Seminars

"Carbon" is arguably one of the most ambiguous commodities of late neoliberal capitalism. The creation of a commodity form focused on carbon is meant to avert climate change by calculating and putting a value on the climate impact of human actions. Yet, this creation both assigns carbon a transformative role in changing individual and collective practices of production and consumption, and at the same time a conservative role by being part of market designs that try to preserve and protect the contemporary capitalist system from itself. This book argues that the ambiguity stems from carbon’s sociomaterial “being” as much more than a commodity. Carbon is a chemical element of nature, and as such it is both material and constant, yet fluid in its movement through a diversity of states and bodies – social as much as material. Most importantly, carbon thus figures in a long range of relationships to other bodies: natural and environmental, economic and political, social and cultural. Yet, even as a commodity carbon is often regarded as intangible and ephemeral – most importantly as data and information within markets and practices of offsetting, where the credits that are traded have often been accused of being “hot air”. The book, in this way, argues that carbon – as discourse, standard, or sociocultural norm – values “everything”, but when priced as a commodity it has to deal with the claim that it refers to “nothing”. In this capacity carbon provides an interesting anthropological and sociological lens for discussing how late neoliberal capitalism deals not only with the contemporary climate crisis, but with value more generally.

Dr. Douglas Rogers is currently working on Eating Oil: An Earthly History, a project about microbes that metabolize hydrocarbons and the humans, states, and corporations who have discovered, researched, cared for, grown, sold, killed, and otherwise related to them. Ranging across Soviet, European, and North American sites, the project deepens our knowledge of the natural and cultural history of hydrocarbons and life on Earth and seeks new possibilities for reckoning with that history in the present. This event will be a discussion on this project.

Imagining what life will become in the near future, public officials and community members on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast are coming together to take responsibility for underground water worlds. In the process, they move across two different configurations: groundwater and aquifers. Each of these intensifies different forces, pushing and pulling everyday tasks in the direction of water extraction or an expansive understanding of matter and being. I examine these as two configurations that can flicker, changing the grounds of the possible quickly, although many times briefly. I examine these dynamics by looking at data collection and database maintenance at the intersection of community organizations and public agencies. From there, I theorize the configuration and its flickering qualities to understand how people use science to relate to subterranean water in the midst of a changing political, economic, and security environment.

The North Atlantic Gyre is part of a system of circulating ocean currents often referred to by oceanographers and climate scientists as the “oceanic conveyor belt,” a metaphor that imagines the sea in the form of a ubiquitous but essential late 19 th century industrial technology. Before the “conveyor belt” emerged as a technology, this gyre sustained the violent physics of colonialism by creating a current of circulation that linked Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. In the midst of these circulating currents, the North Atlantic Gyre also sustained a weedy refuge or, depending on your perspective, albatross—The Sargasso Sea. The Sargasso is a sea within the sea bounded by the gyre’s currents with a distinct ecosystem dominated by a genus of pelagic seaweed known as Sargassum. Paradoxically, however, the Anthropocene environment that has emerged through global capitalism has increasingly disrupted the metaphorical “conveyor belt” at its center. In the long term, this increases the likelihood of disruptive changes to ocean circulation and climate regimes. And in the shorter term, these changes may be causing the proliferation of a rogue circulation of Sargassum seaweed leading to massive seaweed “strandings” on the coastlines of Belize and throughout the greater Caribbean. Moving from the breakdown of global oceanic circulatory systems to the Belizean shores on which these weedy excesses find their ends, this paper builds upon growing critical approaches to the commons and commoning by ethnographically examining the more than human social and political relationships that manage Sargassum’s unplanned arrival in the Caribbean. Here, on a shore that Aldous Huxley referred to as “the end of the world,” local residents, governments and scientists are attempting to build new ecologies of possibility through the weedy remains of capitalism’s failure and breakdown.

Chimpanzees and people each approach the other from different sides of a translucent margin of similitude. Across time and space, chimps and people have interacted and informed each other; people certainly, and perhaps also certain chimpanzees, recognize and curiously engage with the similarities that bring people and chimps together in resemblance, and differences that delineate our separateness. But the significance of this double-sided mirror of resemblance varies in terms of culture and history, ecology and biology, science and politics; such variations are themselves contested, commercialized, and consequential for chips and humans alike. While forest communities of the Congo River basin have lived in overlapping ecological spaces and intersecting social spaces for millennia, direct Euroamerican interaction with chimps only began in the mid-nineteenth century, with early colonial explorations of equatorial Africa. This paper, a draft of a chapter concerning contexts of chimp-human interactions in southeastern Cameroon, explores the contrasting boundaries and bridges between people and chimps as imagined, articulated, and actualized by forest communities on the one hand, and by colonial explorers and collectors, agents and officials on the other. Although claiming an anchoring argument is premature, this chapter explores the possibility that colonial-era perceptions of and engagements with chimpanzees drove the surge in transmission of the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) harbored by Pan troglodyte troglodyte chimpanzees into the first human hosts in whom SIV would successfully adapt to become a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), ultimately seeding the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.

A good travel book should offer what the once heralded writer Norman Douglas called the three different types of exploration: into a particular time abroad, into the author’s brain, and, most profoundly, into our own psyche. Yet travel books and academia can sometimes make for uncomfortable bedfellows – two groups of writers who ofttimes do not sometimes see the respective values of ‘the other’. Dr. Gordon Peake – an academic by training, a travel writer by desire – set out to try combine both genres, when he set out to write a book about Bougainville, a set of islands on the farthest fringes of Papua New Guinea recovering from conflict and looking to strike out as a country of its own. The book is based on Peake’s experience working as an adviser to the government in Bougainville from 2016-2020. In his day job he saw at first hand the challenges of trying to stand up new government systems, painful realities sometimes unseen in academic writing on peace agreement implementation. Away from the office he travelled with former rebels, followed the ghost of anthropologist Beatrice Blackwood and meditated on how much perceived academic conventions meant that her most vivid and enduringly fascinating writing was never published. In 2019, he reported for world media on the joy and euphoria as the people of Bougainville vote in a referendum on their future – 97.7% voted to strike out as a country of their own –and has followed developments since as sputtering progress is made on progressing the results. When he went to try to write about his experiences, he encountered strains in straddling both genres but in an unexpected way. It wasn’t audiences who were the most difficult constituency to convince. It was publishers. Gordon Peake is Senior Adviser, Pacific Islands, United States Institute of Peace. His first book was a double-award winning memoir of life in Timor-Leste, his second, ‘Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation’, is on Bougainville and he is beginning research on his third, about long-staying Americans in the Pacific entitled ‘The Relics’. He has written for the Guardian, Aeon and a range of Australian publications.