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We live in an era marked by an accelerating rate of species death, but since the early days of the discipline, anthropology has contemplated the death of languages, cultural groups, and ways of life. The essays in this collection examine processes of – and our understanding of – extinction across various domains. The contributors argue that extinction events can be catalysts for new cultural, social, environmental, and technological developments – that extinction processes can, paradoxically, be productive as well as destructive.
The essays consider a number of widely publicized cases: island species in Galapagos and Madagascar; the death of Native American languages; ethnic minorities under pressure to assimilate in China; cloning as a form of species regeneration; and the tiny hominid Homo floresiensis fossils ("hobbits') recently identified in Indonesia.
Introduction
Accumulating Absence: Cultural Productions of the Sixth Extinction Genese Marie Sodikoff
Part I: The Social Construction of Biotic Extinction
1. A Species Apart: Ideology, Science and the End of Life Janet Chernela
2. From Ecocide to Genetic Rescue: Can Technoscience Save the Wild? Tracey Heatherington
3. Totem and Taboo Reconsidered: Endangered Species and Moral Practice in Madagascar Genese Sodikoff
Part II: Endangered Species and Emergent Identities
4. Tortoise Soup for the Soul: Finding a Space for Human History in a Galapagos Dynasty Jill Constantino
5. Global Environmentalism and the Emergence of Indigeneity: The Politics of Cultural and Biological Diversity in China Michael Hathaway
Part III: Red-Listed Languages
6. Last Words, Final Thoughts: Collateral Extinctions in Maliseet Language Death Bernard C. Perley
7. Dying Young: Pidgins, Creoles, and other Contact Languages as Endangered Languages Paul B. Garrett
Part IV: Pre-Histories of An Apex Predator
8. Demise of the Bet-Hedgers: A Case Study of Human Impacts on Past and Present Lemurs of Madagascar Laurie R. Godfrey and Emilienne Rasoazanabary
9. Disappearing Wildmen: Capture, Extirpation, and Extinction as Regular Components of Representations of Putative Hairy Hominoids Gregory Forth
Epilogue: Prolegomenon for a New Totemism Peter Whiteley
Index
Contributors
Genese Marie Sodikoff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rutgers University, Newark. She is author of Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere (IUP, 2012).
"The Anthropology of Extinction provides compelling evidence for deep connections between cultural, linguistic, and bio-diversity, and exposes the common threats they now face. This book will serve as a timely call to action for anthropologists, linguists, biologists, and activists."
– K. David Harrison, Swarthmore College and National Geographic Society
"As key players in the development of the extinction narrative, anthropologists have mostly neglected their potential as critical interlocutors and have not theorized extinction as a meta-narrative on a globalizing planet – until now, that is. This volume's contributors offer refreshing, insightful, and challenging analytic accounts of the multi-dimensional power of the trope of extinction in specific cultural, linguistic, biological, and environmental case-studies. Their critical interventions do not diminish the anxieties with which we must confront global ecological and sociocultural crises, but each author's work highlights the necessity for deeper historical understanding and keener political acumen in anthropology's encounters with the multiple varieties of extinction taking place in this century."
– Les W. Field, University of New Mexico
"[F]ulfills a very important need [...] It is in keeping with the best and most important aspects of 'posthumanism' and the trend toward questioning the boundaries between human and nonhuman life [...] [R]eadable and thought-provoking."
– Molly Mullin, author (with Rebecca Cassidy) Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered
"The Anthropology of Extinction offers compelling explorations of issues of widespread concern."
– The Birdbooker Report
"If extinctions are seen as unfamiliar, faraway events, we often fail to think about them, let alone take conscious action to prevent them. Future studies in extinction discourse will do well to further interrogate the relationship between extinctions in 'local' and 'foreign' contexts, while interrogating the assumptions that undergird these very designations. A valuable step in this direction, The Anthropology of Extinction gives us the tools we need to bring us closer to the discomfiting, disorienting, destabilizing real."
– Make Magazine
