Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change

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    Thomas Hylland Eriksen

    Publisher: Pluto Books

    Year: 2016

    Format: Paperback

    Size: 192 pages

    ISBN: 9780745336343

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A major new intervention on the overarching challenges of modernity from one of the world's leading anthropologists.

The world is overheated. Too full and too fast; uneven and unequal. It is the age of the Anthropocene, of humanity’s indelible mark upon the planet. In short, it is globalisation - but not as we know it.

In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Hylland Eriksen breathes new life into the discussion around global modernity, bringing an anthropologist’s approach to bear on the three interrelated crises of environment, economy and identity. He argues that although these crises are global in scope, they are perceived and responded to locally, and that contradictions abound between the standardising forces of information-age global capitalism and the socially embedded nature of people and local practices.

Carefully synthesising the ethnographic and comparative methods of anthropology with macrosocial and historical material, Overheating offers an innovative new perspective on issues including energy use, urbanisation, deprivation, human (im)mobility, and the spread of interconnected, wireless information technology.

About the Author

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and former President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). He is the author of numerous classics of anthropology, including Small Places, Large Issues, Ethnicity and Nationalism and What is Anthropology?

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
1. Le Monde est Trop Plein
2. A Conceptual Inventory
3. Energy
4. Mobility
5. Cities
6. Waste
7. Information Overload
8. Clashing Scales: Understanding Overheating
Bibliography
Index

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