Research Seminar in Anthropology: Nils Bubandt "Why We Need Theory...But Not Too Much...in the Anthropocene: How Corals and Other Stones Made Me (A)theoretical.”

 

Anthropology came of age at a time when Western scientists - across the human and natural sciences - agreed that humans were special. Recently however, new insights in the natural sciences and novel turns in the human sciences have in each their way begun to question the doctrine of human exceptionalism, a doctrine (or modern constitution, as Bruno Latour might have it) that the concept of the Anthropocene also throws fundamentally into crisis. This talk wants to suggest that the crisis of human exceptionalism is actually also an opportunity for anthropology (and other sciences of humans and of life) to rethink their own object.  Using my interest in coral (and, if there is time, stones) as an example I would like to talk about the particular approach to the Anthropocene as an anthropological challenge that we have begun to develop in the last five years in AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene).  The key contribution (and innovation, I think) of AURA has been to approach the Anthropocene - and the transdiscilinarity that the concept invites us to - not primarily as a theoretical issue but as a methodological one.  

Nils Bubandt is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Professor II at UiT, and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Ethnos. He has conducted fieldwork on the islands of North Maluku and West Papua in Indonesia since 1991. Recent publications include: The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island (Cornell University Press, 2014) and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (co-edited with Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson and Elaine Gan)(University of Minnesota Press, 2017). He is co-editor (with Anna Tsing and Andrew Mathews) of a special issue of the journal Current Anthropology entitled “Patchy Anthropocene: The Frenzies and Afterlives of Violent Simplification” that will appear in September 2019.