How natural and cultural forces shaping tropical forested landscapes are conceptualised is of vital importance to Anthropocene debates. We examine two concepts: disturbance and landscape domestication. From the perspective of disturbance, humans – whether ancient or modern – are a priori negative for tropical forests, outside of and alien to nature. From this view, the Anthropocene is a planetary scale aggregation of disturbance. A more just vision of tropical forests, accepting anthropogenic influence on biodiversity, would combine ‘disturbance’ with other concepts that capture human agency and intentionality. Landscape domestication proposes that humans can shape ecology and plant and animal population demographics, making the landscape more productive and congenial for humans, upgrading or degrading the biodiversity of tropical forests. Herein, forest peoples shape the Anthropocene itself through their ‘domestication’ of the forest. Yet this approach can overdetermine culture, ignoring non-human agency, whilst human impacts can be seen as the outcome of intentional modifications to increase landscape productivity, at worst a disavowed projection of ‘economic man’. Using the convivial scholarship framework of Nyamnjoh, we argue that these ideas give incomplete views of tropical forests in the Anthropocene and can be enriched by concepts derived from African worldviews with ‘relationality’ and ‘wholeness’ at their core. These are expressed in ohanife, deriving from Igbo language, ubuntu, from the Nguni language and ukama, a notion from Shona culture. Together these concepts evince an ‘eco-bio-communitarianism’ embracing humans, God, spirits, ancestors, animals and inanimate beings in a ‘community of beings’ irreducible to the culture-nature divide (moving beyond disturbance) and allowing for the agency and personhood of non-humans (moving beyond historical ecology). This is consonant with Indigenous Amazonian worldviews, such as that of Kopenawa. Approaching human-nature relations from Nyamnjoh’s idea of conviviality, we elaborate a less incomplete and more just perspective on the cultural and natural shaping of Anthropocene tropical forests.

中文翻译：

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定义人类世热带森林：用非洲世界观的概念超越“干扰”和“景观驯化”

如何概念化塑造热带森林景观的自然和文化力量对于人类世的辩论至关重要。我们研究两个概念：干扰和景观驯化。从干扰的角度来看，人类——无论是古代的还是现代的——对于热带森林来说都是先天的负面因素，处于自然之外，与自然格格不入。从这个角度来看，人类世是一个行星尺度的扰动聚合。对热带森林的更公正的看法是，接受人为对生物多样性的影响，将“干扰”与捕捉人类能动性和意图的其他概念结合起来。景观驯化提出，人类可以塑造生态以及动植物种群的人口统计，使景观更加富有成效，更加适合人类，从而提升或降低热带森林的生物多样性。在这里，森林民族通过对森林的“驯化”塑造了人类世本身。然而，这种方法可能会过度决定文化，忽视非人类机构，而人类影响可以被视为有意修改以提高景观生产力的结果，最坏的情况是对“经济人”的否认预测。利用 Nyamnjoh 的欢乐学术框架，我们认为这些想法给出了人类世热带森林的不完整视图，并且可以通过源自以“相关性”和“整体性”为核心的非洲世界观的概念来丰富。这些语言用源自伊博语的 ohanife 语言、源自恩古尼语言的 ubuntu 以及源自绍纳文化的概念 ukama 来表达。这些概念共同表明了一种“生态生物社群主义”，将人类、上帝、灵魂、祖先、动物和无生命的生物纳入“生命共同体”，不可简化文化与自然的鸿沟（超越干扰），并允许机构和非人类的人格（超越历史生态）。这与亚马逊原住民的世界观一致，例如科本纳瓦的世界观。我们从 Nyamnjoh 的欢乐理念探讨人与自然的关系，对人类世热带森林的文化和自然塑造提出了一个不那么不完整、更公正的视角。