Anthropocene Anthropology—Contributions and Opportunities

This chapter shows that cultural anthropology has always had a professional proximity to the subject of nature and has dealt with the environment in various ways. The causes of the Anthropocene may not be perceived by us as individuals, but the effects will be experienced locally and differently in the long term. The concepts and goals of countermeasures are also local. This shows that the local access and the holistic approach of cultural anthropology opens a fruitful window to understanding the Anthropocene. In this section of the book, I criticize currently dominant approaches to the Anthropocene in cultural anthropology because they avoid scientific findings, obscure the specific geological deep time, and generally provide more artistic contributions. The chapter presents very different anthropological approaches, and I also attempt to do justice to directions and positions that I do not represent based on my scientific assumptions, such as the more-than-human approaches or posthumanism.