In conversation with Helen Verran (Charles Darwin University)

In the past decades, anthropology has rendered obvious that the conceptual categories by the means of which Europeans had hitherto conceptualized their own destiny—nature, society, culture, history, economics, politics, religion, art—are irrelevant, even misleading, when used to account for other forms of association of beings, some still very active at the periphery of the modern world. Will this anthropological reframing of our analytical tools provide new answers to the challenge of the increasing dysfunction of the Earth system which global warming and the massive extinction of species are rendering manifest?

Biography: Philippe Descola

Philippe Descola initially specialized in the ethnology of Amazonia, focussing on how native societies relate to their environment. He has published extensively on his field research with the Achuar of Ecuador and on the comparative analysis of the relations between humans and non-humans, including images. He is Professor of Anthropology at the Collège de France and a Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Among his books in English are In the Society of Nature; The Spears of Twilight; Beyond Nature and Culture; The Ecology of Others. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Biography: Helen Verran

Helen Verran is University Professorial Fellow, College of Indigenous Futures, Arts and Societies, Charles Darwin University, Australia. She has taught history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne for nearly 25 years with a special focus on articulating the relations between the sciences and Australia's many Aboriginal knowledge traditions. In the 1980s Helen Verran spent eight years in Nigeria, learning from the Yoruba teachers she worked with. Nowadays her research is concerned with governance, policy, and politics in the areas of environmentalism and indigeneity.

About This Series

The Anthropocene—the geological epoch of humanity—has established itself as a key concept within a wider scientific and social discourse. In the midst of the dramatic and destabilizing changes to the basic conditions for life on our planet, new epistemic potentials for human action upon the Earth are to be explored.

In the framework of the Anthropocene Lecture series, a number of distinguished speakers accentuating the Anthropocene debate are invited to respond to a topic that will be a central challenge for many generations to come. The lectures take place at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam.