The Anthropology of Extinction by Genese Marie Sodikoff

The Anthropology of Extinction by Genese Marie Sodikoff

In an age of academic interdisciplinarity, it is often worth reading well outside the confines of one's discipline, for one can find valuable and unexpected insightsThis volume of essays explores the connections, similarities, and sometimes interactions between biological and cultural extinctions. It emphasizes the nuances of language used to define extinctions and pending extinctions, drawing on each of the main sub-fields of anthropology. Genese Marie Sodikoff, the volume's editor, has drawn together an eclectic group of authors, resulting in a very loose-knit set of ideas, but a set that provocatively makes one think about extinction in novel ways.

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.

The Anthropology of Extinction offers compelling explorations of issues of widespread concern.

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).