Emptiness

‘Postness’, a contemporary human condition?

Authors: Friederike Pank, Felix Schiedlowski

Like emptiness, 'postness' denotes a condition between a disintegrated past and an elusive future that is difficult to articulate in positive terms. Describing reconfiguration without resolution, terminologies of 'postness' point to a present that feels epistemologically evacuated. In this virtual issue, Friederike Pank and Felix Schiedlowski collate JRAI articles published between 2002 and 2022 to trace how anthropologists have tried to make sense of this phenomenon.

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Reverberations of extractivism: The long epilogue of the coal story in East Germany

Authors: Friederike Pank

Location: Germany

Themes: Climate, Extractivism

Welzow, a provincial coal mining town in the Lusatian mining district of Eastern Germany, is an exemplary case of how the transition from extractivism to post-extractivism reaches the limit of anthropocentric technological solutionism, calling for a radically new approach, anthropologist Friederike Pank argues in her contribution to the Berliner Gazette text series 'After Extractivism'.

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