Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T14:42:01.141Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

SEVEN - Enter Catastrophe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2020

Richard D. G. Irvine
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
An Anthropology of Deep Time
Geological Temporality and Social Life
, pp. 153 - 171
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Enter Catastrophe
  • Richard D. G. Irvine, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: An Anthropology of Deep Time
  • Online publication: 04 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108867450.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Enter Catastrophe
  • Richard D. G. Irvine, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: An Anthropology of Deep Time
  • Online publication: 04 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108867450.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Enter Catastrophe
  • Richard D. G. Irvine, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: An Anthropology of Deep Time
  • Online publication: 04 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108867450.008
Available formats
×