Religion and religious studies still aren't part of the academic discussion of the Anthropocene, but sometimes they're tantalizingly close. In their manifesto for a new anthropology for a "patchy" understanding of the Anthropocene, some writers I admire even offer a place at the table ... though the name card says "nonsecular cosmologies."
A key part of the interest of many anthropologists in the natural science models of the Anthropocene is, arguably, that the “unprediction” of the Anthropocene feels—in both promising and uncanny ways—like a homecoming of sorts, namely, a return to a world of unseen forces that might just possibly also include spirits: a return to the doubt that lingers in witchcraft as much as in climate science (Bubandt 2014; Oreskes and Conway 2010), and a return to the unpredictability of a world that was not modern after all (Latour 1993). The uncanniness of the Anthropocene grows from the way this model-made reality has added new verisimilitude, new truth-likeness, to spirits, monsters, and ghosts (Bubandt 2017, 2019; Tsing et al. 2017). At the very historical juncture where modern reason declared spirits and monsters to be dead, the graphs of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015) have helped draw the contours of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene in which the spirits and monster dwell … after all (Bubandt 2018).
I'm with them, but I'm amused by the indirection they feel obliged to use broaching what is clearly a sensitive subject. Spirits (something they talk about as if everyone knows what they are) "might just possibly also" be part of what's going on "... after all." What a tease! I share their sense of cracks opening up in modernist confidence in prediction, but I might just have said the future is unpredictable "... after all." But they go full negative theology, crafting a mysterious neologism, "unprediction," and intimate that "new verisimilitude, new truth-likeness" (what ontological shivers that dubious doubling sends down the spine!) have been added to "unseen forces" by that great secular spirit, the "uncanny." Unreal!!
