Anthropocene by Cymene Howe
This essay is an examination of how sensing capacities can draw in, and from, other-than-human en... more This essay is an examination of how sensing capacities can draw in, and from, other-than-human entities-both animate and inanimate. Based upon ethnographic field research in Iceland, it describes sensory encounters that are realizable through the bodies, sensations, and ontological status shifts of other beings and entities, namely, in bears and ice and earth. As anthropogenic impacts deepen, the essay argues, sensing ought to be practiced as a collaborative effort among human and other-than-human entities. Sensing by other means entails sensing through others' means and beyond the human sensorium.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Book] Anthropocene Unseen A Lexicon](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/63022647/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, 2020
The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occ... more The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word. The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole. The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Book] Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/63022510/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene, 2019
Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Te... more Between 2009 and 2013 Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer conducted fieldwork in Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec to examine the political, social, and ecological dimensions of moving from fossil fuels to wind power. Their work manifested itself as a new ethnographic form: the duograph—a combination of two single-authored books that draw on shared fieldsites, archives, and encounters that can be productively read together, yet can also stand alone in their analytic ambitions.
In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power.
We write in the midst of a dramatic revaluation of the epoch at hand, as a subcommission of the I... more We write in the midst of a dramatic revaluation of the epoch at hand, as a subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy weighs whether to identify this era with the deeds and tracks of the human species-as an Anthropocene. While the geologists continue their deliberations, this name has already spread into domains as disparate as history (Chakrabarty 2009), poetry , and contemporary art (Davis and Turpin 2015) with astonishing speed, dislodging familiar terms like nature and environment from their customary preeminence as signs of the world beyond ourselves. Of course, the point is precisely this: that that world exists no longer, or makes less sense than it ever did, given the pervasive and undeniable presence of human activity or consequence wherever we turn now on this planet of ours. What can anthropology contribute toward these urgent concerns? We hope this lexicon may grow into a resource helpful for this task.
Reflections on Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen: adoptions and adaptations of Anthropocene ... more Reflections on Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen: adoptions and adaptations of Anthropocene as term and theory + speed and acceleration + what is in a stratigraphic name? + radicalizing ACN's potential + "unhappily necessary" possibilities + fossilizations within human subjects + athropos and anthropology + snorkeling with plastics + telling time in the ACN + collaborative speculation
We are air-born. From our infant inhale, throughout our respiratory lives, and to our last gasp. ... more We are air-born. From our infant inhale, throughout our respiratory lives, and to our last gasp. Life above earth has us thinking in the atmosphere and being its midst, its volume turned up around us.
Wondering into the wind leads us upward. It is an invitation to lose one’s footing...to release our discipline from the earthly domains it has historically occupied and to float us to new ethnographic spheres and spaces untethered
to worldly surfaces; this collection is meant as a deterrestrialization of thought: an exploration of vitalities, materials, and movements that are skyward, spacey, and atmospheric.
muse words for the anthropocene
In press for special issue of Anthropological Quarterly, "Energopower and Biopower in Transition"
Infrastructure + Materials by Cymene Howe
Plastics: Environment, Culture, and the Politics of Waste, ed. Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad, 2023
Plastic is a beautiful thing. We know this because we have surrounded ourselves with it. Look aro... more Plastic is a beautiful thing. We know this because we have surrounded ourselves with it. Look around you. It appears in every corner of our world. It is handles and wheels, boxes and bread bags; trinket, talisman, tape. It is the warp and weft of petromodernity. Plastic is magical, absorbing shapes in miraculous ways. Morphing into gigantic cylindrical tanks and delicate tools, it also bulges to become an inflatable pool on the hottest day-one that is now becoming hotter still. Plastic holds air like a lung. Except better. Longer. A balloon for your party. A colored orb that flies. Plastic secures. And its transmogrificational capabilities seem to know no limit. It is an infinitely mutable, changeable thing, sucking up color and inspiration. The human mind thrives in plasticity. It has the ability to adapt and mutate and become differently, to transfigure. And what entity is more transfigural than plastic? A wonder born from the earth. A wonder born from chemicals. A wonder of fabulation and form. An invitation to invention. A handsome material to craft a more beautiful world. Full of fresh possibilities. A palette of color. The persuasive shapeshifter. We are the plastic fantastic lovers...
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sc... more In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure,
the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding
infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material
and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.
Review of Bakke's "The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future"
Grids are the working relationship between humanity and the electron.
Circulating a force that ... more Grids are the working relationship between humanity and the electron.
Circulating a force that has become indispensable to contemporary subsistence in much of the world, grids operate as conduits for systems of social organization. But grids are also frail machines, prone to debility, to breakdown, and to blacking out. Rummaging for a candle in the dark, we realize that most of us know our grids best by their failure. Grids tend to disappear into the background, we are unconscious of them, and in this sense electric grids are exemplary infrastructure: embedded, largely invisible technical arrangements conveying services to human populations. However, grids are more than transmissional tools; they are more than a ‘thing.’
Our project in this article is to unwind ‘wind power’ as a consolidated conceptual object and to ... more Our project in this article is to unwind ‘wind power’ as a consolidated conceptual object and to consider the ventifactual arrangements of its political materiality. In a time when
carbon incineration has been exposed as among the greatest ecological threats to humanity and other life on the planet, renewable energy forms, like wind power, are commonly assumed to have a clear, logical, and obvious salvational purpose: a path
away from fossilized resources and toward sustainable sources of energy. Mexico has established some of the most far-reaching and comprehensive climate legislation in the world, including mandates for renewable energy production. The Isthmus of
Tehuantepec, in the Southern state of Oaxaca, now hosts the densest concentration of on-shore wind development anywhere on the planet. We find, however, that the ‘good’ of wind is differentially felt. The power of the wind is not singular, but rather
as multiple as the world it inhabits. We thus develop an argument against a singular interpretation of ‘wind power’ and toward a surfacing of wind’s manifold effects and ways of mattering. We call this domain: aeolian politics. In this article, we take several snapshots of aeolian politics to help articulate its multiplicity, showing how wind power becomes contoured by land and desire and by infrastructure and technological management. We also see aeolian political life entangled with cosmologies and subjectivities and implicated within the ethical domains of sustainable development.
Ice : Melt by Cymene Howe
The Fragility of Ice: Cryohuman Relations in Times of Collapse, 2024
In this chapter, I consider responses to melting ice as they are enacted by both humans and non-h... more In this chapter, I consider responses to melting ice as they are enacted by both humans and non-humans. Response, as I see it, is both a reaction and an attempt at an answer, but response is also a profound acknowledgement – an acknowledgement of the continuum between human and material worlds, or a relational ontology of care and attention that becomes manifest in distinct ways (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 2017). In the process of response, I argue, multiple fragilities become apparent. As glaciers melt, they undergo an ontological “phase change”—a fundamental transformation in their material state. For living beings, like humans, glacial phase changes can be known through affective encounters, scientific accounts, and meditations upon ecological futures. With the growing awareness that human behaviors, past and present, are deeply impacting ecosystems that sustain biotic life and give shape to geological form, the transmaterial qualities of ice highlight the tenuous space between living and dying. Our responses can be many in a world of multiply entangled fragilities.
forthcoming in Fragilities: Essays on The Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Care, Maintenance And Repair, eds. Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (2024)
Science, Technology and Human Values, 2019
This essay is an examination of how sensing capacities can draw in, and from, other-than-human en... more This essay is an examination of how sensing capacities can draw in, and from, other-than-human entities-both animate and inanimate. Based upon ethnographic field research in Iceland, it describes sensory encounters that are realizable through the bodies, sensations, and ontological status shifts of other beings and entities, namely, in bears and ice and earth. As anthro-pogenic impacts deepen, the essay argues, sensing ought to be practiced as a collaborative effort among human and other-than-human entities. Sensing by other means entails sensing through others' means and beyond the human sensorium.
Anthropology News, 2020
IN 2014, THE FIRST OF ICELAND’S NAMED GLACIERS SUFFERED DEATH BY HUMAN-MADE CLIMATE CHANGE. TWO A... more IN 2014, THE FIRST OF ICELAND’S NAMED GLACIERS SUFFERED DEATH BY HUMAN-MADE CLIMATE CHANGE. TWO ANTHROPOLOGISTS DECIDED TO MARK ITS PASSING.
Energy Transitions by Cymene Howe
The Routledge Handbook of Energy Humanities , 2025
Is it possible to engage with energy as both a physical phenomenon and a cultural matter? And wha... more Is it possible to engage with energy as both a physical phenomenon and a cultural matter? And what might it mean to think of energy as a social force? For anthropologists, what energy is, and can be, are both exciting and challenging questions. In its material meaning, energy is the power cultivated through mechanical or chemical processes to do things like animate machines, shed light, or warm and cool spaces; in its simplest definition, energy is the capacity to do work thermodynamically, kinetically, electrically, chemically, by splitting atoms and most provocatively of all: as potential energy. Whole fields of natural science orbit around energy and its possibilities (Daggett 2019). In the humanities and social sciences, energy also operates as a durable metaphor codified in language to describe personal dynamism or a set of characteristics orientated toward productivity. But it also evokes spiritual forces, auras and transcendental powers-energy captures both the physical and the metaphysical.
ENERGÍA EÓLICA INTERRUMPIDA SELECCIÓN, 2023
Para la resistencia, la instalación del megapro- yecto era una imposición neocolonial más, que de... more Para la resistencia, la instalación del megapro- yecto era una imposición neocolonial más, que despojaba a los indígenas de sus tierras para beneficio de los financiadores europeos. Des- de este punto de vista, no es de extrañar que la expansión de los parques eólicos en la región pasara a denominarse de un modo más gene- ral “la nueva conquista”. En el frustrado par- que eólico vemos que la transición depende en gran medida del lugar del que se trate. El cambio a nuevas formas de energía es funda- mental para la salud climática global, pero se vivirá de manera distinta en función de los in- tereses locales y globales.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2019
Renewable energy projects are ethically laudable for their cleansing intentions, but they also pr... more Renewable energy projects are ethically laudable for their cleansing intentions, but they also produce effects upon other-than-human beings in their orbit. Taking the case of Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which is home to the densest concentration of onshore wind parks anywhere in the world, and following Foucault's reading of the speech form 'parrhesia', this essay argues that the bodies of affected nonhuman beings, particularly those whose existence is actively balanced against a 'greater good' for humanity, enact a form of other-than-human speech, first in their threatened status and, secondly, through environmental management regimes that seek to synchronize human and nonhuman lives in settings of both local and global ecological failures. Free speech In one of his lesser-known theoretical fascinations, Michel Foucault contemplated a Greek speech form called parrhesia. His notes tell us that this term is ordinarily translated into English as 'free speech'. In its subjective usage, the parrhesiastes is s/he/they who utilize parrhesia, the one who speaks her/his/their truth. Parrhesia is the articulation of a genuine belief, unencumbered by rhetoric and thus purified in its honesty. The parrhesiastes uses their freedom to choose frankness over persuasion, or flattery over morality, selecting veracity in place of falsehoods.
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Anthropocene by Cymene Howe
In her volume, Ecologics, Howe narrates how an antidote to the Anthropocene became both failure and success. Tracking the development of what would have been Latin America's largest wind park, Howe documents indigenous people's resistance to the project and the political and corporate climate that derailed its renewable energy potential. Using feminist and more-than-human theories, Howe demonstrates how the dynamics of energy and environment cannot be captured without understanding how human aspirations for energy articulate with nonhuman beings, technomaterial objects, and the geophysical forces that are at the heart of wind and power.
Wondering into the wind leads us upward. It is an invitation to lose one’s footing...to release our discipline from the earthly domains it has historically occupied and to float us to new ethnographic spheres and spaces untethered
to worldly surfaces; this collection is meant as a deterrestrialization of thought: an exploration of vitalities, materials, and movements that are skyward, spacey, and atmospheric.
Infrastructure + Materials by Cymene Howe
the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding
infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material
and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.
Circulating a force that has become indispensable to contemporary subsistence in much of the world, grids operate as conduits for systems of social organization. But grids are also frail machines, prone to debility, to breakdown, and to blacking out. Rummaging for a candle in the dark, we realize that most of us know our grids best by their failure. Grids tend to disappear into the background, we are unconscious of them, and in this sense electric grids are exemplary infrastructure: embedded, largely invisible technical arrangements conveying services to human populations. However, grids are more than transmissional tools; they are more than a ‘thing.’
carbon incineration has been exposed as among the greatest ecological threats to humanity and other life on the planet, renewable energy forms, like wind power, are commonly assumed to have a clear, logical, and obvious salvational purpose: a path
away from fossilized resources and toward sustainable sources of energy. Mexico has established some of the most far-reaching and comprehensive climate legislation in the world, including mandates for renewable energy production. The Isthmus of
Tehuantepec, in the Southern state of Oaxaca, now hosts the densest concentration of on-shore wind development anywhere on the planet. We find, however, that the ‘good’ of wind is differentially felt. The power of the wind is not singular, but rather
as multiple as the world it inhabits. We thus develop an argument against a singular interpretation of ‘wind power’ and toward a surfacing of wind’s manifold effects and ways of mattering. We call this domain: aeolian politics. In this article, we take several snapshots of aeolian politics to help articulate its multiplicity, showing how wind power becomes contoured by land and desire and by infrastructure and technological management. We also see aeolian political life entangled with cosmologies and subjectivities and implicated within the ethical domains of sustainable development.
Ice : Melt by Cymene Howe
forthcoming in Fragilities: Essays on The Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics of Care, Maintenance And Repair, eds. Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (2024)
Energy Transitions by Cymene Howe