Sociology/anthropology and the Anthropocene discourse share a common genealogy in the European Enlightenment that characterises modern positivist epistemic frameworks. Both European Modernity and the Anthropocene speak of the human category as an abstract collective. But European Modernity was predicated on the ‘anthropology of difference’, namely race, articulated as the distinction between pre-modern and modern subjects. The abyssal line of genocide, racism and slavery underpinned the celebration of reason and progress, the latter available to certain specific modern human kind. Similarly it is not the collective human species, but a particular sub-set of humans of the modern world who are responsible for the current planetary predicament. The Anthropocene contends with the ‘geography of difference’ between the under-developed and developed nations wherein island nations and under-developed regions would bear disproportionate consequences for climate change.
By treating the Anthropocene, as an excursion into sociology of knowledge, I examine the power-knowledge nexus that imbricates Modernity, Colonialism, positivist Science and Sociology/Anthropology. In an effort to contest the depoliticising universal claims of the Anthropocene and avoid methodological nationalism, I propose territorialising the Anthropocene from a continental perspective of ‘Asia as method’ proposing the northeast region of India as its locus of enunciation. Asia as method envisages recovering submerged perspectives or a pluriverse of knowledge systems as opposed to the universal monocultures of mind that Euro-American culture had imposed on the rest. I envisage Asia as method as a transnational cooperative regionalism formulating a geosociality that articulates the stratifying variables of race, tribe and caste with that of geographic region, uniting the forces of climate and human history. Thus, Asia as method is a way to prevent the Anthropocene from turning into another European theoretical prescription.
