the more you read recent environmental anthropology you might get the impression that
we've become obsessed with ruins. Here's a few examples there are books about rubble and about
Debris and about the ruins of capitalism and about waste Landing is one example are which is a way
of discursively creating places that can be ruined and there are
many other examples as well so much so that recently some have proclaimed stuff like this that
Anthropology seems has become a science of ruins, and another similar trend is this which is writings on
the end of nature and this has been especially a popular trope within environmental history it seems
like ruins and end times are really fascinating to us right now and
so what does it mean to look at something as a ruin according to do Dawdy we seem to have a fascination
with ruins and attraction to ruin and we have been occupied with ruins there's this
romantic view of ruins that plays a role in modernity itself she argues and the Contemporary
anthropology of ruins meanwhile has sought to resist romanticising ruins
Our anthropological story of ruins as Dawdy puts it politically dystopic we write about
ruins to criticise things to criticise things such as modernity and capitalism and colonialism and for
contemporary anthropology it might seem like we seek out ruins because they confirmed to us our
theories of modernity and capitalism the ruins of modernity might appear to confirm for us those
theorists say that modernity was always just this story that people told themselves
the story of progress and need to clear cut dividing lines which glossed over everything
that didn't fit. Ruins might point to the end not of nature but of the delusion that we can
separate ourselves from nature or it might point to not the end of the world but the end of the
delusion of endless progress
and we seem to be drawn to ruins now it's like a trainwreck we just can't take our eyes off of
we watch the ruins of modernity within the holistic macabre fascination as if to say look we
were right all along it's all going to shit
so ruins can point to an end of modernity as this vision of the world but there's also a risk in our
fascination with ruins it may play right into modernity's most dominant vision of time and so
modernity's ways of thinking about time rest on the idea of a sudden temporal break that
modernity is defined by a break in the flow of history and decisive point where pre-modern
Turns to modern after which nothing is the same anymore and this by the way is the temporal break
that's also reflected in and upheld by the division of labor between different fields like
archaeologists who study Antiquity and social and cultural anthropologists in the Contemporary
world and most anthropologists and archaeologists Dawdy claims still explicitly or implicitly
subscribed to this modern image of time along with the assumption that modernity
is qualitatively distinct and different from what came before it. So the fascination with the ruins
of modernity might introduce another such sudden temporal break not to the beginning point of
modernity or where modernity started this time an endpoint where progress ends so the ruins of modernity
might point to the end of modernity but when making that end as sudden temporal break it becomes an
endpoint within
Modernity's own logic of time
ruins then tell a story about time ruins point to the past, the present, and the future at the same
time and Dawdy has done research on life in the urban ruins of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and
she writes the following and the ruins of Katrina like oneself elsewhere simultaneously evoked the
past when a structure was once whole and complete the present as a state of decline
abandonment or it front to Nature and the future as a stage setting for dystopia or more
rarely Utopia. We can say the same thing about ruin landscape and ruin nature they evoke a past
when an environment was whole and complete a present of Decline and degradation and the future of
dystopia this ruin narrative while it does point to the end of progress and it disturbs
that notion that we should strive for endless progress it is also and I quote Dawdy
fundamentally linear in imagining end times as the terminus of a trajectory it works within
modernities linear time and I really I think that a lot of people think about the environment in
this way today through this linear imaginary of time they imagined Landscapes to be somewhere on this
near timeline that's already set this is like the filter that we see Landscapes through, and the
problem is according to Dawdy if we think about ruins in this way we re-inscribe them
modernities logic of time it becomes really becomes too linear it seems like yeah there's
something within this Landscapes that are predestined it becomes almost eschatological almost
millenarian says Dawdy at one point
which I take to suggest that when we describe these landscapes as a ruin there might be a
risk that we aren't really talking about these Landscapes as much as we are solely using them as a
new character to populate this age all Christian tale about end times and new beginnings
but there is a different alternative there is a different way to make ruins tell a story about time
they don't necessarily need to be re-inscribed modernities linear vision of time. We can look at a
ruins in a different way one that avoids linear time when it does not rest on the modernity's
assumptions about time, and this is where Dawdy draws inspiration from steampunk and the clock Punk
and science fiction and so what
is steampunk or clock punk I bet some of you know it already and if you Google
steampunk you get a lot of this Halloween costumes that are sort of old-timey Gothic looking and you
get a lot of like clockwork stuff and industrial looking stuff and mechanical stuff gears
and cogs and that sort of stuff and an intricate old time looking Machinery then everything has
the same kind of brown color scheme and so this is an aesthetic but it's also a genre of
Science Fiction and it might also be seen as kind of a cultural commentary a commentary that is a
criticism of modernities cult of newness as Dawdy puts it. So steampunk displays a mixing of the old
with the new and in science fiction steampunk refers to works that describe worlds where futuristic
Technologies mixed with all-time me Aesthetics and Technologies and another word for that is
associated with steam punk music is retro-futurism which points to this mixing of the
old and the new right and so imagine the time machine but it's made with cogs and wheels and
Clockwork and stuff and it's typically is 19th century stuff the age of the steam engine and
Mixed
In with futuristic stuff and clock punk I believe is even older stuff like the age of
machinery and mechanisms mixed in with the futuristic technology. You
all know this stuff rather and the Netflix show the Umbrella Academy has elements of Steampunk and
West World and also the Hunger Games and also some of those
Studio Ghibli films like Hal's Moving Castle I'm sure some of you have seen that a
these are all movies with steampunk elements but for our purposes our
academic purposes steampunk or clock punk shows an anti modern folding of time as
Dawdy says it's a play with mixture
of Futures and pasts it's a way of entangling different points in time in a nonlinear fashion
cycling back of the past into the future a future in the guise of the past an imaginary recycling
of time so steampunk and clock Punk highlights the possibility the time May function differently than
modernity's linear progressive version of time.
so what would clock punk anthropology be? well it would be an anthropologist that seeks actively
to subvert linear time and to avoid modernities progressive time and it would be as as Dawdy
points an anthropology of revolution without the mythical sense of rupture revolution as to
revolve rather than to be born again revolution as a cycle something from the past towards the
future
but what would clock punk environmental Anthropologist look like? Dawdy doesn't
say so this is my interpretation and I think there are two things or perhaps one thing with two
parts and that one thing is to avoid placing Landscapes on linear Progressive timeline and it would
be to look at the Landscapes we study and not imagine them in our minds to be as
Somewhere along a line going from pristine and natural to degraded present to completely ruin future
and it will be perhaps to see landscapes not as a line as Dawdy points out
and there are two parts to how one can go about trying to accomplish this I think and one part is to
try and avoid
thinking that a landscape or environment had a starting point and to avoid imagining that
there must have been some kind of Wilderness Point outside of history and and the second aspect is
to try to see try to not see a ruined landscape as an endpoint and I think this second one is far
more difficult for us to accept then the first one where we sort of know that environments
didn't have
starting point but it's it's really difficult I think for us not to think about Landscapes around
the world today is approaching some finality as on the way to being destroyed it's very difficult
for us not to look at a disappearing Glacier for instance like this in Iceland and not place
it on a linear progressive modern timeline that moves toward an end point
and you see the plaque here which is from from the funeral for the Glacier in Iceland it does
exactly that it places the glacier on this linear timeline it evokes the past when the glacier
was whole and complete a present in which is disappearing and an end point this dystopian end
point future in which there are no glaciers at all and this is not to say that they're necessarily
Wrong in anticipating that glaciers will disappear
but to put it too bluntly Perhaps it is modernity's fault that they think about it like they do in
this linear way progressing towards an end point.