholders conjuring alternative visions of a cultivated world (see Dove 2019).Less fortunate have been many species of Pacific tree snail, studied by the biologist Michael Hadfield, who relates a lifetime spent exploring and defending these creatures and their delicate island homes. Donna Haraway’s companion piece riffs on the themes raised by Hadfield’s extraordinary life among snails and their comrades, pointing to the co-emergence of a politicized scientist and a threatened species, struggling to build a livable future against all odds (see Hadfield and Haraway 2019). Vanessa Agard-Jones broke important ground in her exploration of chemical kinship in Martinique, where pesticides seep into human bodies and set new terms for more-than-human politics and social bonds. Historian Kate Brown complicated our picture of a crisis we thought we knew well, showing how the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl was merely a punctuation mark in a long history of damage—to trees, to communities, to ways of life (see Brown 2019).Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Natasha Myers brought the conversation to a close, not with optimism but with a tempering of the vision of global apocalypse inspired by some discussions of planetary crisis. Viveiros de Castro spoke of ontological anarchy and the potential of indigenous world-making to disrupt dominant models (see Viveiros de Castro 2019). Myers documented the deep histories oak trees and their First Nations companions are bringing into play to shape the future of a Toronto park. Yen-Ling Tsai, who could not be present, sent along a brochure introducing her project in queer farming in the rural outskirts of Taipei, where she is involved in a collective creating new forms of kinship among humans, rice plants, and snails (see Tsai 2019). More than just a set of case studies, the essays that resulted from this provocation add up to a shared conclusion. The house that man built is not just his home, nor is man the only builder. Anthropology is in a perfect position to document the Anthropocene’s entanglements, injuries, and lines of flight.At Wenner-Gren, we are always on the lookout for good topics for symposia. We are committed to an inclusive vision of anthropology. We are also committed to the proposition that anthropology has something important to say about the range of problems currently facing our world. In the next few years, we plan to host symposia focusing on one or the other aspect of our mission. Some will create new, field-spanning conversations that expand our understanding of what anthropology is or could be. Others will provide a setting for bold and substantive collaborations between anthropologists and scholars in other disciplines. If you have questions or suggestions, we would love to hear from you. For information on the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the symposium program, and what makes for a good symposium topic, see our website at http://www.wennergren.org/programs/international-symposia.References CitedBrown, Kate. 2019. Learning to read the great Chernobyl acceleration: literacy in the more-than-human landscapes. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S198–S208.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarDoherty, Jacob. 2019. Filthy flourishing: para-sites, animal infrastructure, and the waste frontier in Kampala. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S321–S332.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarDove, Michael R. 2019. Plants, politics, and the imagination over the past 500 years in the Indo-Malay region. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S309–S320.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarFicek, Rosa E. 2019. Cattle, capital, colonization: tracking creatures of the Anthropocene in and out of human projects. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S260–S271.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarHadfield, Michael G., and Donna J. Haraway. 2019. The tree snail manifesto. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S209–S235.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarKeck, Frédéric. 2019. Livestock revolution and ghostly apparitions: South China as a sentinel territory for influenza pandemics. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S251–S259.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarKhan, Naveeda. 2019. At play with the giants: between the patchy Anthropocene and romantic geology. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S333–S341.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarMorita, Atsuro, and Wakana Suzuki. 2019. Being affected by sinking deltas: changing landscapes, resilience, and complex adaptive systems in the scientific story of the Anthropocene. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S286–S295.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarPerfecto, Ivette, M. Estelí Jiménez-Soto, and John Vandermeer. 2019. Coffee landscapes shaping the Anthropocene: forced simplification on a complex agroecological landscape. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S236–S250.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarSwanson, Heather Anne. 2019. An unexpected politics of population: salmon counting, science, and advocacy in the Columbia River Basin. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S272–S285.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarThomas, William L., Jr., ed. 1956. Man’s role in changing the face of the earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarTsai, Yen-Ling. 2019. Farming odd kin in patchy Anthropocenes. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S342–S353.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarTsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt. 2019. Patchy Anthropocene: landscape structure, multispecies history, and the retooling of anthropology; an introduction to supplement 20. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S186–S197.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarViveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2019. On models and examples: engineers and bricoleurs in the Anthropocene. Current Anthropology 60(suppl. 20):S296–S308.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarNotesDanilyn Rutherford is President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (655 Third Avenue, 23rd Floor, New York, New York 10017, USA [[email protected]]) Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 60, Number S20August 2019Patchy Anthropocene: Frenzies and Afterlives of Violent Simplifications Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703829 Views: 345 HistoryPublished online June 20, 2019 © 2019 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.