Postdoctoral Fellows in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo

Amber is a fossil resin secreted by plants between 300 and 16 million years ago, mostly during phases of climate breakdown and ecological crises. Today, geologists and palaeontologists believe that the study of amber specimens can help us answering key questions about the planet’s climatic history, and understanding how and why species adapted, or failed to adapt, during previous phases of mass extinction. Amber is also a well-known and sought-after organic gemstone, fuelling violent mining economies from Myanmar to Russia, Ukraine, and Mexico, and constitutes a global market increasingly driven by Chinese demand. Amber thus offers a privileged entry point to interrogate the current moment characterised by growing extractivism, trade, environmental crises, and conflict. And it is a compelling lens through which we can address some of the key empirical and theoretical challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

The AMBER project, funded for 5 years by an ERC Starting Grant, builds on recent literature (variously referred to as the “vertical” or “geological” turn) arguing that anthropological engagements with the nonhuman must pay closer ethnographic attention to a study of the geological, and to how scientific knowledge production is tangled up with broader socioeconomic processes of resource exploitation and circulation. As a violently extracted, organic gemstone with great scientific value for the (extinct) lifeforms it often contains, amber offers a unique ethnographic entry point to study such dynamics and the relations between them. This project’s main objective is to explore the nexus of extraction, exchanges, and extinctions through the global entanglements of amber and thus lay the groundwork for a geological anthropology for the Anthropocene that moves beyond the divisions between human and nonhuman, life and nonlife, and the biological and the geological. In doing so, AMBER will contribute a more effective toolbox to both the study and the communication of current planetary crises.

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