A manifesto against property: Anthropological anger in an era of greed and destruction

Abstract

The term polycrisis , coined by Edgar Morin at the turn of the millennium (Morin and Kern 1999), has been picked up by a handful of commentators recently, and it was also recently the topic of a special issue of Anthropology Today (Henig and Knight 2023, see also Kalb 2023). Ranging from biodiversity loss and climate change to mounting inequalities both globally and domestically, a widespread sense of powerlessness spreads even in countries considered democratic, often feeding conspirators, ethnonationalists, right-wing populists and others who promise simple answers to complex questions.