Afterword | Environmental Humanities

One culture’s villain is another culture’s hero. Paraphrasing the tired political aphorism was the first thing that came to mind when I was invited to write the afterword to this collection, in light of what anthropologists are generally expected to do when tackling a question such as this: first to culturalize it, then to relativize it. This is not, however, what the articles in this special section, “Heroes and Villains in the Anthropocene,” seek to do or call for. Examining an impressive range of cases across the globe, this collection aims to make more-than-human heroes and villains “serve as diagnostic lenses” for examining practices of blame, responsibility, victimhood, and salvationism in the Anthropocene.^¹ This is an analytically bold way to situate the collection, and an important vantage point from which to read its articles. Diagnosis, as Michel Foucault first noted in his 1966 lectures in Tunis, is one of the cornerstones of modern philosophical discourse, the other being exegesis.^² Being a process of acquiring knowledge (gnosis) by taking something apart (dia-), diagnosis needs to be considered beyond its obvious medicalizing attributes, so as to be taken epistemologically seriously as a way of knowing “that traverses and distinguishes.”^³ Applied in this way, diagnosis allows for configurations of more-than-human heroes and villains to be used as a lens onto “wider, often dichotomizing, discourses and politics of blame, accountability, victimhood, redemption, and salvation in the contemporary moment.”^⁴ In particular, it can serve as a way of discerning the pathos of different regimes of blame, causality, and responsibility—the passions, ailments, injustices, and sufferings resulting from or revealed by hero/villain binaries. The impact of such binary frameworks is expertly discussed by Adam Searle, Jonathon Turnbull, and Catherine Oliver’s article in this collection, examining the ways in which farmed cows “figure as both solutions and problems to the climate crisis.”^⁵ Sliding between these two polar opposites is the result of scalar work that is an inherent trait of reasoning about and imagining the Anthropocene.^⁶ Diagnosing hero/villain binaries involves both ontological and epistemological work on the part of anthropologists, and indeed the working together of these two approaches, seen all too commonly as antithetical. In her discussion of Central Kalimantan peatlands, Viola Schreer brings into tension, on the one hand, the frameworks of corporate and state actors that render Ngaju Dayak farmers into climate/environmental villains, and on the other, Indigenous approaches according to which peat fires “are largely a matter of injustice emerging from a deeply engrained institutional blindness, its power imbalances and structural inequalities shaping the interactions between people, peat, and fire on the ground.”^⁷ For agribusiness stakeholders and government officials, both what peat fires are and how they and their causes can be known form part of ossified scripts of blame, whereas for Indigenous agents the ontological and epistemological contours of this phenomenon stand suspended in a state of unknowability; they thus “disrupt and reconfigure questions of fire causality, blame, and responsibility in surprising ways that neither match with common tropes of Indigenous victimhood nor correspond to conventional thoughts of fire villainy.”^⁸ When not subsumed into what Jean Starobinski called a “clinical schema,” diagnosis promises to move beyond “the binarizing logics of culpability and salvation that often undergird invocations of heroes and villains, and to gesture toward other ways of knowing and responding to the Anthropocene.”^⁹

This heterotopic potential is particularly evident on the local scale, as the site par excellence of ethnographic research. Across the different case studies in this collection, the authors emphasize the importance of paying close attention to local or molecular articulations of heroism and villainy on the ground, where otherwise globally established heroes or villains assume concretely different forms than their global prototypes. We are able to see how, by becoming thus entangled with specific meanings, beliefs, and practices that go beyond or against ready-made scripts of action, villains and heroes assume unsettled, troubling, and often unpredictable social lives. In her article in this collection, Alice Rudge shows how Batek people in Malaysia oppose the binary logics of environmentalist discourses by treating oil palms as “planted objects” and “means to an end” rather than as “autonomous botanical persons.”^¹⁰ Rather than indicting Indigenous agents with an internalization of Western, colonialist tropes of objectifying life-forms, Rudge shows how in this way “categories of heroism and villainy are destabilized,” allowing for unsettling notions of autonomy and “more subtle forms of negotiation . . . that demonstrate both the situatedness and complexity of plantation domination and the range of alternative modalities that might exist for understanding how people envision their lives in contexts of environmental destruction.”^¹¹

However, a degree of caution is needed when giving emphasis to the local as a scale for a diagnostic use of more-than-human heroes and villains. For at the same time as they assume local forms and elicit local practices, heroes and villains also operate on global, and indeed global-historical, scales, having very real effects on the ground. Let us take the example of the rat (for our purposes Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus); this is the first animal to be configured as an epidemic or indeed pandemic villain in human history, becoming targeted as the universal spreader of bubonic plague in the course of the latter’s third pandemic (1894–1959), during which more than fifteen million people perished.^¹² Configurations of the rat as an epidemic or pandemic villain varied in different regions of the world, with significant impacts. To give but a couple of examples, in the Dutch East Indies, when colonial doctors became convinced that rats were nesting in the bamboo beams of Indigenous houses, they launched a devastating campaign that saw the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian homes.^¹³ This campaign brought enormous economic hardship to those supposedly benefiting from these antirat, antiplague measures, but also massively spread malaria in the regions of Java where it was applied.^¹⁴ By contrast, French colonial authorities decided to exterminate the rat population of Hanoi and stamp out plague in the city by placing a bounty on rats, an antiepidemic measure that led to a lucrative industry of rat breeding among the Vietnamese in the outskirts of the city.^¹⁵

Microhistories and historical ethnographies of the global war against the rat in the first half of the twentieth century provide us with exemplary examinations of how a universal epidemic/pandemic villain became reconfigured on the ground in different parts of the world, and how these configurations led to unforeseen results, such as those mentioned above.^¹⁶ If we were, however, to stay only at a local level, we would be missing a process whose transformative impact was felt across the globe and which set in place unprecedented processes of globalization. I have examined this process in detail in a study coauthored with Lukas Engelmann on the subject of maritime fumigation.^¹⁷ This involved the development of a technoscientific apparatus of exterminating rats in the holds of ships, which was mandated internationally by 1903 and applied practically to every port across the globe by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Fumigation machines like the Clayton apparatus became epidemic heroes in their own right, even assuming their own visual culture at the time.^¹⁸ They promised not only to exterminate every rat in the holds of cargo ships but also to abolish the costly quarantines that until 1900 had been mandated to stop the international spread of the third plague pandemic. Positing the rat as a pandemic villain against a heroic machine that could interrupt the animal’s international travel and the spread of plague fostered the globalization of shipping practices (ships had to adapt both their structures and the way they carried cargo for purposes of fumigation) and port health regulations, and led to an unprecedented technoscientific integration of global trade and global health. Both the rat as a pandemic villain and the Clayton machine as a pandemic hero had hundreds if not thousands of local histories. Yet they also had a mutually entangled global history that was more than the sum of its local, regional, or national parts. This history transformed the world by making it more “global” and by instituting processes that would have consequences far beyond the pandemic context of this hero/villain binary, such as the development of Zyklon B—the gas that would be eventually used by the Nazis in the Shoah—as, among other things, an alternative to the Clayton apparatus and similar machines.^¹⁹

At the same time as forming fecund grounds for examining scalar effects and entanglements, examinations of more-than-human heroes and villains may help us develop alternative imaginaries of the Anthropocene, in the sense of opening up pathways for both different imaginations and different ways of imagining. Most important, the studies in this collection challenge us to imagine with rather than simply by means of heroes, villains, and hero/villain complexes. To do this it is necessary to move beyond traditional anthropological approaches to the imagination as what David Sneath, Martin Holbraad, and Morten Axel Pedersen have correctly identified as a mainly “rhetorical device in well-rehearsed constructivist arguments.”^²⁰ Instead, imaginaries, imaginings, and imaginations of heroes and villains are best understood as fueled by a constant and productively unresolved tension between what Cornelius Castoriadis would call their instituted and instituting potentials.^²¹ The first is the potential of such imaginaries to operate ideologically as instituted imaginaries through “socially sanctioned symbolic systems,” so as to “assur[e] continuity within society, the reproduction and repetition of the same forms.”^²² The second potential is for them to operate ontologically as instituting imaginaries, “bringing into being a form that was not there before, the creation of new forms of being.”^²³ Far from simply being part of a “‘self-understanding’ of a society” or a “‘repertory’ of the practices which can be adopted by society’s members,” in their radical indeterminacy, hero/villain imaginaries bring into tension self-perpetuating and emergence-enabling potentials, without the outcome of this tension being ever predetermined or final.^²⁴

Crucially, when applied to the Anthropocene, hero/villain imaginaries play important roles in the complex political and affective negotiations of loss, carrying with them what Jan van der Valk in this collection calls a “transformative potential vis-à-vis the technocratic tendencies of the Anthropocene.”^²⁵ To paraphrase the Chilean activist and novelist Luis Sepúlveda, if the post-WWII decades were a time marked by the disappearance of people under the boot of civil and military dictatorships across the globe, our present time, the time of the Anthropocene, is a time when it is the fundamental facts of life that disappear before our eyes: the seasons, the air that we breathe, the water we drink, but also a specific tree that no longer bears fruit, a cove where one could find freedom away from work now overgrown with toxic algae, or a memory-filled slope first burned by wildfires and then erased by floods.^²⁶ Reality and unreality become painfully indistinguishable in this time of loss; witnessing disappearance often requires us to rely on hero/villain binaries simply to cope with the enormity of the catastrophe, even when we are all-too-well aware of their analytical limitations and political perils. Yet, as studies in this collection so powerfully show, this is also the time of confronting and subverting hero/villain schemes, thus unleashing the instituting potential inherent to their imaginaries: creating new ways of thinking, being, becoming, sharing, discussing, hoping, and acting when all appears to be forever lost. Loss, as Laura Ogden has argued in her examination of imperialism and environmental catastrophe in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, is always paired with wonder in the Anthropocene.^²⁷ And, we may add, what makes more-than-human heroes and villains especially fecund, in this dialectic of loss and wonder and in this “experience of brokenness,” is that they are more often than not positioned, configured, and experienced at the famously “bewitched” or indeed spectral “crossroads between magic and positivism.”^²⁸

Can hero/villain schemas be made to work redemptively, as what Walter Benjamin called “dialectical images” for our Anthropocenic Endzeit?^²⁹ May they, in other words, be used as a “switch” that can “arres[t] fleeting phenomena” so that “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation”?^³⁰ We here need to proceed on the basis of recent critiques of Hannah Arendt’s reading of the dialectical image as a metaphor.^³¹ Moving away from this language-focused interpretation of the dialectical image, we should take heroes/villains to be, at one and the same time, the site and the method of our investigation into the Anthropocene, by which we can “reveal the underlying tensions in history between different conceptions of temporality and difference.”^³² In this way, more-than-human heroes and villains may indeed assume the role of “an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability.”^³³ In other words, an image that allows us to think and act in and with the Anthropocene otherwise. The studies in this collection refuse to simply critique hero/villain binaries or to melancholically seek to “go beyond” them and the social contradictions they entail.^³⁴ Instead, they challenge us to approach these in an anthropological materialist manner: as lenses through which we can arrive at another understanding of the Anthropocene, particularly one that is imbued with a potential for “unthinking mastery” as the kernel of human/more-than-human relations.^³⁵ Both as diagnosis—an illumination of scalar entanglements and effects—and as an invitation for new imaginings of the Anthropocene and our condition within it, the articles in this special section mark a critical new departure for examinations of more-than-human heroes and villains.