This book provides the rigorous anthropological critique of the Anthropocene that has long been required. Informed by posthumanist, multispecies, and new materialist theory, and drawing from archaeological evidence and their own ethnographic research projects in South Asia, the authors challenge three central strands of the Anthropocene argument. These might be characterized as (1) the assertion of a singular humanity, or anthropos—undifferentiated by gender, class, race, culture, economics, politics, historical context, or geographic location; (2) the assumption that this universal humanity impacts Earth systems quite separately and distinct from the associated effects of other species, things, and forces; and (3) the insistence that a definite moment in time must be specified for when humans became a global geologic force, transitioning the Earth from a state of imagined natural equilibrium to the unstable state of the Anthropocene.
Underlying these lines of argument, Bauer and Bhan point out, is the fundamental divide of natural/social: the concept of the Anthropocene always invokes its binary opposite, Nature. To imagine climate without Nature is to imagine it outside the dualistic framework of Anthropocene thinking. Climate change is wrought not by humans and technology alone but by broader heterogeneous assemblages of humans and nonhumans acting collectively, albeit unequally. Nonhuman agents include domesticated animals and plants, which have been influencing atmosphere and climate for thousands of years, as demonstrated by a useful discussion on cattle pastoralism and rice production in India. But the aim of the book is not to make a case for the early Anthropocene. It rightly refuses to be drawn into debate on the date of onset of the proposed new geologic epoch, consistently maintaining that there is no such thing as a single point in time when human/nonhuman assemblages suddenly became a geologic force.
Lively ethnographic case studies carried out by the authors eschew globalizing models of climate for local experiences of changing weather, in parts of the world undergoing biophysical transformation. Landscape features from dams to glaciers feature strongly in these material-rich accounts, which introduce us to indigenous ways of thinking about interactions with the atmosphere.
In my opinion, the book is stronger ethnographically than it is archaeologically. While it states correctly that archaeological evidence helps to track long-term historical processes of climate change, and archaeology offers “a critical lens through which to fracture the singularity of the anthropos,” (p. 29) the stratigraphic and temporal dimensions are nevertheless neglected. Archaeological evidence is treated as a record only of the past, not of the unfolding present. What is missing is recognition of the sheer extent of anthropogenic deposits now covering large areas of Earth's surfaces and the fact that, although accumulated over thousands of years, these are still in the process of formation today. This expanding archaeosphere is growing and spreading at increasing rates, arguably constituting an ecological and geologic force in its own right. Yet it goes unnoticed and unremarked upon by the authors. Given the prominence accorded to new materialist perspectives, it seems ironic that this mighty material presence should be overlooked.
The great strength of the book is its critical analysis of the more hubristic and anthropocentric elements of Anthropocene narratives. In that sense it will be an influential work, and there are perhaps two ways its message might be acted upon. The first would be for anthropologists to keep their distance from the Anthropocene and to frame their role in relation to it primarily in terms of critique. But that would be too negative a stance to adopt. The evolving and still fluid debate on the Anthropocene is too important for anthropologists to situate themselves outside of it.
A more positive approach, building on insights contained in the book, would be to recognize that anthropological methods and perspectives—together with those of the natural sciences—are crucial to the collaborative multidisciplinary task of reformulating the Anthropocene. The anthropos should be taken to include domesticated animals and plants as well as people in all their differentiated and unequal heterogeneity, along with other entangled entities and forces held to be part of broader assemblages producing climate change and other transformations. The Anthropocene rethought along those lines would no longer need the imposition of a globally synchronous time line onto manifestly diachronous evidence, to mark the supposed sudden transition from a natural to a human-dominated age. Research would be focused on reaching the more nuanced understandings of processes of change at work in Earth systems that Bauer and Bhan argue for. In such a project, moving beyond critique, anthropologists surely have a vital role to play.
