This conversation was held in October 2014 in Aarhus to discuss the still inchoate concept of Anthropocene. Does the Anthropocene entail an important call for a new kind of politics and understanding or is it a political buzzword? Does Anthropocene scholarship signal the prospect of genuine cross-disciplinary collaboration or does it sustain conventional hierarchies of knowledge and power? What, in short, are the pitfalls and possibilities of the Anthropocene? Editor Nils Bubandt invited four scholars from different disciplines and backgrounds to discuss these questions.

The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. "Patchy Anthropocene" is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call "modular simplifications" and "feral proliferations." This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; "structure" here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being system characteristics. Indeed, we discuss "systems" as thought experiments, that is, imagined holisms that help make sense of structure. Ecological modeling, political economy, and alternative cosmologies are systems experiments that should rub up against each other in learning about the Anthropocene. We address the misleading claim that studies of nonhumans ignore social justice concerns as well as suggesting ways that ethnographers might address "hope" without rose-colored glasses. This introduction offers frames for appreciating the distinguished contributions to this supplement, and it traces key changes in anthropological thinking from the time of this supplement's predecessor, the Wenner-Gren Foundation-sponsored 1956 volume, Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Rather than interrogating philosophies of the Anthropocene, the supplement shows how anthropologists and allies, including historians, ecologists, and biologists, might best offer a critical description.

Tracing the political history of the concept of ‘security’ through a variety of global, national and regional inflections, this article argues for the analytical usefulness of the concept of ‘vernacular security’. Entailed by this concept is a proposal to treat ‘security’ as a socially situated and discursively defined practice open to comparison and politically contextualized explication, rather than merely an analytical category that needs refined definition and consistent use. While the ideas and politics of security associated with the rise of global governance are built on late-modern ideas about what it means to be safe, global governance is not seamless in its extension. The apparent universalism of the ontology and politics of global security therefore breaks down into a more complex pattern upon closer inspection. Based on material from Indonesia, the article suggests that the ‘onto-politics’ of security have global, national and local inflections, the interplay of which requires re-examination.

How might one responsibly review a fi eld just coming into being-such as that provoked by the term Anthropocene? In this article, we argue for two strategies. First, working from the premise that the Anthropocene fi eld is best understood within its emergence, we review conferences rather than publications. In conference performances, we glimpse the themes and tensions of a fi eld-to-come. Second, we interpret Anthropocene as a science-fi ction concept, that is, one that pulls us out of familiar space and time to view our predicaments diff erently. Th is allows us to explore emergent fi gurations, genres, and practices for the transdisciplinary study of real and imagined worlds framed by human disturbance. In the interplay and variation across modes for constructing this fi eld, Anthropocene scholarship fi nds its shape.

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