Polycrisis: Prompts for an emerging worldview

Abstract

Taking the realms of business, finance and economic history by storm, polycrisis captures the complexity of an increasingly uncertain world in a state of flux and transition. Proponents of the polycrisis model, such as prominent economic historian and Financial Times contributing editor Adam Tooze, propose polycrisis as a marker of our age, capturing overlapping and interconnected crises beyond cause and effect. In his article, the authors offer some prompts for considering the usefulness and limitations of polycrisis for the anthropological toolkit. The authors cautiously welcome the polycrisis trope as a multidimensional means to account for the consequences of interrelated crises in an unprecedented era.