Pey-Yi Chu. The Life of Permafrost

The discipline of history expands its horizon both in time and depth. The recent notion of the Anthropocene has not only contributed to philosophical debates about humans’ relationship to the natural world but has also stimulated the imaginations of social and human science scholars. “Objects” that had long been considered solely as part of “natural history” have gradually been redefined by historians and anthropologists as zones of all-encompassing human concern. Indeed, stones and soil, oceans, and air have lost their identities as “silent” objects of the natural world and have begun to inform us about our own human history through a complex unpacking of human, non-human, and more-than-human relations. This transformation of history and anthropological discourses is perhaps most visible from a specific geographical area located at “the top of the world”: the Arctic. The Arctic has served as an emblematic image, if not a barometer, of environmental change, and one of its core features, permafrost, is one of the most enigmatic objects that brings together human and environmental agency. Pey-Yi Chu’s The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science aims to historicize an under-studied permafrost and represents an important contribution to the humanities approach to Anthropocene studies.

Anthropocene · Arctic · Earth system science · Environmental history · History of science · Natural (archaeology) · Permafrost · The arctic · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine