On Environment with Nayanika Mathur: “Beastly Tales from the Himalaya: An Anthropology for the Anthropocene”

Location: A125, LMU Main Building, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 Munich

This lecture will be given by Nayanika Mathur (University of Oxford).

How does one write of places in the world where the ground is, quite literally, slipping away from under your feet? This talk dwells on the question of what it means to be an anthropologist working in places that no longer exist as we once knew them, on a planet marked by profound change, uncertainty, and instability. Mathur will argue for a renewed anthropological project that deploys the immense power and creativity of ethnography to rethink the planetary crisis through a deep grounding in place, time, and human-nonhuman entanglements. While the singularity of ethnography as a method and as a mode of describing the world remains unquestionable, the climate crisis demands a transformation of the craft. An anthropology for the Anthropocene is not a disciplinary practice that necessarily needs to embrace the Anthropocene as frame or concept per se. But rather, it is a discipline that writes in the profound uncertainty that defines the present by finding new ways of thinking and doing academic labour. Working through ‘beastly tales’ or stories populated by human and nonhuman agents of all stripes and their complex entanglements in India, this talk aims to provide one iteration of what an anthropology for—and not just in—the Anthropocene can become.

Nayanika Mathur is professor of anthropology and South Asian studies at the University of Oxford where she is the director of the South Asian Studies Centre. She also codirects a research network on climate crisis thinking in the humanities and social sciences at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). Nayanika is the author, most recently, of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

This event is part of the lecture series “On Environment.” The series is organized by the Chair of Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

Environment is a broad conceptual idea with a history and many meanings. Today, the term is used ubiquitously. We are closely connected to what surrounds us and live in an environment more and less shaped by humans. In this series of lectures scholars from different disciplines address the concept, providing a lens into what it may mean to think environmentally.