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The ethnographic focus of this paper is a group of sourdough bakers based in Finland, with a specific view on a fermentation workshop in 2019. In this workshop, emerging human-microbe relations were drawn, bringing attention to a post-antibiotic world. Studying bread making necessitates a more-than-human analysis that foregrounds microbes as central characters situated in the political climate of increasing populism and the Anthropocene. In this paper I describe bakers, termed microbiohackers, putting forward critiques of capitalism that link ecological extraction, political oppression, and industrial food production. Crafting an alternative to the dominant public health narrative of microbes as a threat and antimicrobial resistance, I use the notion of diffraction to discuss the complex entanglements of the microbial/material and social/political. In the hands of the bakers, fermentation, sourdough, and antimicrobial resistance present an opportunity to question dualisms of how microbes are thought about and to create emergent post-antibiotic futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers recent studies of global environmental change and their impact on the deltas, social and ecological patches that epitomize an Anthropocene environmental dynamism. Looking into these delta studies, we explore an emerging imagination about human-planet relations. Specifically, we indicate that the relationship between the changing Earth and human activities depicted in these studies is comparable to the kind of affective relations to which the anthropology of science has recently brought attention. While affective relations as anthropologically described depend on the capacity of the body to be affected by other entities, global change research on deltas asks the public to imagine collective life, including infrastructure, land use, resource consumption, and companion species, as composite bodies affected by the changing planet. This imagination is made possible by analogies developed in the vicinity of the notion of resilience, a term that originated in mathematical ecology and complex adaptive systems in computer science. In exploring this interdisciplinary traffic of ideas and models, we elucidate an analogical imagination that crosses the border of machines and organisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances a heuristic distinction between "model" (in the Geertzian sense of "model-for") and "example" as contrasting modes of articulating thought and action in the Anthropocene. I argue that the distinction is helpful in understanding the ontological presuppositions of geo-engineering as a technopolitical fix. Finally, I draw the outlines of a notion of "ontological anarchism" as the proper meta-mode of existence of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we make sense of the uneven landscape in Yilan, Taiwan, where small-scale organic farming and luxurious country houses grow side by side? This essay suggests that we see both the rise of luxurious housing and eco-friendly farming as different patches of human-to-land relationships woven together through a landscape structure undergirded by the rise and fall of nuclear-family farms in post–World War II Taiwan. The uniqueness of the eco-friendly farmers in Yilan lies in their abilities to foster new livelihoods through creative assemblages of more-than-human economies and ecologies. By taking care of the wandering ghosts in the paddies, for example, new farmers join old farmers and villagers to enact a more-than-human world where both the material and the formless matter. By taking care of the paddy creatures, new farmers also join the health- and environmentally conscious urban consumers in enacting a more-than-human world where human well-being depends heavily on the well-being of nonhumans. Recognizing these interweaving practices of both normative and odd kinship making in relation to farmscape making helps us to think of more nonexclusive ways of farming and co-living in patchy Anthropocenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coffee was introduced to Mexico in the late eighteenth century, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that wealthy European immigrants purchased "unregistered" land and invested in coffee cultivation. Displaced farmers, mostly indigenous, returned to the region as plantation workers and learned how to cultivate coffee. After the Mexican Revolution and when land reform reached the southern states, small farmers began cultivating coffee. Coffee transformed landscapes and people in southern Mexico and today continues to do so. Focusing on the Soconusco region of the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, we examine how coffee landscapes affect people and nonhuman nature. In particular, we discuss how "technified" coffee landscapes affect biodiversity and created the conditions that may have led to the coffee rust outbreak in 2012. We also discuss the impact of the plantation system on social relations and the impact that this system has on permanent and temporary farmworkers. Finally, we explore potential connections between the ecological and social impacts of the plantation system in the Soconusco region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. "Patchy Anthropocene" is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call "modular simplifications" and "feral proliferations." This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; "structure" here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being system characteristics. Indeed, we discuss "systems" as thought experiments, that is, imagined holisms that help make sense of structure. Ecological modeling, political economy, and alternative cosmologies are systems experiments that should rub up against each other in learning about the Anthropocene. We address the misleading claim that studies of nonhumans ignore social justice concerns as well as suggesting ways that ethnographers might address "hope" without rose-colored glasses. This introduction offers frames for appreciating the distinguished contributions to this supplement, and it traces key changes in anthropological thinking from the time of this supplement's predecessor, the Wenner-Gren Foundation–sponsored 1956 volume, Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Rather than interrogating philosophies of the Anthropocene, the supplement shows how anthropologists and allies, including historians, ecologists, and biologists, might best offer a critical description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focused on the lives and deaths of Pacific Island tree snails, the crafting of apparatuses and practices for their study in laboratory and field, and the diverse people engaged in the work, this double-voiced essay by two long-term friends and colleagues joins science, politics, and culture to contribute to multispecies environmental justice and island biopolitical geography. In part 1 Hadfield tracks his own trajectory, beginning with professional life as a "pure scientist," fascinated by patterns of development of marine animals, and then finding that fascination moving to efforts to stop the extinctions of native Hawaiian land snails, conservation efforts across the Pacific, and ultimately teaching and practicing resistance to political suppression of science and military takeover and destruction of islands around the world. In the idioms of science studies and anthropology, part 2 by Donna Haraway plays cat's cradle games with Hadfield's land-and-sea EcologicalEvolutionaryDevelopmental biology and activism. Haraway explores the complexity of practices crucial to life-altering scientific caring in the patchy Anthropocene. Parts 1 and 2 are linked by Satoru Abe's print Parting Trees B , which is a vital hinge for collaborations in the Tree Snail Manifesto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the long-lasting ecological and social impacts of cattle introduced to the New World by Spanish colonists. First, it shows how cattle aided European expansions by occupying spaces inhospitable to colonization and destroying indigenous landscapes. It then turns to the role of cattle in modern projects of state-making and economic development centered on industrialization. Finally, it moves into eastern Panama in the 1970s and 1980s, where cattle legitimized settler land claims by converting forests into private property. Throughout, it highlights the unintended impacts of this cattle introduction in order to argue that cattle move in and out of capitalist and colonialist projects in ways that are never fully under human control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I consider how the ideas of the patchy Anthropocene forwarded by the editors of this special issue provide a way to do anthropology otherwise by reversing the relationship between the background and foreground in our studies. This switch allows me to bring to the fore the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River as both a hydrological entity and a geological event and the interrelations between these two as explored in geological writings. It helps grow the kinds of accounts that are appropriate to the complexity of the Anthropocene. At the same time I also pose that the inner structure of the imagination must change to be in step and similarly appropriate to our entangled and scaled-up present. The romantic geology of the early nineteenth century, particularly that of the German romantic Novalis, provides interesting experiments with commensurating humans to the geological. It does so by thinking the human as tending toward the nonhuman, thus possibly at play with the mountainous giants who shaped the earth's topography in romantic imagination. I consider how gigantism may be explored as a dimension of human existence in the Anthropocene even as we consider the human in her particularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much scientific debate has focused on the timing and stratigraphic signatures for the Anthropocene. Here we review the Anthropocene in its original usage and as it has been imported by anthropology in light of evidence for long-term human-environment relationships. Strident debate about the Anthropocene's chronological boundaries arises because its periodization forces an arbitrary break in what is a long-enduring process of human alterations of environments. More importantly, we argue that dividing geologic time based on a "step change" in the global significance of socialenvironmental processes contravenes the socially differentiated and diachronous character of human-environment relations. The consequences of human actions are not the coordinated synchronous product of a global humanity but rather result from heterogeneous activities rooted in situated sociopolitical contexts that are entangled with environmental transformations at multiple scales. Thus, the Anthropocene periodization, what we term the "Anthropocene divide", obscures rather than clarifies understandings of human-environmental relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leftist former Bishop Fernando Lugo came to power in Paraguay in 2008 with the pledge to "recover Paraguay's hydroelectric sovereignty" from Brazil by demanding greater control of the energy and finances of Itaipú Binational Hydroelectric Dam. This article explores what is meant by "hydroelectric sovereignty" and argues for a new approach to how to theorize sovereignty within anthropology by urging that scholars move beyond a focus on the exception, biopower, and bare life. The (re)turn I propose situates sovereignty historically in terms of nature, economics, cultural otherness, and imperialism by engaging an older genealogy of sovereignty, the sixteenth-century Spanish school of Salamanca, which centered on the rights of indigenous peoples to control their natural resources and govern themselves. This tradition gave rise to international law, setting in place a framework that continues to structure the global economy and natural resources, including the hydroelectric potential of Itaipú Dam. By exploring how hydroelectric sovereignty is an example of theorizing from the margins, I show how the asymmetrical dominance between Brazil and Paraguay, the desirability of natural resources in a time of environmental scarcity, and the supremacy of economic imperative presage twenty-first-century changes in eco-environmental sovereignties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]