On 11 May, the “Forms of Ethnography – Ethnography as Form” series and the "Amber Worlds" project hosted a workshop co-organised by Alessandro Rippa and Richard Irvine (St. Andrews) on the theme of “reckoning with mass extinction.” Building on Mike Davis’s classic essay “Cosmic Dancers on History’s Stage?,” and led by a series of guiding thoughts and questions by Richard, participants explored how the concept of mass extinction has unsettled orthodoxies in the earth sciences by revealing the planet as an open, historically ruptured system rather than a stable, closed one. Reading across various disciplines, including geology and palaeontology, the group examined recent research that questions the temporal resolution and universality of “the Big Five” events — asking, for instance, whether it still makes sense to speak of global, all-encompassing mass extinctions when the fossil record shows such divergent patterns across marine and non-marine environments, plants and animals, insects and other taxa (and importantly, what this realisation might mean for our current times of widespread biodiversity loss and extinction).
The workshop combined collective discussion with a writing exercise in which participants reflected on personal encounters with “extinction,” in a broad sense. This opened a space to consider what it might mean, methodologically and ethically, to “write extinction” from an anthropological perspective. The discussion was wide-ranging, moving from debates within the earth sciences to contemporary political concerns about mass extinction, and to how the very notion of “mass extinction” might enable or inhibit political action — and why. Participants reflected on how anthropologists might confront this concept in their own work, and how this might inform and challenge our understanding of time.
Participants: Chiara Arnavas (IKOS), Ingjerd Hoem (SAI), Richard Irvine (St. Andrews), Christian Krohn-Hansen (SAI), Carolin Maertens (SAI), Alessandro Rippa (SAI), Elisabeth Schober (SAI), Stuart Strange (IKOS).