Alf Hornborg

The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative

The Anthropocene narrative portrays humanity as a species ascending to power over the rest of the Earth System. In the crucial field of climate change, this entails the attribution of fossil fuel combustion to properties acquired during human evolution, notably the ability to manipulate fire. But the fossil economy was not created nor is it upheld by humankind in general. This intervention questions the use of the species category in the Anthropocene narrative and argues that it is analytically flawed, as well as inimical to action. Intra-species inequalities are part and parcel of the current ecological crisis and cannot be ignored in attempts to understand it.

Ethnogenesis, regional integration, and ecology in prehistoric Amazonia: Toward a system perspective

This paper critically reviews reconstructions of cultural development in prehistoric Amazonia and argues for the primacy of regional and interregional exchange in generating the complex distributions of ethnolinguistic identities traced by linguists and archaeologists in the area. This approach requires an explicit abandonment of notions of migrating peoples in favor of modern anthropological understandings of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Further, the paper discusses the significance of such a regional system perspective on Amazonian ethnogenesis for the ongoing debate on the extent of social stratification and agricultural intensification on the floodplains and wet savannas of lowland South America. It concludes that the emergence of Arawakan chiefdoms and ethnic identities in such environments after the first millennium BC signifies the occupation of a niche defined in terms of both ecology and regional exchange but also that it transformed both these kinds of conditions. In these processes, ethnicity, s...This paper critically reviews reconstructions of cultural development in prehistoric Amazonia and argues for the primacy of regional and interregional exchange in generating the complex distributions of ethnolinguistic identities traced by linguists and archaeologists in the area. This approach requires an explicit abandonment of notions of migrating peoples in favor of modern anthropological understandings of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Further, the paper discusses the significance of such a regional system perspective on Amazonian ethnogenesis for the ongoing debate on the extent of social stratification and agricultural intensification on the floodplains and wet savannas of lowland South America. It concludes that the emergence of Arawakan chiefdoms and ethnic identities in such environments after the first millennium BC signifies the occupation of a niche defined in terms of both ecology and regional exchange but also that it transformed both these kinds of conditions. In these processes, ethnicity, social stratification, economy, and ecology were all recursively intertwined.

Animism, fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world

Abstract Animistic or ‘relational’ ontologies encountered in non-Western (i.e. premodern) settings pose a challenge to Western (i.e. modern) knowledge production, as they violate fundamentalassumptions of Cartesian science. Naturalscientists who have tried seriously to incorporate subject-subject relations into their intellectual practice (e.g. Uexküll, Bateson) have inexorably been relegated to the margins. Surrounded by philosophers and sociologists of science (e.g. Latour) announcing the end of Cartesian objectivism, however,late modern or ‘post-modern’ anthropologists discussing animistic understandings of nature will be excused for taking them more seriously than their predecessors. It is incumbent on them to analytically sort out what epistemological options there are, and to ask why pre-modern, modern, and post-modern people will tend to deal with culture/nature or subject/object hybridity in such different ways. Animism, fetishism, and objectivism can be understood as alternative responses to universal semiotic anxieties about where or how to draw boundaries between persons and things.

Ethnogenesis, Regional Integration, and Ecology in Prehistoric Amazonia

This paper critically reviews reconstructions of cultural development in prehistoric Amazonia and argues for the primacy of regional and interregional exchange in generating the complex distributions of ethnolinguistic identities traced by linguists and archaeologists in the area. This approach requires an explicit abandonment of notions of migrating peoples in favor of modern anthropological understandings of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Further, the paper discusses the significance of such a regional system perspective on Amazonian ethnogenesis for the ongoing debate on the extent of social stratification and agricultural intensification on the floodplains and wet savannas of lowland South America. It concludes that the emergence of Arawakan chiefdoms and ethnic identities in such environments after the first millennium BC signifies the occupation of a niche defined in terms of both ecology and regional exchange but also that it transformed both these kinds of conditions. In these processes, ethnicity, s...This paper critically reviews reconstructions of cultural development in prehistoric Amazonia and argues for the primacy of regional and interregional exchange in generating the complex distributions of ethnolinguistic identities traced by linguists and archaeologists in the area. This approach requires an explicit abandonment of notions of migrating peoples in favor of modern anthropological understandings of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Further, the paper discusses the significance of such a regional system perspective on Amazonian ethnogenesis for the ongoing debate on the extent of social stratification and agricultural intensification on the floodplains and wet savannas of lowland South America. It concludes that the emergence of Arawakan chiefdoms and ethnic identities in such environments after the first millennium BC signifies the occupation of a niche defined in terms of both ecology and regional exchange but also that it transformed both these kinds of conditions. In these processes, ethnicity, social stratification, economy, and ecology were all recursively intertwined.

Revelations of Resilience: From the Ideological Disarmament of Disaster to the Revolutionary Implications of (P)anarchy

The currently burgeoning discussions on ‘socio-ecological resilience’ tend to mask the power relations, contradictions of interest, and inequalities that to a large extent determine how humans utilise the surface of the Earth. On the other hand, resilience theory has the potential to radically confront such power structures by identifying some of the basic assumptions of economics as the very source of vulnerability, mismanagement, and crises. It has every reason to critically scrutinise the operation of general-purpose money, the global market, and neoliberal ideology. The ultimate implications of resilience theory, in other words, are vastly more radical and subversive than its current proponents imagine. A strategy to enhance socio-ecological resilience would be to distinguish local from global economic scales by employing separate currencies for the two levels. Proponents of resilience theory are advised to engage more respectfully with social science, particularly its understandings of culture and power. Upon doing so, they would find the idea of a bi-centric economy, as sketched in this article, entirely consistent with the fundamental insights of resilience theory.

Technology as Fetish: Marx, Latour, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism

This article discusses how the way in which post-Enlightenment humans tend to relate to material objects is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalism. The difficulties that conventional academic disciplines have in grasping the societal and political aspect of ‘technology’ stem from the predominant Cartesian paradigm that distinguishes the domain of material objects from that of social relations of exchange. This Cartesian paradigm has constrained the Marxian analysis of capital accumulation from extending the concept of fetishism to the domain of technology. Both Marxian and mainstream thought represent technological objects as empowered by their intrinsic properties, which derive from human ingenuity and tend to progress over time. To transcend this paradigm will be possible only through the kind of post-Cartesian perspective on material artefacts that has been championed by Bruno Latour. However, Latour’s own neglect of technological systems as social strategies of exploitation reflects his lack of concern with global inequalities.

Symbolic technologies: Machines and the Marxian notion of fetishism

By extending the Marxian theory of fetishism from money and commodities to machines, we may achieve an epistemological shift in our understanding of the foundations of ‘technological development’. The first part of the article discusses previous definitions of fetishism in order to distil some central themes that appear to be particularly significant to the argument on machine fetishism. It is argued that semiotic theory can be useful in distinguishing different varieties of fetishism. The core of the Marxian definition is understood to be the mystification of unequal relations of social exchange through the attribution of autonomous agency or productivity to certain kinds of material objects. The attribution of productivity to modern technology is here interpreted as a mystification of the unequal, global exchange of (labour) time and (natural) space.

Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution

This paper argues for a semiotic approach to the problematic interface of economics and ecology. It begins by tracing the origins of materialist science and discussing strategies for transcending Cartesian dualism in the study of human ecology. It then discusses pre-modernity, modernity and post-modernity as transformations of semiotic relations with implications for identity and culture as well as human-environmental relations. The phenomenon of money is identified as a vehicle and epitome of the processes of semiotic abstraction we know as modernity. Various analogies between money and language are scrutinized and rejected. The tendencies of money to dissolve cultural and natural systems are understood as two aspects of a single, ecosemiotic process. Finally, a very general suggestion is offered as to how the idea and institution of money could be transformed so as to check the continued devastation of the biosphere.

Artifacts have consequences, not agency: Toward a critical theory of global environmental history

This article challenges the urge within Actor-Network Theory, posthumanism, and the ontological turn in sociology and anthropology to dissolve analytical distinctions between subject and object, society and nature, and human and non-human. It argues that only by acknowledging such distinctions and applying a realist ontology can exploitative and unsustainable global power relations be exposed. The predicament of the Anthropocene should not prompt us to abandon distinctions between society and nature but to refine the analytical framework through which we can distinguish between sentience and non-sentience and between the symbolic and non-symbolic. The incompatibility of posthumanist and Marxist approaches to the Anthropocene and the question of agency derives from ideological differences as well as different methodological proclivities. A central illustration of these differences is the understanding of fetishism, a concept viewed by posthumanists as condescending but by Marxists as emancipatory.

Revisiting the Image of Limited Good: On Sustainability, Thermodynamics, and the Illusion of Creating Wealth

Two worldviews are now contending for cultural dominance: the open-system model long promoted by economists, here called the “image of unlimited good,” and a more traditional closed-system view, Foster’s “image of limited good,” still widely found among peasant societies today. The former rests on the assumption that people “create” wealth, an illusion that conflates the properties of wealth’s real and virtual forms while ignoring the economy’s extreme reliance on fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that as “growth” occurs in such a system, it fundamentally destroys; thus the net sum cannot be positive, and the system is not expanding but steadily running down. The latter rests on the assumption that most of the “goods” valued by people in life are scarce, being derived from finite raw materials through the expenditure of human labor and extrasomatic energy. Such goods are therefore “subtractable,” their limited supply forming a commons that must somehow be shared. Based on an ethnological argument centering on the successful management of scarce water for irrigation, a shift toward the closed-system worldview is shown to be necessary if people are to act collectively to limit their expanding consumption, a change already widely underway, particularly in the global South.