Anthropos and the material

The destructive effects of modern industrial societies have shaped the planet in such profound ways that many argue for the existence of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. This claim brings into relief a set of challenges that have deep implications for how relations between the human, the material, and the political affect contemporary social worlds. The contributors to 'Anthropos and the Material' examine these challenges by questioning and complicating long-held understandings of the divide between humans and things. They present ethnographic case studies from across the globe, addressing myriad topics that range from labor, economics, and colonialism to technology, culture, the environment, agency, and diversity. In foregrounding the importance of connecting natural and social histories, the instability and intangibility of the material, and the ways in which the lively encounters between the human and the nonhuman challenge conceptions of liberal humanism, the contributors point to new understandings of the capacities of people and things to act, transform, and adapt to a changing world.

Uncommoning nature : stories from the anthropo-not-seen / Marisol de la Cadena -- Contemporary capitalism and Dominican New Yorkers' livery-cab bases : a taxi story / Christian Krohn-Hansen -- Anthropos and pragmata : on the shape of things to come / Ingjerd Hoëm -- Tabu and Bitcoin : fluctuating (im)materiality in two nonstate media of exchange / Keir Martin -- Sperm, eggs, and wombs : the fabrication of vital matters through legislative acts / Marit Melhuus -- Lithic vitality : human entanglement with nonorganic matter / Penny Harvey -- Traces of pasts and imaginings of futures in St Lucia, South Africa / Knut G. Nustad -- Matters that matter : wind and weather in South Africa / Rune Flikke -- The ghost at the banquet : ceremony, community, and industrial growth in west Norway / John Law and Marianne Lien -- When the things we study respond to each other : tools for unpacking "the material" / Anna Tsing.