Anthropocene Lecture – Philippe Descola

May 25th, 2018

Is the Anthropocene soluble in ontological pluralism?

Is the Anthropocene soluble in ontological pluralism?

In the past decades, anthropology has rendered obvious that the conceptual categories by the means of which Europeans had hitherto conceptualized their own destiny—nature, society, culture, history, economics, politics, religion, art—are irrelevant, even misleading, when used to account for other forms of association of beings, some still very active at the periphery of the modern world. Will this anthropological reframing of our analytical tools provide new answers to the challenge of the increasing dysfunction of the Earth system which global warming and the massive extinction of species are rendering manifest?