Cultural History and the Anthropocene - by Anders Ekström & Marit Ruge Bjærke & Brita Brenna (Hardcover)

About the Book

This open access collection is a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and contributions of cultural history to contemporary and cross-disciplinary discussions of the Anthropocene.

Book Synopsis

This open access collection is a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and contributions of cultural history to contemporary and cross-disciplinary discussions of the Anthropocene.

Organised into three key sections, this volume is a concise and critical overview of interdisciplinary research on the cultural history of the Anthropocene. The first part introduces readers to the key conceptual and theoretical challenges of Anthropocene debates, before the second part analyses a variety of case studies, to highlight how ethnography and cultural history can make certain processes visible and historically tangible. Key case studies explored by the volume range from sustainability in poultry production, to 18th century mining, to natural history and the works of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen. Finally, the third section explores 5 critical approaches to Anthropocene discourse, and the challenges it may pose to alternative styles of cultural history.

Overall, this volume offers a synthesis of conceptual, historical, and critical approaches, that when combined provide a detailed overview of the latest research surrounding the cultural history of the Anthropocene.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the University of Bergen.

Review Quotes

Cultural Histories of the Anthropocene provides a guide to a new field that remains fertile but is already overgrown with a thicket of specialized terms and insider arguments. It's comprehensive, but not in the style of a generic textbook; instead, this edited collection provides a distinct perspective on a global phenomenon. The seventeen bite-sized essays represent a complex and ongoing interdisciplinary conversation among the leading Nordic scholars whose work has done so much to make writing critical planetary histories possible. They critically analyze theories, concepts, and methods; reflect on the politics and ethics of writing of the Anthropocene and being a scholar inthe Anthropocene; and they provide model ethnographic case studies and close of exhibits and texts. Cultural Histories of the Anthropocene will be a particularly valuable resource in undergraduate and graduate classes in the environmental humanities.
Perrin Selcer, Associate Professor, University of Michigan, USA

No cultural historian or scholar engaged with the environmental humanities can ignore the rich and diverse content of this impressive volume.
Christian Wicke, Assistant Professor, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

About the Author

Anders Ekström is a Professor in the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Sweden

Marit Ruge Bjærke is a Researcher in the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen, Norway

Brita Brenna is a Professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, Norway

John Ødemark is Professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, Norway