This is a belief that can also be found in other geographical regions, for example among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s contribution to this issue of e-flux journal compiles and extrapolates on many similar cosmogonies.
Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, who hold positions in Climatology and Global Change Science in the Geography Department at University College of London, have recently proposed 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene. See Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, Defining the Anthropocene, in Nature, 519 (12 March 2015) 171-180. For a summary see: http://www.cnet.com/news/orbis-spike-in-1610-marks-date-when-humans-fundamentally-changed-the-planet/
Phillipe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010).
Ibid.
See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Jealous Potter (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988).
The manual guide to both understand and hopefully avoid this thorny path might very well be Isabelle Stengers’s Cosmopolitics volumes.
See Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Must Pass, trans. William McCants (Harvard: John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at the Harvard University, 2006).
Alongside Isabelle Stengers’s Cosmopolitics series, Phillipe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture may very well be the first book of cosmopolitical historiography, at least in the moments in which, in order to think such ontological evolution, it appears to bridge anthropology with historiography.
