Toward a planetary ethnography? From “frictions” to “tensions” in understanding post-truth capitalist power

It is time for anthropology to reclaim truth and speak it to capitalist power more forcefully. The rise of post-truth and the truth of our planetary socioecological predicaments demand this. How to do so is not straightforward. Recalibrating deconstruction and finding a new balance between epistemic solidities and shifting sands is only part of the task. The greater anthropological challenge is reorienting ethnography from frictions (how “global connections” fragment) to tensions (how and why contradictory global connections came about and endure or not). To explore this reorientation, I propose a political ecology of truth and the cultivation of a planetary ethnography. Both aspire to do anthropological justice to the dramatic transformations in our dominant planetary consciousness and the contradictory socioecological predicaments this is mired in.