Book contents
- An Anthropology of Deep Time
- New Departures in Anthropology
- An Anthropology of Deep Time
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- ONE Time Depth
- TWO Time Travelling Pits and Migrant Rocks
- THREE Excluding Water
- FOUR The Problem with Presentism
- FIVE Mapping Deep Time
- SIX Geology and Biography
- SEVEN Enter Catastrophe
- EIGHT Wasteland
- References
- Index
SEVEN - Enter Catastrophe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2020
- An Anthropology of Deep Time
- New Departures in Anthropology
- An Anthropology of Deep Time
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- ONE Time Depth
- TWO Time Travelling Pits and Migrant Rocks
- THREE Excluding Water
- FOUR The Problem with Presentism
- FIVE Mapping Deep Time
- SIX Geology and Biography
- SEVEN Enter Catastrophe
- EIGHT Wasteland
- References
- Index
Summary
Beginning with an ethnography of controversy in the representation of time at the Giant’s Causeway, County Antrim, this chapter focuses on the role of catastrophe as rupture in time, confronting us with the transformative potential of events that render planetary history radically discontinuous. Yet while in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of the earth sciences catastrophism became displaced as orthodoxy by uniformitarian explanations, becoming a shadow mode of explanation associated primarily with Christian Biblical literalism, the significance of catastrophe in earth history has re-emerged in a distinct form through the recognition of mass extinction events. Indeed, it has a particular contemporary significance, as we increasingly recognise our own extractive relationship with time as catastrophe: vectors of a mass extinction event, the likes of which have occurred only five times in the last 540 million years or so.
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- An Anthropology of Deep TimeGeological Temporality and Social Life, pp. 153 - 171Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020