The Anthropo-Not-Seen: Colonialism and the “Geographies of the Present”.

In this abstract I take up one key critique of the concept of the Anthropocene, namely that its universalising tendency tends to obscure the ways it is lived differentially. In doing so, I foreground the “ontological multiplicity” of the Anthropocene (Ejsing, 2023). To engage with multiplicity, I draw on de la Cadena’s notion of the ‘anthropo-not-seen’ (2019). This notion names both an anthropos that arrogated to itself the “will to make the world as he or she knows it” as well as the “disobedient anthropos” that is relationally entangled with others (de la Cadena, 2019, p.40). Situated in the context of extractivism, I discuss a lived aspect of the anthropo-not-seen. Following Tsing (2019, p. 230), thinking with landscapes as active lifeworlds “held together by material traces and legacies”, reorients our attention to “constrained multiplicity”. I explore this with reference to two deserted settlements, a disused plant for processing lead mined and a burial site in the southeast of Morocco that dates back to the French colonisation. By way of re-turning to the “geographies of the present” (Gordillo, 2019, p.11) as manifestation of how this landscape is produced, destroyed and what is “created by its destruction” (Gordillo,2019, p.11), I engage with the anthropos’s unseen “constitutive will to destruction”, which “in turn cancels the possibility of disobedient beings and therefore makes for their not-seen condition” (de la Cadena, 2019, p.41). At the same time, by attending to how people “live with and in ruins” (Stoler, 2013, p.13), as an analytical category, the anthropo-not-seen brings into view “the material forms...ruins of empire take when we turn to shattered peoples and polluted places” (Stoler, 2013, p.13).