'Ancestral future': On consumption, ethics and the Anthropocene

Abstract

Along with a growing debate around the emergence of a new time on Earth, called the Anthropocene, a critical perspective has emerged in the field of Human and Social Sciences that questions the terms of this nomination, including its temporality, its view of humanity as species, its capitalist impetus and its colonialist position. In this essay, I seek to materialize this critical view by analysing how corporate discourse has promoted "ethical solutions" for the Anthropocene, particularly in the sphere of consumption. Taking The Fable of the Bees of Bernard Mandeville as a starting point, I show that in the context of capitalism, consumption is based on the logic of excess and the promise of unlimited satisfaction, which is opposed to what the time of catastrophes demands. In dialogue with a prolific interdisciplinary academic production on another way of understanding the Anthropocene, I argue that it is not possible to think about an ethical consumption in the Anthropocene. I propose a return to the ancestral future of Indigenous peoples as a means to envision another ethics, one in which the critique of consumption does not evolve into an implicit endorsement of it or its future.