Cultural Anthropology· 2018Q1
Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence
- 454citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2018year
Short summary
An 'African Anthropocene' framework, using 'interscalar vehicles,' can bridge planetary and human timescales to analyze the creation of waste and value, as demonstrated by a Gabonese uranium mine's violent implications.
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Key points
- Proposes an 'African Anthropocene' concept to frame planetary temporality alongside specific human lives.
- Introduces 'interscalar vehicles' as analytical tools to traverse deep time and human time, geological and political space.
- Uses the example of a uranium mine in Mounana, Gabon, to analyze waste, value, and violent implications.
- Highlights the political, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of interscalar vehicles in the Anthropocene context.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
How can we incorporate humanist critiques of the Anthropocene while harnessing the notion’s potential for challenging political imagination? Placing the Anthropocene offers one way forward; the notion of an African Anthropocene offers a productive paradox that holds planetary temporality and specific human lives in a single frame. Navigating the Anthropocene from Africa requires attending to scale both as an analytic and an actor category. In order to do so, this essay proposes the notion of interscalar vehicles: objects and modes of analysis that permit scholars and their subjects to move simultaneously through deep time and human time, through geological space and political space. This essay discusses the creation and destruction of value/waste and pasts/futures around a uranium mine in Mounana, Gabon, to unpack the political, ethical, epistemological, and affective dimensions of interscalar vehicles and their violent Anthropocenic implications.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Cultural Anthropology, 2018 · DOI ↗
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Field: Geography, Planning and Development
Geography, Planning and DevelopmentSocial Sciences