Health and environment in times of Anthropocene

Abstract

This special focus was born from the desire to ethnographically analyze emergent configurations at the intersection of health and environmental studies, expressly within Italian contexts and in the time of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological epoch marked by anthropogenic planetary changes (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). At a socio-cultural level, the concept of the Anthropocene highlights an acknowledgment of the deep entanglement between humans and nature and their interdependency in determining the fate of the entire planet (Haraway 2014, Lewis and Maslin 2015, Moore 2016). In this context, the traditional concept of ‘health’ (normally referring to a body, expressly the human body) appear partial. The domains of both health and the environment--taken singularly--reflect  a great number of debates, rethorics, semantics, hierarchies, politics and profits spanning the last 50 years. Their combination, by way of ‘environmental health,’ creates a socio-political space absent of stable and defined boundaries, thus mirroring the instability of discourses ‘in times of Anthropocene’. Within this complexity, ethnography provides us basic elements from which to generate substance and to problematize natureculture assemblages, likewise paving the way for bottom-up and localized solutions.