Natural-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene. Tracing – Archiving – Remembering

Memorials for human and nonhuman victims of the climate crisis, funerals for glaciers as rituals of ecological mourning, and literary memoirs that combine personal biographies, family remembrance and planetary history—all those phenomena are mnemonic responses to the immense consequences of climate crisis. They mark the emergence of a specific Anthropocenic culture of remembrance.

Human activities have been irreversibly changing the basic conditions of life on Earth since colonization and industrialization at the latest. The geological concept of the Anthropocene expresses this (Earth-)historical insight and identifies humans as a planetary geophysical force. To understand the crisis-ridden present, it is necessary to reflect on the temporal dimension of geology and the history of modernity as part of a general history of life. Against this background, the Anthropocene has been established as a cultural concept since around 2010. By bringing together human and Earth history, it contributes to a fundamental re-conceptualization of the relations between nature and culture.

This reconceptualization includes an expansion of cultural memory, which reaches out to deep-time entanglements in the more-than-human world. This emerging natural-cultural memory of the Anthropocene is based on natural archives as a first-order storage memory. These are stocks of, for example, climate history in the ice and deep-sea sediments long before science has started to systematically collect weather data (second-order storage memory). They are key to understand environmental long-term effects of human activities. These material records contain information about the history of the planet and constitute an archival basis for narratives of human history in the horizon of geological deep time. At the same time, they mark the beginning of a new chapter in the media history of cultural memory.

Addressing these developments, the conference contributes to a growing field of research on memory studies in the Anthropocene and seeks to expand the traditional humanist lens of cultural memory studies. To understand the role of Earth history and natural archives in public communication and political discourses requires a broader conceptualization of cultural memory. Following the work of Aleida Assmann and others, the conference asks how the information, stored in natural archives, enters the functional memory, actively shaping a culture’s identity, its stories and ideas of past, present, and the future.

With kenyotes by Jürgen Renn and Sverker Sörlin and a reading by Judith Schalansky.

The conference is organized by the University of Vechta in cooperation with the ZfL.