The Marett Memorial Lecture 2026 🌍🔍
The Anthropocene, Lost and Found: Towards an Eventful, Situated and Patchy Study of Planetary Disruption. Professor Nils Bubandt (Aarhus University) argues that when the proposal to formally declare the Anthropocene a new geological epoch was rejected in March 2024, social scientists’ disregard for the decision was both fully understandable and profoundly mistaken — a missed analytical opportunity in the study of planetary disruption.
What to expect:
🌍 The Anthropocene, lost and found — Why the 2024 rejection of the Anthropocene as a formal chronostratigraphic epoch passed largely unnoticed in anthropology, and why taking the decision seriously now opens up new terrain for research
🔍 A patchy, eventful planet — Bubandt makes the case for studying the Anthropocene as inherently multiple, eventful, situated and patchy, guided by ethnographic examples from Indonesia and three strands of thought drawn from R.R. Marett, the celebrated anthropologist after whom the lecture is named
🏛️ A free lecture at Exeter — An open evening lecture in the Fitzhugh Auditorium at the Cohen Quad, part of Exeter College’s annual memorial lecture in the social sciences