Anthropizing the Earth: Where Did it Go Wrong?
Pluralizing the Anthropocene II
Pluralizing the Anthropocene II
Schedule: 6 pm (UTC + 1, Lisbon Time)
The session will be in English
Events
will take place online. All welcome but registration required
Philippe DESCOLA (Collège de France)
Moderator: Gonçalo Santos (CIAS / Sci-Tech Asia / University of
Coimbra)
In spite of anthropological
and biocultural accounts showing that human collectives co-evolve with
nonhumans and that they jointly create specific milieux over time, the
idea that societies, as if fallen from the sky, adapt to an already constituted
environment is one of the basic tenets of modern times. This is not surprising
if one accepts that modernity amounts to the affirmation that there exists a neat
separation between nature and society. However, the new climatic regime into
which we have entered forces us to reconsider this state of affairs in
paradoxical ways that will be explored in the lecture.
Related
Gonçalo D. SANTOS is an anthropologist and a leading international
scholar in the field of China studies. His research explores new approaches to
questions of modernity, subjectivity, and social, technological, and ecological
transformation in contemporary China. He is an assistant professor of
socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences and a Researcher
and Group Coordinator in the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the
University of Coimbra. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra in 2020, he
held positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Village
Life Today (University of
Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Transforming
Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017). His research
has been published in leading scientific journals in the fields of
anthropology, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. He is a member
of the Research Group on
Culture and Society, Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues,
at Georgetown University, and is the founder and the director of Sci-Tech Asia, a transnational research
network that focuses on the relations between technoscience, politics, and
society in Asia and around the world. He is interested in comparative
approaches that draw on Chinese and Asian perspectives and histories to
challenge the hegemonic power of Euro-American epistemologies and narratives of
modernity.