Interview by Jon Bialecki

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/an-anthropology-of-deep-time/D5B5D1825BF9D440246A17118E17080E

Jon Bialecki: There is a lot to this book. It contains reflections on the history of the discipline of anthropology and the unpacking of some of the unstated assumptions and ironies of geology. And most striking to my mind are the carefully crafted sketches of Scottish and English communities who either take up, or foreclose, the issue of deep time as an integral part of what collectively constitutes them aesthetically, economically, and at times even existentially. But I think that for many of the readers of CaMP, what might stand out is how the people you’ve worked with have learned to read and imagine the landscape around them.

The Bahktinian idea of the chronotype, introduced to our discipline through linguistic anthropology, seems to play a large role in your thinking on this matter. I was wondering if you could say what work the chronotype does when thinking about deep time and how the concept of deep time might extend, question, or transform the traditional way that the chronotype is understood and used in anthropology?

Richard Irvine: So the anthropological potential of the chronotope as a way of thinking about landscape is something that’s pretty well known through Tim Ingold’s work, but the possibilities of the concept also came to life for me when reading the work of linguistic anthropologists such as Asif Agha, and really thinking about the way that temporal norms are shaped. What this opened up for me is the political agency of the ways we encapsulate time. That becomes pretty important if we’re thinking about how the Geological Time Scale generalises and globalises a particular moment of encounter in Imperial Britain. Deep time is mapped in relation to Britain’s coal measures, and the names of the periods around the Carboniferous reference the geography of Wales and Devon. So, not to sound too facetious, but there’s likely a bit of Imperial Britain beneath you wherever you are.

When it comes to engaging with the chronotope, the place I do this most obviously is in Chapter 3, where I talk about the idyll. Bakhtin describes the chronotope of the idyll as a “sealed off segment of nature’s space”. And I ask, well, what underlies the English idyll? What are the conditions of existence that make this idyll possible? This is something that’s being asked with particular urgency right now in forcing a recognition of Colonial history. But I’m also asking it materially, because the idyll not only rests on but relies on its underlying geology.

That relationship tends to be an extractive relationship, delving into resources formed in our geological history and paying the consequences of that extraction forward into the planetary future. But the ‘sealing off’ that Bakhtin describes – a sealing off that I think characterises our present idyllic mode of consumption more widely – often means that those actions in the present are bracketed off from the geological history they’re situated in. This is what I describe in the book as the “extraction from deep time”.

Jon Bialecki: Your answer brings us to one of the most recurrent themes in the book: the “extraction from deep time.” In both the ethnographic and theoretical portions of your book, you document numerous ways that this foreclosing of both geological history and geological futures occurs. What stands out to me is that this denial, this bracketing, seems to have certain kind of cunning to it – even when people seem to be actively trying to think about deep time, such as imagining a post-human world, you identify them as engaging in this bracketing, too. Could you say something about how this bracketing operates, even when people are trying to deny any claim to escape deep time, and also – if this isn’t cheating by asking two questions at once – whether this bracketing is a kind of blindness, bad faith, or perhaps some combination of the two, or perhaps even something entirely different? Continue reading →