Month: August 2017

I’ve developed an enthusiasm recently for stone balancing. Not for doing it myself—I haven’t remotely got the dexterity or the patience—but for photos and videos of rocks stacked on top of one another in impossible ways (there are videos all over YouTube, and pictures all over the internet). The connections to thinking about stratigraphy and about the Anthropocene are easy to see: scrupulous attention to rocks arranged in vertical layers; the anamnesic quality of stone, or the way it can turn out to hold within itself improbable forms, like fossils; the delicate connection between human intention and mineral solidity, attuned to the possibility of disaster; stone, sheerly, the mesmeric draw of the lithic celebrated by Jeffery Jerome Cohen. Continue reading “On Balance”

Jamie Lorimer, “The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed,” Social Studies of Science 47:1 (2017), 117–42

It’s a fun title, and the article doesn’t disappoint: this is now the best and most up-to-date short survey of scholarship on the Anthropocene, succeeding Noel Castree’s work. Continue reading “Scene Setting”