The ERC-funded project "Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene (AMBER)" considers the multiple and entangled worlds of amber through ethnographic research in different sites of extraction, trade, and science.
Amber is a fossil resin secreted by plants between 300 and 16 million years ago, mostly during phases of climate breakdown and ecological crises. Amber is today found and studied across the world for the prehistoric lifeforms it contains. Their study, geologists and palaeontologists believe, can help us answering key questions about the planet’s climatic history, and understanding how and why species adapted, or failed to adapt, during previous phases of mass extinction. Amber is also a well-known and sought-after gemstone, fuelling violent mining economies from Myanmar to Russia, Ukraine and Mexico, and constitutes a global market increasingly driven by Chinese demand.
Amber thus offers a unique entry point to interrogate the current moment characterised by growing extractivism, trade, environmental crises, and conflict. Through amber, this project further aims to pay closer ethnographic attention to the geological, to what continues to be understood as inert, passive, lifeless -- and thus to address some of the key empirical and theoretical challenges posed by the Anthropocene.
AMBER will start in the fall of 2023. A research team will be assembled in the coming months, and more information will be made available in due course.
Financing
AMBER is funded by an ERC Starting Grant, and will run between 2023-2028.
Funded by the European Union (ERC Starting Grant, Amber, 101075511). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them