Decolonizing the Anthropocene

Abstract

The Anthropocene debate is here situated in the context of the environmental crisis. The polysemic nature and political implications of the concept are examined. The prefix Anthropos is discussed, especially in its historical connections to environmental injustice, racism, and specism. The concept of domestication is adopted as a heuristic tool to explore some of the colonial legacies that inspire contemporary ecological thinking and point to alternative ways of inhabiting the world, particularly those associated with multispecies ethnographies and Indigenous and Black diasporic ontologies. The core argument of this entry is that a productive decolonial perspective on the Anthropocene can operate as a reverse or counteranthropology of the contemporary condition, in which the present and the scientific attempts at making sense of it, through concepts such as the Anthropocene, are seen and evaluated from the fringes of the hierarchies of knowledge that structure modern science.