The Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 022669867X
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (266 download)

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Book Synopsis The Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown by : Michael Taussig

Download or read book The Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown written by Michael Taussig and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For a long time, we humans have excelled in mimicking nature with the goal of exploiting it. Now, with the existential threat of global climate change on the horizon, the ever-provocative Michael Taussig asks what it would take to change ourselves so as to save our world. Acknowledging the possibility of collapse and our all-too-human impotence in the face of accelerating disaster, this book is not solely a reflection on our tragic condition but also a theoretical effort to reckon with those human faculties that have fed our ambition for dominance over nature. At stake is an ultimate undoing of our sense of control--a "mastery of non-mastery." Animated by the urgency of a planet approaching meltdown, Taussig captures our moment, and all its attendant mythologies, with luminescent clarity"--

The Corn Wolf

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022631099X
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis The Corn Wolf by : Michael Taussig

Download or read book The Corn Wolf written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-12-02 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting a decade of work from iconic anthropologist and writer Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf pinpoints a moment of intellectual development for the master stylist, exemplifying the “nervous system” approach to writing and truth that has characterized his trajectory. Pressured by the permanent state of emergency that imbues our times, this approach marries storytelling with theory, thickening spiraling analysis with ethnography and putting the study of so-called primitive societies back on the anthropological agenda as a way of better understanding the sacred in everyday life. The leading figure of these projects is the corn wolf, whom Wittgenstein used in his fierce polemic on Frazer’s Golden Bough. For just as the corn wolf slips through the magic of language in fields of danger and disaster, so we are emboldened to take on the widespread culture of academic—or what he deems “agribusiness”—writing, which strips ethnography from its capacity to surprise and connect with other worlds, whether peasant farmers in Colombia, Palestinians in Israel, protestors in Zuccotti Park, or eccentric yet fundamental aspects of our condition such as animism, humming, or the acceleration of time. A glance at the chapter titles—such as “The Stories Things Tell” or “Iconoclasm Dictionary”—along with his zany drawings, testifies to the resonant sensibility of these works, which lope like the corn wolf through the boundaries of writing and understanding.

The Magic of the State

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135249040
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (352 download)

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Book Synopsis The Magic of the State by : Michael Taussig

Download or read book The Magic of the State written by Michael Taussig and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the enchanted mountain of a spirit-queen presiding over an unnamed, postcolonial country, this ethnographic work of ficto-criticism recreates in written form the shrines by which the dead--notably the fetishized forms of Europe's Others, Indians and Blacks--generate the magical powers of the modern state.

My Cocaine Museum

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226790150
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis My Cocaine Museum by : Michael Taussig

Download or read book My Cocaine Museum written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-12-19 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years. Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine. This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories.

Walter Benjamin's Grave

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226790002
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis Walter Benjamin's Grave by : Michael Taussig

Download or read book Walter Benjamin's Grave written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology’s—and indeed today’s—most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited Benjamin’s grave in Port Bou. The result is “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin’s border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume of the same name. “Looking over these essays written over the past decade,” writes Taussig, “I think what they share is a love of muted and defective storytelling as a form of analysis. Strange love indeed; love of the wound, love of the last gasp.” Although thematically these essays run the gamut—covering the monument and graveyard at Port Bou, discussions of peasant poetry in Colombia, a pact with the devil, the peculiarities of a shaman’s body, transgression, the disappearance of the sea, New York City cops, and the relationship between flowers and violence—each shares Taussig’s highly individual brand of storytelling, one that depends on a deep appreciation of objects and things as a way to retrieve even deeper philosophical and anthropological meanings. Whether he finds himself in Australia, Colombia, Manhattan, or Spain, in the midst of a book or a beach, whether talking to friends or staring at a monument, Taussig makes clear through these marvelous essays that materialist knowledge offers a crucial alternative to the increasingly abstract, globalized, homogenized, and digitized world we inhabit. Pursuing an adventure that is part ethnography, part autobiography, and part cultural criticism refracted through the object that is Walter Benjamin’s grave, Taussig, with this collection, provides his own literary memorial to the twentieth century’s greatest cultural critic.

Palma Africana

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022651627X
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Palma Africana by : Michael Taussig

Download or read book Palma Africana written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist’s dream.” So begins Palma Africana, the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to what elixir does he refer? Palm oil. Saturating everything from potato chips to nail polish, palm oil has made its way into half of the packaged goods in our supermarkets. By 2020, world production will be double what it was in 2000. In Colombia, palm oil plantations are covering over one-time cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant life. Over time, they threaten indigenous livelihoods and give rise to abusive labor conditions and major human rights violations. The list of entwined horrors—climatic, biological, social—is long. But Taussig takes no comfort in our usual labels: “habitat loss,” “human rights abuses,” “climate change.” The shock of these words has passed; nowadays it is all a blur. Hence, Taussig’s keen attention to words and writing throughout this work. He takes cues from precursors’ ruminations: Roland Barthes’s suggestion that trees form an alphabet in which the palm tree is the loveliest; William Burroughs’s retort to critics that for him words are alive like animals and don’t like to be kept in pages—cut them and the words are let free. Steeped in a lifetime of philosophical and ethnographic exploration, Palma Africana undercuts the banality of the destruction taking place all around us and offers a penetrating vision of the global condition. Richly illustrated and written with experimental verve, this book is Taussig’s Tristes Tropiques for the twenty-first century.

Law in a Lawless Land

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226790142
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis Law in a Lawless Land by : Michael Taussig

Download or read book Law in a Lawless Land written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-11-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern nation in a state of total disorder, Colombia is an international flashpoint—wracked by more than half a century of civil war, political conflict, and drug-trade related violence—despite a multibillion dollar American commitment that makes it the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Law in a Lawless Land offers a rare and penetrating insight into the nature of Colombia's present peril. In a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state, anthropologist Michael Taussig chronicles two weeks in a small town in Colombia's Cauca Valley taken over by paramilitaries that brazenly assassinate adolescent gang members. Armed with automatic weapons and computer-generated lists of names and photographs, the paramilitaries have the tacit support of the police and even many of the desperate townspeople, who are seeking any solution to the crushing uncertainty of violence in their lives. Concentrating on everyday experience, Taussig forces readers to confront a kind of terror to which they have become numb and complacent. "If you want to know what it is like to live in a country where the state has disintegrated, this moving book by an anthropologist well known for his writings on murderous Colombia will tell you."—Eric Hobsbawm

I Swear I Saw This

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226789845
Total Pages : 187 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis I Swear I Saw This by : Michael Taussig

Download or read book I Swear I Saw This written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig’s reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this”—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig’s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud’s analysis of dreams, Proust’s thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin’s theories of history—fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig’s characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, “drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody.” Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.

Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 552 pages
Book Rating : 4.X/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by : Michael T. Taussig

Download or read book Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man written by Michael T. Taussig and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working with the image of the Indian shaman as Wild Man, Taussig reveals not the magic of the shaman but that of the politicizing fictions creating the effect of the real. "This extraordinary book . . . will encourage ever more critical and creative explorations."--Fernando Coronil, [I]American Journal of Sociology[/I] "Taussig has brought a formidable collection of data from arcane literary, journalistic, and biographical sources to bear on . . . questions of evil, torture, and politically institutionalized hatred and terror. His intent is laudable, and much of the book is brilliant, both in its discovery of how particular people perpetrated evil and others interpreted it."--Stehen G. Bunker, Social Science Quarterly

What Color Is the Sacred?

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226789993
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis What Color Is the Sacred? by : Michael Taussig

Download or read book What Color Is the Sacred? written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past thirty years, visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has crafted a highly distinctive body of work. Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussig’s remarkable intellectual path. Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum,this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls “the bodily unconscious” in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history—a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West’s discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe’s belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich. Nietzsche once wrote, “So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history.” With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we’ve come to expect from him.

Nature, Man and Woman

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307822982
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Nature, Man and Woman by : Alan Watts

Download or read book Nature, Man and Woman written by Alan Watts and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From “perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West—and an author who ‘had the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the unwritable’” (Los Angeles Times)—a guide that draws on Chinese Taoism to reexamine humanity’s place in the natural world and the relation between body and spirit. Western thought and culture have coalesced around a series of constructed ideas—that human beings stand separate from a nature that must be controlled; that the mind is somehow superior to the body; that all sexuality entails a seduction—that in some way underlie our exploitation of the earth, our distrust of emotion, and our loneliness and reluctance to love. Here, Watts fundamentally challenges these assumptions, drawing on the precepts of Taoism to present an alternative vision of man and the universe—one in which the distinctions between self and other, spirit and matter give way to a more holistic way of seeing.

I Am Sophia

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Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1725291878
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (252 download)

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Book Synopsis I Am Sophia by : J. F. Alexander

Download or read book I Am Sophia written by J. F. Alexander and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a mysterious and charismatic woman insinuates herself into a fringe religious group, its dozen members wonder whether she is a lunatic, a con artist, or a messiah. Sophia quickly upends the routines and expectations of the group--the last Christians in the inhabited solar system--while Peter, their struggling leader, becomes increasingly obsessed with her. Before long, Peter finds himself following Sophia on a perilous interplanetary adventure which may cost both of them their lives.

Reality Boxes

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Publisher : Swann-Ryder Productions, LLC
ISBN 13 : 1949214559
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (492 download)

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Book Synopsis Reality Boxes by : Ingo Swann

Download or read book Reality Boxes written by Ingo Swann and published by Swann-Ryder Productions, LLC. This book was released on 2018-09-02 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE REALITY OF HUMAN REALITY BOXES In this lucid and absorbing work, Ingo Swann opens up the continuing story about the fuller extent of human consciousness and limitations imposed on it by human reality boxes, a.k.a. "socially constructed realities" and "personal realities." All cultures, societies, and individuals have fashioned reality boxes. Like language-making and other innate factors, this clearly indicates that somewhere in the motherboard of human consciousness there exists a versatile innate capability to do so. As advanced researchers of consciousnesses are beginning to suspect, this means that behind all of the thousands upon thousands of reality boxes are the impressive factors of innate human consciousness itself — the sum of which must be far, far greater than smaller "reality" versions of it found in limited reality boxes — from which many seek to escape. However, "getting out of the box" is something like escaping a prison, which one cannot really achieve unless one learns a great deal about the nature of the prison itself. Most reality-box constructions omit mention of how awesome and wonderful the individual and collective consciousness of our species actually is. Even so, this magical aspect of ourselves can be retrieved from the many wreckages brought about via conflicting reality-box endeavors. After all, the panorama of innate human consciousness does survive, and is always "there" behind whatever reality boxes are superimposed on it.

The Rational Male

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Publisher : Rollo Tomassi
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 191 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis The Rational Male by : Rollo Tomassi

Download or read book The Rational Male written by Rollo Tomassi and published by Rollo Tomassi. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Bible of the Red Pill", The Rational Male® is a rational and pragmatic approach to intersexual dynamics, and the social and psychological underpinnings of intergender relations. The book is the compiled, ten-year core writing of author/blogger Rollo Tomassi from therationalmale.com. Rollo Tomassi is one of the leading voices in the globally growing, male-focused online consortium known as the "Manosphere". Outlined are the concepts of positive masculinity, the feminine imperative, plate theory, operative social conventions and the core psychological theory behind Game awareness and "red pill" ideology. Tomassi explains and outlines the principles of intergender social dynamics and foundational reasoning behind them.

Reality of Dreams

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300262930
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Reality of Dreams by : Japhy Wilson

Download or read book Reality of Dreams written by Japhy Wilson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of radical megaprojects in the Ecuadorian Amazon, considering the fate of utopian fantasies under conditions of global capitalism From 2007 to 2017, the “Citizens’ Revolution” launched an ambitious series of post-neoliberal megaprojects in the remote Amazonian region of Ecuador, including an interoceanic transport corridor, a world-leading biotechnology university, and a planned network of two hundred “Millennium Cities.” The aim was to liberate the nation from its ecologically catastrophic dependence on Amazonian oil reserves, while transforming its jungle region from a wild neoliberal frontier into a brave new world of “twenty-first-century socialism.” This book documents the heroic scale of this endeavor, the surreal extent of its failure, and the paradoxical process through which it ended up reinforcing the economic model that it had been designed to overcome. It explores the phantasmatic and absurd dimensions of the transformation of social reality under conditions of global capitalism, deconstructing the utopian fantasies of the state, and drawing attention to the eruption of insurgent utopias staged by those with nothing left to lose.

Meta-Religion

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520281365
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis Meta-Religion by : James W. Laine

Download or read book Meta-Religion written by James W. Laine and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-01-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whereas many textbooks treat the subject of world religions in an apolitical way, as if each religion were a path for individuals seeking wisdom and not a discourse intimately connected with the exercise of power, James W. Laine treats religion and politics as halves of the same whole, tracing their relationship from the policies of Alexander the Great to the ideologies of modern Europe secularists, with stops in classical India, China, and the Islamic world. Meta-Religion is a groundbreaking text that brings power and politics to the fore of our understanding of world religions, placing religion at the center of world history. This synthetic approach is both transformative and enlightening as it presents a powerful model for thinking differently about what religion is and how it functions in the world. With images and maps to bring the narrative to life, Meta-Religion combines sophisticated scholarly critique with accessibility that students and scholar alike will appreciate.

Future Remains

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Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022650882X
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Future Remains by : Gregg Mitman

Download or read book Future Remains written by Gregg Mitman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can a pesticide pump, a jar full of sand, or an old calico print tell us about the Anthropocene—the age of humans? Just as paleontologists look to fossil remains to infer past conditions of life on earth, so might past and present-day objects offer clues to intertwined human and natural histories that shape our planetary futures. In this era of aggressive hydrocarbon extraction, extreme weather, and severe economic disparity, how might certain objects make visible the uneven interplay of economic, material, and social forces that shape relationships among human and nonhuman beings? Future Remains is a thoughtful and creative meditation on these questions. The fifteen objects gathered in this book resemble more the tarots of a fortuneteller than the archaeological finds of an expedition—they speak of planetary futures. Marco Armiero, Robert S. Emmett, and Gregg Mitman have assembled a cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene, bringing together a mix of lively essays, creatively chosen objects, and stunning photographs by acclaimed photographer Tim Flach. The result is a book that interrogates the origins, implications, and potential dangers of the Anthropocene and makes us wonder anew about what exactly human history is made of.