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Criminal Anthroposcenes

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture ((PSCMC))

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Abstract

This chapter introduces and explains the concept of criminal anthroposcene. The concept can enrichen criminology’s current engagements with the Anthropocene, particularly for those interested in studying media representations of environmental harm.

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Change history

  • 09 March 2021

    This book was inadvertently published with incorrect authorship for each chapter. This has now been updated in all the chapters. The co-authored chapters now mirror the cover authorship, where ‘with’ is used rather than ‘and’ (as in Anita Lam with Matthew Tegelberg).

Notes

  1. 1.

    Please note that this is a fictionalized account of similar real-life incidents that have occurred in Churchill, Canada, as reported in Beaumont (2017), Leonard (2013), Mulvaney (2019) and Yong and Meyer (2013). The description of the inmate’s behaviour has been supplemented with reference to Parks Canada (n.d.). Statistics about inmate turnover refer to numbers provided by Manitoba Sustainable Development (2018).

  2. 2.

    In Canada, inmates serve time in a jail when their sentence of imprisonment amounts to two years less a day; by contrast, inmates serve time in a prison when their sentence exceeds two years in length. Rather than officially use the term ‘jail,’ the Town of Churchill prefers the term ‘holding facility,’ although the differences between a holding facility, detention centre and jail might only amount to semantics. Experientially, these sites exist on a carceral continuum, especially since confinement has been configured and re-configured as part of the dark side of global mobility (Loyd et al. 2012).

  3. 3.

    This description is paraphrased from Cesare Lombroso’s (2006: 312) praise of the painter Ruben’s depiction of criminal physiognomy in Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1616).

  4. 4.

    The BEAR hotline forms part of the Polar Bear Alert Program in the Churchill area. Once sighted, Polar Bear Alert staff will attempt to chase a bear out of the town by making loud noises, or by shooting the bear with rubber bullets or paintballs. Polar bears that continue to prowl the town, or refuse to stay away, are then captured and placed in the polar bear jail .

  5. 5.

    According to Emile Durkheim (1933/1984: 31), the term ‘crime’ is used to designate ‘any act which, regardless of degree, provokes against the perpetrator the characteristic reaction known as punishment.’ Thus, crime is the cause of punishment. In the Durkheimian framework, crime scenes logically precede and trigger punishment.

  6. 6.

    Polar bears have been spotted in such large numbers in Belushya Guba, a town on the Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, that a state of emergency was declared on February 9, 2019. In December 2018, a ‘mass invasion’ of at least 52 polar bears terrorized residents in this remote region located in the Arctic Ocean (Steer 2019; TASS 2019).

  7. 7.

    The performative approach in criminology has encompassed multiple trajectories, given the different ways performance has been theorized in the social sciences. For instance, in studies of language and governmentality (e.g., Edwards and Hughes 2008), performativity refers to the ways in which human speech acts bring into being the very objects that they signify (Austin 1962). The performance metaphor has also been applied to social interactions in everyday life by Goffman (1959). According to Goffman , ordinary people present themselves as selves (i.e., personas) to each other, acting as though they were on a stage in a theatrical performance. Goffman’s work has been taken up by criminologists interested in the study of stigma and its effects on social interactions. More recently, the concept of performativity has been applied to the doing of specific identities, such as gender (Butler 1990). While the word ‘performance’ has a rich academic history, the performer of note in scholarly analyses has primarily been human. Notable exceptions to this anthropocentric emphasis have been connected to work done by Science and Technology scholars, such as Callon (1998) who studied the performance of markets.

  8. 8.

    Green criminologists have varied in their approach to defining environmental harms as crimes (Gibbs et al. 2009; Ruggiero and South 2010; White and Heckenberg 2014). While some have taken a strictly legalistic perspective that narrowly takes into consideration only those environmental harms that have been defined as violations of specific criminal laws, others have taken a broader approach. This alternative, harm-centric approach examines environmental harms, irrespective of whether or not they have been officially designated as crimes. As such, it also considers normative and legal behaviours that are harmful to the environment.

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  1. Department of Social Science, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Anita Lam & Matthew Tegelberg

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Correspondence to Anita Lam .

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Lam, A., Tegelberg, M. (2020). Introduction. In: Criminal Anthroposcenes. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46004-4_1

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