What can Brazil, this continental country placed at the forefront of contemporary ecological upheavals, teach us about the Anthropocene? ? A collective of Brazilian researchers invites us to break down the barriers between university disciplines.
What does the Anthropocene do to history? ? This, summarized in a few words, is the ambition of this collective work organized by two historians specializing in the theory of history and historiography – a particularly dynamic academic field in Brazil. To this general question, it is appropriate to add another, present implicitly in this volume which brings together the contributions of 13 historians: what can Brazil, this continent country placed at the forefront of contemporary ecological upheavals, teach us about the Anthropocene ? The answer is particularly rich and will be of interest to specialists in Latin America as well as to all those interested in the Anthropocene from a more global perspective. Indeed, each of the thematic contributions nourishes a constant dialogue with the most recent bibliography on the Anthropocene in order to consider Brazil’s past and present through the prism of this new concept.
R. Turin and W.F. Figueiredo Lowande opens the introduction with a fundamental question, which is at the origin of the editorial project: “ How can we make history when the conditions of habitability of the planet are transformed more quickly than the own capacity for (re)action of those who considered themselves, to a large extent, as the unique ones? agents of history » ? At the starting point of the reflection is therefore the idea that it is not only useful, but essential to take the idea of the Anthropocene seriously, despite all the criticisms that can be addressed to this concept, and to which many contributors return throughout the work. Certainly, the stratigraphy commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences refused to validate the concept of Anthropocene in 2024, but this does not prevent other sciences from seizing this concept to think freshly about their objects again, like the historical discipline. Thus, it is less a question of discussing the relevance of a concept than of analyzing the consequences of its emergence, its uses and its effects on our way of understanding history and our relationship to time. And in this work, Brazil is at the center of the reflection, while too often it is located on the periphery since the reflection is carried out from the “ North “.
The reflective approach that is required here carries with it a strong prospective dimension, starting from the observation that, for the moment, the discipline has only been marginally affected by the irruption of the Anthropocene – an observation as relevant in Brazil as in France, when we observe the teaching models in our universities. It is therefore a question of reflecting on the profound changes in practices and knowledge that this concept is likely to bring to the discipline. ; what the authors propose to explore by following three directions, which are all challenges for writing history. The first deals with questions as essential as those of the actors and temporalities of history ; the second analyzes the concept of citizenship through the prism of the Anthropocene ; the third concerns issues specific to the historical discipline and, more broadly, to the university.
Agency and temporalities
The Anthropocene, because it links classical human history, inherited from Greco-Roman Antiquity, with the sciences of the Earth system, requires us to rethink history off the beaten track, betting on greater inclusiveness, by taking into account a wider range of actors and subjects of history. This major challenge is explored in particular by NS Carvalho de Ostos in a chapter devoted to multi-species history. Paradoxically, if the Anthropocene is a concept which places at the center of the focus the impact of human agency on the world, understanding this reality supposes at the same time operating a decentration in relation to the anthropocentric perspective, founding of history as a discipline. In a context of new great extinction, it is up to history to account for this multi-species past, the diversity of its actors and their complex interrelationships which have built interdependent worlds. Furthermore, the Anthropocene brings with it the idea of an unprecedented use of animals by humans, a process that goes well beyond the long history of animal domestication, which we know to be a history of co-evolution rather than outright domination of man over the domesticated animal. Entry through the history of animals or interspecies history also has the merit of better considering other histories that have escaped Western domination, in which the exceptionality of man is not always founded.
Understanding history from a multi-species perspective is particularly fertile for a country like Brazil, anthropized for millennia by indigenous societies whose cosmogonies or ontologies are not based on the absolute primacy of man, as established by the work of P. Descola or A. Viveiros de Castro, among others. In a chapter devoted to “ indigenous perspective », G. Bianchi takes stock of the collective enterprise of rewriting the history of colonial and contemporary Brazil in the light of this indigenous history, in dialogue with anthropology. Among other conceptual issues, the Anthropocene here raises the question of temporality and relationships to time to the extent that, from the point of view of indigenous populations, the contemporary ecological catastrophe is rather part of the continuity of a long-term history, the original marker of which dates from the beginnings of colonization, in 1500. This historiography is also careful to account for the very complex framework of relationships between each people and its “ environment », whether it concerns the fauna, the flora or the spirits which participate in the configuration of the worlds present.
This is also the methodology at work in environmental history, to which a chapter is devoted, insofar as it is based on a renewed conception of the culture/nature articulation and an expansion of the sphere of politics, to account for these collectives, these communities within which human beings, to satisfy their needs, interact with other animal and plant species, and other elements of life, whether water, wind, soil, climate, etc.
Rethinking citizenship through the prism of the environmental emergency
Many contributors rightly point out the need to critically understand the founding concepts of the contemporary world, such as modernity or the idea of progress. This is particularly glaring seen in Brazil, where modernity has imposed itself by force, via the colonization of beings and nature, at the expense of indigenous populations and the millions of slaves brought by force to develop the plantation economy. Taking the Anthropocene seriously and the challenges it poses to the habitability of our planet therefore presupposes first breaking with an ideal of citizenship with universal scope, coming from the North, to the extent that it is based on the disproportionate exploitation of natural resources and labor power (animal and human), according to a scenario that no serious person can consider as sustainable anymore.
In a chapter devoted to “ feminist perspective », Mr. da Glória de Oliveira recalls that ecofeminism established the consubstantial links between the exploration of nature and the subordination of women in the process of colonization of the territory, in Brazil as elsewhere in the world. According to an interspecific approach inspired by the work of A. Tsing and D. Haraway, the feminist perspective also makes it possible to dethrone man from his position of domination over a nature perceived as submissive or dominated, and to invent another way of writing history, emancipated from Western narratives configured from empires or nation-states, located at the crossroads of species ; a “ more than human story ”, in a way – according to an approach that we find at work in studies of slavery and slave resistance in Brazil, a particularly dynamic field of the discipline in Brazil, explored in the first chapter of the work.
L. Marques extends these reflections by analyzing the challenges that the Anthropocene poses to economic and social history. Among these is the need to carry out a major revision of the narratives of innovation or economic progress, which contribute to reifying nature in terms of marketable and exploitable resources in the context of accelerated globalization. However, L. Marques also rightly recalls, and by referring, in particular, to the Annales school, the existence of an already long-standing attention to the materiality of economic worlds and environments. ; historiographical tradition with which it would be useful to reconnect to renew socio-economic history, both in the West and in the “ Souths “.
A.F. Cândido da Silva and D. Miranda de Sá carry out the same critical inventory based on the history of sciences, emphasizing the ambivalent role of the latter which have, certainly, made it possible to describe and document the ongoing ecological catastrophe, but which have also been the relay and the engine of the processes of colonization and exploration of the world, within the framework of European imperialisms, in particular. In this necessary overhaul of citizenship as a universal ideal, history therefore has the task of critically apprehending the role played by the sciences in the implementation of development logics whose unsustainability has now been demonstrated, in order to be able to imagine other possible futures, in dialogue with the sciences of sustainability.
An open history, new academic practices
The various contributions to this volume promote a broader conception of history, the renewal and revision of which must involve better consideration of interdisciplinarity, essential to meeting the Anthropocenic challenges. Environmental history is a good example of the virtues of dialogue with other disciplines in the sciences of the Earth system, when thinking about the interactions between societies and “ nature » in their historical depth, and the upheavals that colonization brought about. More broadly, the disciplinary field of history in Brazil benefits from a fruitful dialogue with other disciplines, in particular sociology, philosophy and anthropology, or even the history of art and heritage – the subject of a chapter ad hoc in this work.
The last chapter of the book concerns an essential issue, that of the transmission of this renewed knowledge, based on a reflection on the teaching of history in schools in Brazil. J. Klanovitcz and A. Freyesleben question the great difficulties that exist in emancipating teaching from the ideology of progress on which a large part of our historical accounts are based. To do this, they propose to constitute a new conceptual lexicon capable of changing our understanding of the past. The two authors also challenge the way in which knowledge is divided into autonomous disciplines at the university, according to an old conceptual framework, coming from “ North “. However, this university framework hinders the necessary revision of the knowledge to be transmitted to new generations, due to its rigidity and (relative) impermeability, at a time when it would be urgent for the university to bring out new ways of inhabiting the planet, based on transversal and innovative knowledge.