Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2024) 32.1: 1–12 © Te Author(s) doi:10.3167/saas.2024.320102 Published on behalf of the European Association of Social Anthropologists KARINE GAGNÉ AND GEORGINA DREW Vital Matter Icy Liveliness in the Anthropocene Abstract: Te Anthropocene epoch is one where human mastery has lef an indelible mark on our planet’s geological record. A grand narrative that foregrounds human domination over nature, the Anthropocene should, however, not foreclose agentive capacity beyond the human. Tis special issue of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale explores engagements with ice, an iconic non- human element of the Anthropocene. Te articles demonstrate how recognising ice’s vitality and impact on humans challenges dominant epistemologies, transcends the life/death binary, confuses the boundaries of matter, and alters timescales, unsettling popular imaginaries about the climate. Specifc in how its vitality is expressed, ice is also here universal as a substance enmeshed in earthly processes that transcend localities. Altogether, these accounts evoke a sense of humility in response to the vitality of ice, urging us to embrace the agency of the non-human, the lack of appreciation for which is indeed inherent to the very conditions of the Anthropocene. Keywords: agency, Alaska, Anthropocene, Arctic, Himalaya, ice, materiality, vitality Ice feeds global and cultural imaginaries about climate change. From the North and South Poles to the Andes and the Himalayas, accounts of melting ice and ruined futures have in the past several decades fuelled a popular imagination of icy retreat and collapse. Te alarming images of receding glaciers, which stand as icons of global warming, have generated their share of emotions and controversies, no less because of what they reveal about humanity. Ice is, today, at the centre of existential questions, for in its demise it epitomises the ongoing impact of humanity on the planet. As it recedes, ice imposes refections on the temporality of the planet and its living beings. For instance, in the 1990s, melting ice in Canada and the Alps led to the discovery of ice men who had rested naturally mummifed, thus connecting us, through earthly processes, to beings from hundreds and thousands of years ago (Orlove et al 2008a: 4). But melting ice has also placed within our reach a dystopian future typical of a certain genre of popular imagination (Gergan et al 2020); an imagination that occludes how, for some communities, the climate crisis is experienced in a dystopian present (Whyte 2018). Crucially, the story of ice in the Anthropocene epoch is also one of intensifed scrutiny: scientists are concerned with deciphering ice, and its change, in order to tell a story about ice that can be plotted along a coherent temporal scale, where past states and current trends enable us to better grasp the future. Yet ice masses are not just data, numbers and lines to be projected on a graph or a map for the This article is available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license as part of Berghahn Open Anthro, a subscribe-to-open model for APC-free open access made possible by the journal’s subscribers.