Being Affected by Sinking Deltas

This paper considers recent studies of global environmental change and their impact on the deltas, social and ecological patches that epitomize an Anthropocene environmental dynamism. Looking into these delta studies, we explore an emerging imagination about human-planet relations. Specifically, we...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Current anthropology 2019-08, Vol.60 (S20), p.S286-S295
Main Authors: Morita, Atsuro, Suzuki, Wakana
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper considers recent studies of global environmental change and their impact on the deltas, social and ecological patches that epitomize an Anthropocene environmental dynamism. Looking into these delta studies, we explore an emerging imagination about human-planet relations. Specifically, we indicate that the relationship between the changing Earth and human activities depicted in these studies is comparable to the kind of affective relations to which the anthropology of science has recently brought attention. While affective relations as anthropologically described depend on the capacity of the body to be affected by other entities, global change research on deltas asks the public to imagine collective life, including infrastructure, land use, resource consumption, and companion species, as composite bodies affected by the changing planet. This imagination is made possible by analogies developed in the vicinity of the notion of resilience, a term that originated in mathematical ecology and complex adaptive systems in computer science. In exploring this interdisciplinary traffic of ideas and models, we elucidate an analogical imagination that crosses the border of machines and organisms.
ISSN:0011-3204
1537-5382
DOI:10.1086/702735