2024/02/27 by Hunter Vaughan · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/09644016.2024.2319517
openalex publication_date 2024/02/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Scientific consensus holds fast to acknowledging the anthropogenic acceleration and nuances of climate destabilisation, and a larger sea change in cultural values and texts trends towards heightened awareness and concern for the urgency of environmental action.Nonetheless, there remains an uphill battle to be fought against the mired politics of the status quo and the enigmatic role that education might -nay, must -play in this larger mission.In Educating for the Anthropocene, Peter Sutoris brings cultural anthropology to bear on the potential for schooling as (to butcher Audre Lourde's well-known axiom) both a necessary tool to be wielded and, simultaneously, a house to be dismantled in the undoing and redoing of global norms and imaginaries around the environmental expectations, limitations, and languages ensconced by centuries of colonial and neoliberal shaping.As any decent ethnographer must, and as any hopeful anthropologist better, Sutoris' ambitious foray is emblazoned with self-awareness, reflection, and admission of complicity.Shockingly optimistic for a study founded upon Arendt and Ricoeur, Educating for the Anthropocene focuses on field work in Pashulok, India and Wentworh, South Africacrucibles of the postcolonial in that they are still today slowly decolonizing "communities 'of the future', where the accelerating face of slow violence is foundalso places of the past" (10).These sites act as iconic bearers of just how deeply educational institutions, forged in colonial fire, smoulder with the vestigial safeguards, not only of ideological frameworks but of the role that schooling plays as a buttress for epistemological dogma and existential limitations.Building a critical framework between Hannah Arendt's critique of totalitarianism and Paul Ricoeur's public anthropology, Sutoris insists that education is systemically political, and that "'politics' is not abstract but radically practical".( 6) Deeply grounded in the preservation of the ideological status quo and social mechanisms of colonialism and, subsequently, neoliberalism, education functions less to prepare future citizens for what they can do than what they cannot, less shapes what imaginaries are potentially envisioned than determining which are kept in the dark.Educating for the Anthropocene thus acts as a corollary within the space of pedagogy and schooling for the cultural argument shaped through Amitav Ghosh's The great Derangement, echoing the growing acknowledgment in environmental communication and environmental decision making as to the wider cultural foundations governing our ability -as individuals, as societies, as a species -to respond to the pressing challenges of a growing climate crisis.Whereas Ghosh addresses the failures of literature and the arts to provide radically new frameworks for a radically changing ecology, Sutoris positions education as a battlefield for this challenge.On this battlefield lies a struggle between the suppressed voices that might offer an alternative world and the maintenance of the very sociopolitical bases that underpin anthropocentric climate change -wherein Ricoeur's "horizons of the possible" are