The Context of the Anthropocene

The term ‘culture’ has its roots in the term ‘cultivation of the soul’ (cultura anima), and is meant to signify the cultivation of the human condition to a noble or highest state. Through the Romantic and Enlightenment eras, this term came to mean the development of a community towards the highest levels of human potential. In contemporary terms, it has come to indicate the ideological disposition and social practices of a community, and as it pertains to the arts, culture and aspirations of that community.

Therefore a traditional definition of Culture could be:

Culture is a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions of  a community. It determines the social meaning of a life held in common.

However in our current context, what geologists call the Anthropocene, We are interested in a far more rich and complex understanding of what Culture is. As shown in Anthropogenic Effects, we see the greatest anthropogenic effects from the beginning of the industrial revolution. With the advent of increasing consumption by the global North, we have seen an escalating anthropogenic impact in the last 50 years (1960, onwards). The global North is responsible for 92% of the contribution to the climate catastrophe in terms of historical emissions and material footprint. In this period we see the emergence of new social and cultural systems (e.g, globalization, neoliberalism and social dictatorships) that give warrant to rampant resource extraction and ecological destruction, exponential economic inequality and poverty.

Therefore we are inquiring into the cultural systems that have birthed and sustained the Anthropocene. In contrast to its initial meaning of ‘the evolution of the human condition’ we can see that Culture has a more pernicious implication for our evolution. As Terrence McKenna points out:

“Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.”

Terence McKenna – Culture is not your friend

Therefore, for the purposes of our inquiry we can develop a more ‘contextually relevant’ working definition of Culture:

Culture refers to the normative values and belief systems that coordinate human activity.

Through these normative values, culture enacts ideological models that give meaning to how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. These ‘systems of meaning’ make implicit distinctions about social, political and ecological categories such as nature/culture, subject/object, knower/object-to-be-known, human/non-human, self/other. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously stated, “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” Culture is not inherently given or simply sui generis. It is a social/cultural/political construct that some, more than others, have a disproportionate responsibility in creating and benefiting from, although everyone affected by it contributes to it. Therefore, culture is both constructed and emergent, as well as felt/lived/experienced and invisible simultaneously.

Culture is not inherently given or simply sui generis. It is a social/cultural/political construct that some, more than others, have a disproportionate responsibility in creating and benefiting from, although everyone affected by it contributes to it.

We can ascertain which categories are prioritized by a given culture by looking at the social, political and ecological outcomes the cultural system produces. For example, let’s examine the dominant culture of the United States vis-a-vis race. In 2010 in the US, 40% of the prison population was made up of black people although they only made up 13% of the entire population. Additionally, in the same year, 60.7% of household wealth belonged to white households while black households owned only 3.8%. From this, it would be a fair inference that this cultural context prioritizes the normative category of “white” and in this prioritization it also deprioritises that which is “not white” through incarceration and impoverishment. Therefore we can gain insight into what normative values a culture holds by making empirical observations within its context.

Now let’s move to a global scale vis-a-vis the climate. As we have seen in Anthropogenic Effects, the ‘culture of the Anthropocene’ is one that prioritizes the unbridled conquest of the Global North in the ‘self-realization’ of  its subjects. Moreover as Braidotti explains, this ‘subject’ is never a truly neutral category:

“…not all humans are equal and the human is not at all a neutral category. It is rather a normative category that indexes access to privileges and entitlements. Appeals to the “human” are always discriminatory: they create structural distinctions and inequalities among different categories of humans. Humanity is a quality that is distributed according to a hierarchical scale centered on a humanistic idea of Man as the measure of all things. This dominant idea is based on a simple assumption of superiority by a subject that is: masculine, white, Eurocentric, practicing compulsory heterosexuality and reproduction, able-bodied, urbanized, speaking a standard language. This subject is the Man of reason that feminists, anti-racists, black, Indigenous, postcolonial and ecological activists have been criticizing for decades.”

Taking this into account, perhaps the first clear assertion that we can make about Culture is that it is not always evolutionary (i.e. there is not a neat, tidy progressive narrative pointing to greater refinement, complexity, etc.). Rather, culture delineates a set of distinctions, assumptions, norms, beliefs about the world. At this juncture in our shared history it is essential that we develop ways to critically assess cultural systems, and in so doing find ways to evolve it.

The Genesis of History

To discern the evolutionary capacities of cultural systems, we must first understand the genealogical processes and component parts involved in their creation. As we gaze back into the history of human development, we can discern several developmental stages of cultural creation including (but not limited to):

• Language: All living systems, from automata to complex organisms, are embedded within an informational domain or evolutionary niche. This linguistic domain allows the living system to determine the features in its environment and therefore survive. Therefore, language emerges as the adaptive means of the organism to deal with the uncertainty of its environment. Language can take many forms and patterns, and does necessitate speech.
  
  
• Speech: Speech can then emerge as a means to communicate observations about ‘persistent phenomena’ in this environment. These speech acts correlate sounds to intersubjective phenomena, and through this the intersubjective field, a cultural field begins to form.
  
  
• Representation: Over time, these ‘persistent phenomena’ are represented in words and images. Embedded within these representations is an underlying syntax; and implicit in this are conceptions about the way things are, e.g. space, time, causality, etc. Therefore these representations become doorways to whole worlds of meaning/experience, and more importantly are means to communicate this.
  
  
• Self-identity: As this system of representation increases in complexity, the capacity for self-reflection in individuals develops exponentially. In other words, as we are able to make more detailed symbolic representations of the phenomena we experience, we also are able to build a more complex understanding of ourselves.
  
  
• Myth: Through the development of this self-identity, archetypal forms emerge that tell meta narratives that give meaning to shared social realities. These mythologies become the constellations upon which culture navigates through the uncertain and unknown lands of existence.
  
  
• Belief system: Belief systems are distillations of our shared mythos into ‘ways of being in the world’. That is to say that they dictate the ‘conditions for truth’ and provide the justification for actions we take. These belief systems are the ‘production machines of culture’ because they enact “cultural truths” (those truths that are unquestioned in any cultural context) into everyday practices and norms.
  
  
• Cultural Identity: Like the emergence of self-identity, cultural identity emerges as our understanding of the world and ourselves increases in complexity. This identity unifies multiple belief systems (ways of knowing and being) into a coherent identity or cultural disposition, e.g. The American Dream, Gen-X, etc..

Essentially, history emerges through self-reflexive social processes mediated through language, beliefs, mythologies and self-identity. In the articulation of the Self, we find fundamental ‘schema of experience’ such as time, space and causality. This schema is the scaffolding of culture, and is imprinted with the archeo-epistemology of ‘creation, life and death’ which stems from the identification with Self (and the Self’s subjective experience of birth, life and death). Therefore, the creation of Self within the dominant cultural context is the genesis of our conception of history. That is, things are born, they subsist and then die; all phenomena that this Self experiences are imprinted with this metaphysical form of space, time and causality.

The creation of Self within the dominant cultural context is the genesis of our conception of history.

Let us examine an archetypal developmental trajectory that exemplifies this metaphysical form in its three stages:

1. The Fall: This phase is characterized by the belief of the Self as a distinct and independent entity, and through this the instantiation of the fundamental schema of (self) experience: space, time, causality and identity. This is the original separation that creates the predicament of the human experience and our subsequent ‘civilization’.
   
   
2. History: In this phase we see an increasing complexification of cultural forms, novelty and density of relationships. It is a phase that seeks a resolution to the “problem of experience” or the belief in an independent Self. Novelty emerges precisely in order to grapple with the unsatisfying condition of independent Selfhood, and exponentially increases towards complexity and collective self-reflexivity.
   
   
3. The Return: This phase is marked by a growing realization of the Self as a nexus of relationships, entangled with an infinite number of other beings, entities and ideas. With this awakening to interdependence, is a new kind of transpersonal ethics that marks a new evolutionary potential for Culture. Therefore it is a phase of reintegration into the web of life, and is the terminal point of History, in the dominant, linear, separatist-materialist-rationalist sense.

This deep archeo-epistemology is inscribed into every facet of our cultures. This means that deep in our consciousness we know that we are moving with great velocity to an end point of History. As McKenna traces this subconscious process:

“I mean, there is an end of the world built into your cosmology: the end of your world — which is, after all, the only world you know. So it may be that the planet will swing a hundred billion times around the [sun] before the consummation of time, but  that doesn’t mean that you have permission not to contemplate final end states. Because you’ve got an appointment with one out there somewhere, ten minutes or fifty years in the future.“

deep in our consciousness we know that we are moving with great velocity to an end point of History.

To return to our task of evolving culture, we can start to see how critical it is to break from the momentum of History as the conqueror’s narrative (progress, civilization, globalization, etc.) to meta-narratives of the Return (e.g. symbiosis with the living world). Specifically, we can work with the genealogical processes and component parts for cultural creation to create more resilient, life-centric cultural forms.

Cultural Development

As discussed above, the fundamental unit of Culture is the Self (or absence of self) and its relationship to Other, and we can ‘measure’ a Culture by critically assessing this unit in terms of its relationship to that Other (that which is not Self). The resolution to the ‘problem of culture’ lies in the evolution of the Self and its process of self-reflection towards a redefinition of Self in terms of Return narratives – i.e. narratives of radical-relationality, belonging, interdependence and interbeing – in order to create more resilient and life-centric cultural systems.

The Deep Structure of Culture

The resolution to the ‘problem of culture’ lies in the evolution of the Self and its process of self-reflection towards a redefinition of Self in terms of Return narratives (…) in order to create more resilient and life-centric cultural systems.

The basis of Culture is a generative model describing the relationship between Self and Other. Any cultural model holds implicit understandings of what constitutes Self (including the absence of Self or relationality as Self). This relationship is mediated by constructs that define the world through this lens of Self – this includes moral judgements, truth claims, value determinations, ontological lenses and theoretical models of reality.  

This model of Culture provides a pathway to better understanding the dominant Anthropocentric cultural forms. Below are four predominant meta-narratives for organizing society determined through the triangulation of Self, Other and cultural constructs.

Meta-narrative	Constructs	Conception of Other
Ethnocentric	Convention and tradition of in-tribe determines value/truth.	Outside of tribal and historical convention.
Humanist	The ideals of freedom and liberty for (certain) humans determines value/truth.	Outside the human in-group.
Rational	Instrumental models of reality that can be determined cognitively are valuable/true.	Outside the technical and rational models of cognition.
Pluralist	Acceptance of multiple values and positions of truth, determined by the subjective limitations to contain pluralities.	Singular positions of truth.

These four dominant meta-narratives are not exhaustive, but rather indicative of specific stages of the dominant Anthropocentric, individualistic culture. All four of these models prioritize egocentric subjectivity and are rooted (to varying degrees) in ethnocentric exceptionalism. For example, although the humanist and rationalist movements were partly born out of a critique of ethnocentric logic (especially the dominant Christian model of religious tribalism), they still reified the Self as the primary unit of subjective experience, and defined the Self as the category, ‘ white, male European’. Since World War II, an ongoing dissatisfaction of these two meta-narratives have resulted in a more pluralistic paradigm, which of course, has also resulted in a bifurcation of nationalist, xenophobic reactions (e.g. European Community versus Brexit). Although pluralistic ontologies are supporting a reconception of the Self-Other-Construct triangulation, pluralism still lacks a defining point of view, an overarching moral philosophy, and a cosmology that describes the directionality of the Return.

The archetypal development trajectory of the dominant Anthropocentric culture will continue to re-create the fundamental error of separation, and therefore, create and enact Return narratives based on destructive cultural conceptions (e.g. Armageddon, apocalypse, collapse, etc.) until we “hack” the dominant conception of the Self-Other-Construct trinity. These alternative meta-narratives do not need to be created ex nihilo. There is a rich tradition of counter-narratives in epistemologies of the global South, including social movements and Indigenous communities. These narratives share a trans-personal sense of Self that is in radical relationality to both the human and more-than-human worlds, both the seen and unseen realms. They share a life-centric approach based on kinship with the living world, reciprocity, generosity, regeneration, consent, dialogue and solidarity.

There is a rich tradition of counter-narratives in epistemologies of the global South, including social movements and Indigenous communities. These narratives share a trans-personal sense of Self that is in radical relationality to both the human and more-than-human worlds.

Two examples of this are the ancient cosmologies of animism (seeing the world and its constitutive parts as living, relational and dialogic) and post-humanism (thinking/feeling beyond human gaze, care and concern). There are many other meta-narratives we could include here including buen vivir from Latin American traditions, ubuntu (”I am who I am through you”)  from the Bantu African cosmologies, etc. What these trans-personal, life-centric narratives hold in common is an ethic of interbeing. This goes beyond interdependence into a radical re-definition of Self through Other, breaking the binary of Western, dualistic, rationalistic thinking.

We believe that part of the cultural evolutionary process requires an understanding of the deep logic, narratives, cultural codes and belief systems of the dominant system; researching and synthesizing life-centric alternatives, especially those rooted in Earth-centric, symbiotic cultures; and testing & iterating new/emerging/ancient narratives in realtime to expose, disrupt and shift cultural assumptions to create new/ancient/emerging narrative spaces for possibility, transformation, restoration and justice. 

Further reading

On Anthropocene: Explore the concept through other conceptualisations of the anthropocene: e.g,  capitalocene (Moore, 2013); Chthulucene (Haraway, 2015); Anthropo-scene (Lorimer, 2017); Plastic-ene (New York Times, 2014); Plantationcene (Tsing, 2015); Mis-anthropocene (Clover & Spahr, 2014); Anthrobscene (Parikka, 2015); Ecocene (Norgaard, 2013); Plutocene (Glikson, 2017); Technocene (Hornborg, 2015). Moore, J (2013). “Anthropocene, Capitalocene and the myth of industrialization II.” World-Ecological Imaginations: Power and Production in the Web of Life; Moore J W (2014) The Capitalocene, Part I & 2 (On the Nature & Origins of Our Ecological Crisis/Abstract Social Nature and the Limits to Capital); Haraway, D (2015). “Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin.” Environmental humanities 6, no. 1: 159-165; Lorimer, J (2017). “The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed.” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 1: 117-142. New York Times The Editorial Board, (2014) Notes from the Plastic-ene; Tsing, A L (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press; Parikka J (2015) The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Norgaard, Richard B. (2013) “Escaping economism, escaping the econocene.” Economy of Sufficiency. Wuppertal: Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy: 44-52.; Hornborg, Alf. (2015) “The political ecology of the Technocene: Uncovering ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system.” In The Anthropocene and the global environmental crisis, pp. 57-69. Routledge; Glikson, A Y (2017). The Plutocene: Blueprints for a post-anthropocene greenhouse earth. Cham: Springer International Publishing; Crutzen, P.J. and Stoermer, E.F. (2000), The Anthropocene: IGBP Global Change Newsletter, v. 41, p. 17–18. ; Latour B (2013) Agency at the time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History Vol. 45, pp. 1-18, 2014; Mirzoeff, N. (2014) Visualising the Anthropocene. Public Culture 26(2) 213-232.; Mbembe, A (2015) Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive. Talk given at the University of Witwatersand, 22 April, 2015.; Turpin E (ed) (2013) Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press; Yusoff K (2013) Geologic life: prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(5): 779 – 795. Ruddiman, William F. (2003) “The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago.” Climatic change 61, no. 3: 261-293; Steffen, W, Grinevald J, Crutzen P, and McNeil J (2011). “The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1938: 842-867.

On Posthumanism (including: New/Neo-Materialism; and anchoring Posthumanism in Feminist, Queer and Critical Race Theories): Bringing “matter” back in counters the linguistic focus of poststructuralism, cultural theory and literary theory. Material/matter is “chthonic” (Haraway, 2006); “vibrant” and has “thing power” (Bennett, 2010). Note: there is a risk of posthuman new/neo-materialism reifying a colonial logic –  have been criticised for failing to highlight differences among humans and downplay issues of race/gender/sexuality – so it is important to infuse these schools of thought with feminist, queer, critical race theories. Overviews: New Materialism (on Global Society Theory) or: Sencindiver, S. Y. (2017). New materialism. Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1565; Haraway, D. (2006). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century. In The international handbook of virtual learning environments (pp. 117-158). Springer, Dordrecht; Saldanha, A. (2006) Re-ontologising race: The machinic geography of phenotype. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24: 9–24; Shomura, C. (2017) Exploring the promise of new materialisms. Lateral, 6.1 (Spring); Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1): 33-47.; Tompkins, K.W. (2016) On the limits and promise of new materialist philosophy. Lateral, 5.1 (Spring).; Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham NC: Duke University Press.; DeLanda, M. (2006)  A New Philosophy of Society. London and New York: Continuum; ; Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter.  Durham NC: Duke University Press; Fox, N.J, and Alldred, P. (2017) Sociology and the New Materialism.  London: Sage; Jackson, Z. I. (2013) Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism. Feminist Studies 39(9); Puar, J.K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press; van der Tuin, I. and Dolphijn, R. (2010). The transversality of new materialism. Women: A Cultural Review, 21(2), 153-171

On Alternative futures: On Prefigurative politics (e.g., on living the change you wish to see and being  “conscientious objectors” to the dominant neoliberal system): Ladha, A (2018) From green growth to post-growth. TruthOut; Ladha, A (2020) Conscious capitalism is an alibi and an apology for our existing paradigm. DoubleBlind. Watch: Ladha, A., (2020) Sacred activism and being of place. Local Futures; Engler, M and Engler, P (2014) Should we fight the system or be the change? Open Democracy; On critical hope: Freire, P. (2014) Pedagogy of Hope. Written in 1992 to elaborate on Pedagogy of the Oppressed with a focus on hope; Parla, A, (2019) Critique without a politics of hope in Fassin, D and Harcourt, B (2019) A time for critique; Books in the genres of: Afrofuturism; Feminist futures; Disability futures; and see Global Social Theory’s page on Decolonial Speculative Fiction & Fantasy.

On decolonial/postcolonial theory: Castro-Gómez, S. (2005) The Hubris of Zero Point: Science, Race, and Illustration in the New Granada (1750–1816); Bhambra, G. and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. (2017) Introduction: Global  Challenges for Sociology; Frantz, F. (1995). Wretched of the Earth; Choudhury, B. (2016). Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Decolonising the Mind. In Reading Postcolonial Theory (pp. 63-82). Routledge India; Bhabha, H. K. (2012). The commitment to theory. In The location of culture (pp. 59-87). Routledge; Césaire, A. (2001). Discourse on colonialism. NYU Press; Mamdani, M. (2018). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton University Press; Connell, R. (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge Production; Comaroff, J and Comaroff, J (2016) Theory from the south; Bayly, S. (2016) “Colonialism/Postcolonialism”, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

On resilient societies (Animism, Indigeneity, Gaia, Non/pre-dualism): For overviews and critiques of the Ontological turn; “Perspectivism”; “Multi-Naturalism” and “Animism”, see: Bessire, L, and Bond D. (2014) “Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique.” American ethnologist 41, no. 3: 440-456; Costa, L, and Carlos F. (2010) “The return of the animists: Recent studies of Amazonian ontologies.” Religion and Society 1, no. 1: 89-109; Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich (2010) “The emergence of multispecies ethnography.” Cultural anthropology 25, no. 4: 545-576; Ramos, A R. (2012) “The politics of perspectivism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 481-494; Chao, S. (2018) “In the shadow of the palm: Dispersed ontologies among Marind, West Papua.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 4 : 621-649; Ingold, T. (2013) “Anthropology beyond humanity.” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 38, no. 3; Kohn, E. (2013) How forests think. University of California Press; Tsing, A L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press; Kirksey, E, (2014) ed. The multispecies salon. Duke University Press; Viveiros de Castro, E. (1996) “Images of nature and society in Amazonian ethnology.” Annual review of Anthropology 25, no. 1: 179-200; see “Historical Ecology” literature which seeks to dereify concepts of nature/culture, e.g. Rival, L (2006). “Amazonian historical ecologies.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: S79-S94; see important debates in Gaia; Luisetti, F. (2017). Decolonizing Gaia or, Why the Savages Shall Fear Bruno Latour’s Political Animism. Decolonizing Gaia or, Why the Savages Shall Fear Bruno Latour’s Political Animism, 61-70 Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons.

On cultural myth: A great example of using myth to develop new connections/meanings is: Cave, D. (1993) Mircea Eliade’s vision for a new humanism. Oxford University Press, 1993. Cave picks up and develops Eliade’s idea of a “new humanism” for modern culture. Eliade anticipated a modern culture (devoid of spirituality, demythologized, and overly material) developing renewed meaning through a restoration of archetypal myths/symbols. Eliade called this recovery of meaning a “new humanism” of existential meaning and cultural-religious unity, putting forward a radically pluralistic vision to bring people together; See how narrative change practitioners talk about the importance of using myths to change people’s understandings of reality (their values, relationships and identities): A case for the banality of myth, Wise Owl Communications, January (2022). 

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