In the seminar “Romancing the Anthropocene” we were challenged to use the anthropological concept of shadow to explore various dimensions of Von Chamisso’s nineteenth-century novella, whose main actor, Peter Schlemihl, sells his shadow to a devilish creature, realizing afterwards that he has lost his human identity.

In the shadowing methodology used in anthropology, the anthropologist puts herself in “someone else’s shoes.” Like a shadow, she sticks to the person she wants to analyze, in order to try to make sense of the world from the other’s perspective. As historians, we tried to replicate this methodology within the framework of historical contextualism. We brought Peter Schlemihl from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century in order to see the Westhafen world of 2016 “through the eyes of a past actor”—that is, in Schlemihl’s case, through the eyes of an expert naturalist who loved to observe, collect, and classify unknown species. By forcing the unknown “species”—cars, motorcycles, bicycles, trains, plastic bags, waste, metal and stone animals, and so on—into his nineteenth-century natural categories, Schlemihl identifies artifacts as natural beings (plants or animals).

From the perspective of someone living in the twenty-first century, Schlemihl erases the boundaries between the natural and the artificial world. The new meanings he attributes to nature deeply invoke the anthropocenic blurring of the dichotomy between nature, artificial/nature and culture by questioning what is really natural in a world deeply (re)shaped by humankind, and simultaneously by naturalizing technology; in the process he endows its artifacts with a natural character. If we go a step further, we realize that not only do we see technology as natural, but we expect nature to behave as a technological artifact. A fitting example is the small child who plays with a tablet, dragging fishes with her finger. When confronted with fishes in an aquarium, she reproduces her finger’s movements in order to control the movement of actual fishes, becoming surprised by her failure.

In our seminar “Romancing the Anthropocene,” the concept of shadow acted as a quasi-object in Michel Serres’ sense, as it forced us to adapt our own perspective on what we considered the “correct” approach to the Anthropocene, in a dynamic interaction where the shadow was used by us, but also “used” us. Thus, by being both object and subject, it strongly bordered Bruno Latour’s concept of objects as “actants.” We hope to continue to develop this line of “alternative” ontologies to discuss deeply and widely the relationship between the Anthropocene and the social sciences, particularly the history of science and technology.