EDC Eco Anthropologists Group: The Okjökull Memorial and Geohuman Relations by Cymene Howe & Dominic Boyer

Join the EDC Eco Anthropologist Group for a conversation with anthropologists Cymene Howe & Dominic Boyer about their new article “The Okjökull Memorial and Geohuman Relations.” This will be our second session in monthly meetings to discuss recent anthropologists’ publications on ecological issues. Join EDC curator Anand Pandian and moderator Fernando López Vega (JHU Anthropology) for a hybrid meeting with the authors about this timely work. Those around Baltimore can join on the JHU campus in Mergenthaler Hall 526 and otherwise virtually in the EDC Eco Anthropologists Room!

Wednesday, March 13th, 2024
2-3 pm (EST)
Mergenthaler 526 & EDC Eco Anthropologists Room:
https://community.ecodesigncollective.org/bbb-room/eco-anth-room/
Access code: eefa91

Cymene Howe & Dominic Boyer. 2024. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 32 (1): 30–45. doi:10.3167/saas.2023.320104

Abstract: Focusing on the life and death of Okjökull, the first of Iceland’s major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change, this article discusses the complex relationships between cryospheres and human communities in Iceland. It asks how distinctions between non-living entities and living beings can offer insights to anthropology, and transdisciplinarily, as a model for recognising mutual precarities between the living and non-living world in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Detailing the authors’ ethnographic encounters with Ok mountain and Okjökull (glacier), the authors argue that by attending to non-living forms, and by registering their ‘passing’ or loss, we are able to document and better comprehend threshold events in the larger life of the planet.

Keywords: affect, Arctic glacier, grief, Iceland, living/non-living, more-than-human, public anthropology