In this interview, Cameron Hu considers the entailments of modernity’s—and anthropology’s—insistence on historical contingency. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation that took place in Berlin in the summer of 2025, beginning while carrying collapsible kayaks to Landwehrkanal in Neukölln and continuing while paddling along the river Spree.

Lachlan Summers (LS): I want to ask you a question. Okay: How does an oil well die, and what happens at the end of the universe?

Cameron Hu (CH): This isn’t the kind of thing I thought we were going to talk about. But you might say an oil well starts to “die” when subterranean pressures cease to push oil to the surface.

LS: And what happens at the end of the universe?

CH: I mean, there are a number of stories about how things end—

LS: Are those two questions not the same question?

CH: Oh, I see. One idea is that the universe “ends” when it reaches maximum entropy, heat death. So if you are an entropy-head, then you might feel there to be a sympathy between how oil wells die and how the universe ends, as if the death of each oil well is rehearsing the ultimate fate of the universe—

LS: Okay. And what does that have to do with history?

CH: Well look, the article is sort of about this—about how modernity projects historical time into the Earth, what that historicity does with us and the planet.

It seems to be a modern compulsion to ask of pretty much anything, sooner or later, if it is “historical.” Asking if something is “historical,” moderns are often raising a further, tacit question: if its given form is necessary or contingent. The force of this question is practical. If x is historically contingent, it might somehow be transformed, replaced, reengineered. What animates the modern compulsion to historicize is often a compulsion to discover and expand the possibilities for world-shaping intervention.

The article observes this compulsion unfolding through the modern Earth sciences and extractive industries, unifying them. With the worldwide sprawl of fossil fuel extraction, it became natural to grasp the Earth historically, in terms of “deep,” contingent historical processes that could have gone and may still go otherwise. Oil historicized the Earth. In turn, it was maybe inevitable that some power would move to modify or modulate those processes, direct the course of Earth history. I show that Texas fracking is one such movement—and exemplary of the compulsion to historicize.

This pattern is familiar enough in the humanities and social sciences. The anthropologist asserts that a prevailing social formation is historical; the force of the assertion is that the prevailing formation is in some way contingent—i.e., it needn’t be this way forever because it hasn’t been this way forever. The moral and political force of saying so is to affirm that some other kind of world than the current, degrading one could indeed be organized. It is a captivating story-form. It is weirdly difficult to tell any other kind of story. Not least because it’s in relation to this story that a modern conception of “agency” is intelligible. History carves the metaphysical terrain on which human beings can become what moderns prefer they be: “agents” capable of authoring and refashioning themselves, building and rebuilding the world.

LS: Everyone’s building a world.

CH: There is something interesting about the availability of the language of world-making, about our confidence that everyone’s essentially busy with the creative activity of constructing worlds. It’s not much examined.

LS: Because you can build any kind of world, right?

CH: “World-making” comes to seem coextensive with human activity writ large.

LS: People are building bad worlds; people are building good worlds.

CH: They cannot not do it; they couldn’t do otherwise.

LS: There’s almost nothing that can’t be described in those terms. A way that I think about these types of things is by trying to imagine its opposite. What is the opposite of world-building? When would someone be doing that? What is the opposite of emergence? Can you imagine a type of writing that depicts the opposite of emergence, one that isn’t just another form of emergence, emergence in another direction? There’s no clear way out of that form of thinking. But I want to know, what’s your history of the discipline, such that this has ended up the way that anthropologists do things?

CH: I don’t have much to say about the discipline in particular. But my sense of how things regularly go in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, in particular around questions of “environment,” goes roughly like this. A lot of important writing across the disciplines pictures human words as thin and imperious representations, which would fix or contain a reality that is essentially complex, unruly, multifarious, lively, emergent, etc.—a reality which is therefore gotten wrong, maybe even violated, by those representations. You don’t have to imagine language and life this way.

But if you do adopt this picture, wittingly or unwittingly, then a critical task might present itself. You might respond by showing how an unruly, excessive reality falsifies or escapes our essentialist words. The world, you might find it urgent to say, is too multiple, too contingent, too indeterminate, to be confined by those finite representations that would “capture” it. You might appoint yourself spokesperson for multiplicity and contingency as a sort of rejoinder. With enough repetition and time and mutual affirmation, these rejoinders congeal into orthodoxies about how things really go, how things just happen. Eventually, it becomes possible to declare in print, as if speaking of natural law, that everything is always multiple, necessarily contingent, determinately indeterminate—and that the scholar’s mandate is to rehearse this principle. Saying all this will seem true and important and, interestingly, not at all like an imperious generalization of its own. In this way, you end up affirming the existence of a universe that fits the modern concept of the “agent” like a glove.

LS: It sometimes sits in a funny way, in that there’s a certain grammar for how this can be spoken about. You see a lot of people say it could be otherwise or it could have been otherwise, but you can’t really imagine a person saying it is otherwise, like describing something while saying it’s exactly different. It casts the depiction’s lack of settlement into the future or into the past. The “otherwise” becomes one of these negative spaces to which anthropology orients with yearning, a yearning that it could eventually find it, but every time you found the otherwise would require you to turn your gaze away, toward an otherwise even farther beyond.

CH: What is there to say about a world of capital and empire that is for many completely unbearable, and yet which seems at the same time intractable? One of the things you can do is insist upon the circumstance that something must lie beyond it.

LS: Let’s compare anthropology to sociology. To me, sociology is much better at studying change or rupture or events like that, where a thing undergoes some process of transformation. And I think because of all of the foundational social theories, sociologists have a sense of destruction, like anomie, alienation, disenchantment, and so on. Anthropology didn’t really have that; anthropology, and its orientation toward the everyday, studies how things continue, rather than how things become different. And this, to me, follows the contours of something like the Boasian culture concept.

What I’m saying is: I don’t know if sociology or other social sciences would have the same commitment to the open-ended contingency of all things that anthropology does. Another way this shows up is in anthropology describing itself as a discipline, and ethnography as a method, as a mode of encountering the questions it wants to ask, rather than finding answers to existing questions. And you’re showing in this essay that there are inheritances of thought in our discipline that determine what seems like a question. But now I’m wondering about what question your work finds. In a crude way, I mean: How were oil men in West Texas talking about the metaphysics of liberal history?

CH: Maybe I can rephrase that. In this essay, at least, I’m less attuned to what people voluntarily do with concepts like “history” than to what these concepts do with us, how they stretch out through our actions, and how our actions disclose the shape and force of those concepts. The idea is that the concept of history reveals its meaning in the range of practices it animates—not least, the global project of excavating fossil fuels. So I wouldn’t say the people of oil are explicitly philosophizing about the metaphysics of liberalism, or what have you, while they drive across the desert. But it flows through their words and actions, and certain features of that metaphysics come into view and present themselves for reflection. For example: The way that the compulsion to grasp the world as so much contingent historical process bends reliably into the high-energy project of modulating historical process.

If you look at how this plays out across domains, from geoscience and fracking to historiography and ethnography, it is remarkable how stable the pattern is. There’s an ironic necessity to these compulsive assertions of contingency. The prevailing form of life is relentlessly projecting historical contingency into the world, it cannot not do this, it doesn’t seem to be able to do otherwise.

LS: I’m wondering if this is a kind of therapy, like the Wittgensteinian idea of a therapeutic form of analysis, in which you take this word out, historicity, contingency, whatever it might be, you give it a little rinse, and then you pop it back into rotation? Or what would be your idea here?

CH: I don’t know if it is about cleaning words up. I would say I am just trying to understand how certain concepts dispose of the life that’s lived through them, how they carry us away, often in ways we aren’t aware of, toward ends we wouldn’t avow.

LS: It is not a commitment to the idea that using the correct words will somehow change things in the world or that they will somehow make things better by virtue of their being more accurate, right? So maybe tell me what you think of a concept, because I take you to mean that it is something more than just a word.

CH: What a question. I’m hesitant about the way we tend to depict ourselves as voluntary users and creators of our concepts. A lot of writing seems unduly confident that it is an obvious and straightforward matter for concepts to be stipulated or invented or subversively redeployed or creatively patched up—

LS: It puts us in a kind of elective relationship to them; you can read an article that says, “I use the concept of x to mean y, this to mean that,” and it stages the scholar as someone who can properly pick a concept, choose how to apply it, then apply it, as if all conceptual work were exhausted in that process.

CH: Right. And my somewhat different emphasis is on how some concepts lie so centrally in our lives that we cannot not “use” them, that our relationship to them is less than elective. This article, at least, pictures a concept rather like a very large mass whose gravity is drawing you near to it, into it, or around it, changing your path. My idea of what it is to understand a concept is to understand the paths on which it sends you. In this piece, a conception of the Earth as a historical entity generates the aspiration to reengineer Earth processes, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. That’s one direction “history” yanks you in. You’ve highlighted something like this in your composite-article on ethnographic realism. You are, as I understand it, dramatizing how fundamentally a genre can grip us.

LS: They’re just always there, and you can’t escape how they shape your work while using them, while you are, as you say, in their grip.

CH: It doesn’t present itself for a choice. Much the way that very few writers are saying to themselves before they start typing, “I am going to deploy the characteristic sentences of ethnographic realism,” very few people are pausing to ask themselves “should I historicize the Earth” before they go on doing it. There’s an automaticity to this conceptual operation. That’s simply what it is for the prevailing form of life to approach something as an object of knowledge—to know something is to know it historically. There are exceptions, of course, and of course they highlight the rule.

LS: So this is one way of thinking about how you’re not saying, which is that it’s not a possibility for you to say: “Let’s decommission a word.” You just want to think about the shape of its pull.

CH: Yes. And maybe—maybe—if you start to identify that shape, you can say, “I’m going to start a bit further out and find out if there’s a slightly different path to navigate.”

LS: But it’s hard to get all the way away from it.

CH: Very hard. This is a piece that falls into most of the potholes it wants to point out. I’ve historicized historicity, I’ve indicated the historical contingency of modernity’s preoccupation with historical contingency. In this way, the article is a kind of object lesson in the compulsions of contingency-talk. As I try to characterize the metaphysics of liberalism, I generate a decent example of it.

LS: I don’t see this article as being the type of thing that offers the kind of satisfaction that you often get with a critique of anthropology. This is because it’s pointing towards something that appears to be beyond what currently constitutes critique, it engages historicization, a central modality of critique itself—and when you critique that, it’s hard to know how to have a conversation anymore.

CH: That might be a reasonable place for us to stop.