Entangled Areas: Reactivating Southeast Asia in the Anthropocene

Since the turn of the millennium, the Anthropocene has heralded a series of wide-ranging transformations in the social sciences. Today, environmental humanities, new materialism actor-network theory, multi-species and more-than-human anthropologies, and critical zones all share interest earthly entanglements. In Southeast Asia, many of the prominent entanglements are disastrous—ecological degradation, mega pollution, accelerating precarity, sinking cities. A growing body of literature examines entanglements of humans, plants, and animals in Asian areas. In dialogue with this literature, the present set of engagements explore the proposition that Anthropocene entanglements call for a deeper rethinking of the notion of area itself. We are at a moment where the STS analytics of entanglement can be used to reactivate Southeast Asian – and other – areas. Shaped in heterogeneous perceptual, conceptual, sensorial, and political registers, areas emerge in the following set of engagements as layered multiplicities, each with its own distinctive grip on reality. Our gambit is that the ways in which entanglements make areas becomes a critical issue for STS as we go deeper into the Anthropocene.