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SEVEN - Enter Catastrophe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2020

Richard D. G. Irvine
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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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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Chapter
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An Anthropology of Deep Time
Geological Temporality and Social Life
, pp. 153 - 171
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • 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
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  • 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
×