At Play with the Giants: Between the Patchy Anthropocene and Romantic Geology

• Autores: Naveeda Khan
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Vol. 60, Nº. Extra 20, 2019 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Patchy Anthropocene: Frenzies and Afterlives of Violent Simplifications), págs. 333-341
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • I consider how the ideas of the patchy Anthropocene forwarded by the editors of this special issue provide a way to do anthropology otherwise by reversing the relationship between the background and foreground in our studies. This switch allows me to bring to the fore the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River as both a hydrological entity and a geological event and the interrelations between these two as explored in geological writings. It helps grow the kinds of accounts that are appropriate to the complexity of the Anthropocene. At the same time I also pose that the inner structure of the imagination must change to be in step and similarly appropriate to our entangled and scaled-up present. The romantic geology of the early nineteenth century, particularly that of the German romantic Novalis, provides interesting experiments with commensurating humans to the geological. It does so by thinking the human as tending toward the nonhuman, thus possibly at play with the mountainous giants who shaped the earth’s topography in romantic imagination. I consider how gigantism may be explored as a dimension of human existence in the Anthropocene even as we consider the human in her particularity.