The Anthropocene as the uncanny

The earth turns and the seasons shift. Here in Australia spring came early and it is already unseasonably warm. Bushfires are burning in the north of the country and the warnings about the developing el Nino weather pattern become increasingly dire by the day. Our Anthropocenic weather is uncanny, strange and unstable.

The anthropologists Nils Bubandt and Martijn van Beek consider the Anthropocene itself to be uncanny:- “the Anthropocene is a truly an uncanny time, a time when the proper separation between things – between culture and nature, subject and object, human and
nonhuman, life and non-life – is collapsing.” (https://anthropocene.au.dk/fileadmin/Anthropocene/MORE_THAN_HUMAN_vol.3.pdf)

The philosopher, Jacques Derrida saw the Anthropocene is a time when we are haunted by the spectres of ecological catastrophe, mass extinction and planetary crisis. This spectrality propels us into rethinking our relationship to the natural world as traces of all that has been excluded, repressed or forgotten by the dominant culture are exposed.

Here in Australia the trauma of our colonial past is currently being disclosed. Aboriginal people are speaking up about the true history of the country. Similar stories of the abuse of indigenous people under colonialization are coming to light across the globe. Massacre sites, places where children were stolen away from their mothers and where tribal ceremonies were disrupted are being revealed. Often there is something uncanny about these places. The rocks, hills and valleys seem to reverberate with echoes of past atrocities as if some deep psychic wounding has become embedded in the physical structure of the Earth.

Controlling people through colonial practices has occurred alongside the exploitation of nature. The Anthropocene is asking us to examine the human/nature split. At the same time indigenous people are asking us to examine our relationship with all people on Earth. A number of scholars suggest that slavery and European colonization define the Anthropocene. Others say the deforestation and development of industrialized agriculture on indigenous land as well the exploitation of indigenous people has played a significant part in causing our current ecological crisis. To fully deconstruct the way in which our thinking has bought us to our current ecological crisis we have to consider the impact of colonization.

There is a weirdness to these times. Our concept of what it means to be human is being called into a question but a deeper question also arises. Are all humans are equally implicated in behaving in ways that have bought us to ecological crisis of the Anthropocene? Indigenous cultures are living cultures that have operated in harmony with the Earth for countless millennia. Notions of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life are fundamental to these cultures.

The ghosts of these cultures haunt us. As bushfires rage out control we learn of indigenous fire stick farming and how, in pre-colonial Australia, bushfires did not occur. More unsettling still, we learn that this fire stick farming was undertaken so that the people could grow food crops. Here where I live there are drawings done by early settlers that depict Aboriginal women harvesting yams. Across the country evidence is emerging that prior to white settlement Aboriginal people cultivated the land, established villages and built dams, weirs and food stores. The colonial idea that Aboriginal people were hunter gatherer nomads who lived at a subsidence level is being proven to be false.

I found today’s post difficult to write and even more difficult to draw to a conclusion. I’m finding that the deeper I dig into the idea of the Anthropocene as a cultural crisis the more it seems impossible that we can extricate ourselves from this mess. Being determined to find pathways through the impasse I am going to write about finding hope in the Anthropocene tomorrow.

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