An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental

"Through provocations challenging innateness and foundational forms, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements invites us to think and feel more capaciously about the elements that compose, inflect, and refract across our mutual worlds. A must-read collection for the emergent elemental turn in the human sciences and more-than-human studies."

Cymene Howe, Professor of Anthropology, Rice University

"Immerse yourself in this open-ended catalogue and move through the fantastic itineraries of the elemental it proposes. Yearnings for possibility within the elemental forces of our time – colonialism, extractivism, racism, capitalism – will be attended to. This is a table of elements geared towards times to come, anticipating its own transformation by offering a notion of elementality that emphasizes recombinatory capacities. This book is a wonderful methodological and political achievement that sparks the imagination, ignites new connections, and keeps the fire of political commitments alive."

Andrea Ballestero, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Ethnography Studio, University of Southern California

"Looking at landscapes, bodies, and relations shot through with mining and endocrine disruptors and fires, this volume turns not to the keywords of the twentieth century, but to the elements of the twenty-first. A wide-ranging set of things and connections unfolds from the question of the unit of inquiry and narrative in an anthropogenic world. By turns sober and creative, this group of accomplished writers plays with and on the periodic table of elements to analyse forms and formations of the element, in social life, in social science, and in the scientific and experiential work of living in a world in which every natural thing is socially and materially shaped by colonialism, industry, and technological activity. The result is writing that settles somewhere in the space between the essay and the assay: curious, experimental, informative."

Hannah Landecker, Professor of Sociology & Society and Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles