anthropological contributions to the study of climate: past, present, future

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Advanced Review Anthropological contributions to the study of climate: past, present, future Kirsten Hastrup In the world of climate science there is an increasing demand for contributions from the social sciences, given that the current processes of climate change deeply affect societies. This article is a response to this call, with specific focus on past and potential contributions from anthropology, as we have known it from the 19th century onwards. It is shown how through the ages, different anthropological interests have shaped distinct perspectives on the entanglement of society and nature. It is argued that the present global concerns about climate change necessitate a refashioning of anthropology, and make it expedient to pay attention to the emergent global imaginaries. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. How to cite this article: WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:269–281. doi: 10.1002/wcc.219 INTRODUCTION A t the present moment in time, there is a feeling that not only the physical but also the intellectual landscape is changing in the wake of global climate change. There are climate sceptics who still question the global crisis and especially the anthropogenic nature of the current trends of change, but most of the enlightened world agrees that the Earth system is facing a major challenge, even if climate is also a concept to which a variety of social meanings adhere. 1 Meanings are social facts and have social effects, and humanity in some ways stands at a threshold. It is a threshold perceived and conceptualized by humans, for whom environmental and climatic issues are some of the most daunting elements in the future of the planet. This is ‘the inconvenient truth’ portrayed by Al Gore, 2 who managed to capture a worldwide audience to his film (and his book), aiming explicitly at raising global awareness and urge governments to take political responsibility. Beyond public campaigns, but feeding into them, scientific investigations have addressed the complexi- ties of climate change and mounted diverse scenarios, Correspondence to: [email protected] Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Conflict of interest: The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article. which—in spite of all their uncertainties and internal variation—paint a fairly coherent picture of rapid and rather alarming global warming. 3 ‘Alarming’ again pointing to a distinct human perception. The main documents are the successive reports from the Inter- governmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which have become increasingly sinister—in relation to the desired, stable Earth System. While natural scientists have generally taken the lead in the debate on the consequences of climate change, social scientists are increasingly invited to take part in the discussion; it has convincingly been argued that the issue of climate change is not simply a ‘prediction problem’ but a more complex question of how great risk society is willing to take on behalf of future generations (Ref 3, p. 21). This calls for the social sciences, where prediction is an even more complicated issue than it is in the ever more standardized climate modeling business. 4 For the social sciences, the challenge of prediction is related to the need for taking responsible social action before it is too late. This is hampered by Giddens’ paradox from the outset; the paradox ‘states that, since the dangers posed by global warming aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of day-to- day life, however awesome they appear, many will sit on their hands and do nothing of a concrete nature about them. Yet waiting until they become visible and acute before being stirred to serious action will, by definition, be too late’ (Ref 5, p. 2). In a similar vein, it Volume 4, July/August 2013 © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 269

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Page 1: Anthropological contributions to the study of climate: past, present, future

Advanced Review

Anthropological contributionsto the study of climate: past,present, futureKirsten Hastrup∗

In the world of climate science there is an increasing demand for contributionsfrom the social sciences, given that the current processes of climate changedeeply affect societies. This article is a response to this call, with specific focuson past and potential contributions from anthropology, as we have known itfrom the 19th century onwards. It is shown how through the ages, differentanthropological interests have shaped distinct perspectives on the entanglementof society and nature. It is argued that the present global concerns about climatechange necessitate a refashioning of anthropology, and make it expedient to payattention to the emergent global imaginaries. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

How to cite this article:WIREs Clim Change 2013, 4:269–281. doi: 10.1002/wcc.219

INTRODUCTION

At the present moment in time, there is a feelingthat not only the physical but also the intellectual

landscape is changing in the wake of global climatechange. There are climate sceptics who still questionthe global crisis and especially the anthropogenicnature of the current trends of change, but mostof the enlightened world agrees that the Earth systemis facing a major challenge, even if climate is also aconcept to which a variety of social meanings adhere.1

Meanings are social facts and have social effects, andhumanity in some ways stands at a threshold. It isa threshold perceived and conceptualized by humans,for whom environmental and climatic issues are someof the most daunting elements in the future of theplanet. This is ‘the inconvenient truth’ portrayed byAl Gore,2 who managed to capture a worldwideaudience to his film (and his book), aiming explicitlyat raising global awareness and urge governments totake political responsibility.

Beyond public campaigns, but feeding into them,scientific investigations have addressed the complexi-ties of climate change and mounted diverse scenarios,

∗Correspondence to: [email protected]

Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen,Copenhagen, Denmark

Conflict of interest: The author has declared no conflicts of interestfor this article.

which—in spite of all their uncertainties and internalvariation—paint a fairly coherent picture of rapid andrather alarming global warming.3 ‘Alarming’ againpointing to a distinct human perception. The maindocuments are the successive reports from the Inter-governmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), whichhave become increasingly sinister—in relation to thedesired, stable Earth System. While natural scientistshave generally taken the lead in the debate on theconsequences of climate change, social scientists areincreasingly invited to take part in the discussion; ithas convincingly been argued that the issue of climatechange is not simply a ‘prediction problem’ but a morecomplex question of how great risk society is willingto take on behalf of future generations (Ref 3, p. 21).This calls for the social sciences, where prediction isan even more complicated issue than it is in the evermore standardized climate modeling business.4

For the social sciences, the challenge ofprediction is related to the need for taking responsiblesocial action before it is too late. This is hampered byGiddens’ paradox from the outset; the paradox ‘statesthat, since the dangers posed by global warming aren’ttangible, immediate or visible in the course of day-to-day life, however awesome they appear, many will siton their hands and do nothing of a concrete natureabout them. Yet waiting until they become visible andacute before being stirred to serious action will, bydefinition, be too late’ (Ref 5, p. 2). In a similar vein, it

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has been argued that the economics of climate changeis very much an economics of risk and uncertainty, andthat the risk of inaction in the face of climate changemay be very severe; it has also been stressed thatreducing the risks of climate change requires collectiveaction (Ref 6, p. 644). This again presupposes anagreement about the risks, and—significantly—adiscussion of ‘the ecological, social, cultural andcognitive thresholds for adaptation and the questionof how much change can we live with’ (Ref 7, p. 19).

Among the social sciences, anthropology isunique in its stress upon extensive fieldwork and qual-itative methods, implying close attention to the every-day lives of people and to their own understandings ofwhat is happening. This has provided a richly facettedknowledge about perceived changes of weather andwind, reflecting the specificities of place and partic-ular ethnographic encounters. At the same time, itis becoming increasingly clear that nobody is unaf-fected by the current global interest in climate change;whether their own backyard is directly afflicted or not,everybody is in the know. This means that the localizedperceptions of climate change that anthropologistsmeet all over the world, are already affected—directlyor indirectly—by the IPCC scenarios, and it has beenshown how the modelers’ ‘predictions’ are just specificversions of the general human and societal propen-sity for forecasting and anticipation.8 Working withinthe shifting environments for social action, and withpeople who live there and register the new weatherrealities, anthropologists offer a comprehensive under-standing of social resilience as embedded in everydayhuman agency and social responsibility—built upona sense of anticipation.9,10 Anthropologists, then, arenot simply witnesses to local effects of global warm-ing; they also contribute to vital discussions of scaleand the framing of scientific inquiry.

The new realities of global connection throughclimate outstretch all anthropological theories aboutlocality, sociality, and connectivity, and time has comenot only to review the ways in which anthropologyhas recently embraced climate and contributed to cli-mate studies, but also to take stock of the theoreticalimplications for an anthropology that was founded indirect social encounters rather than in planetary con-cerns. As I am going to argue toward the end, ‘climatechange’ potentially contributes to a refashioning ofanthropology itself.

PLANETARY IMAGERIES: THECLIMATE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Apart from contributing to a new awareness ofresilience and the agentive powers of people,

anthropology also shows how economic, political,and social imaginaries have direct bearings on thefuture, including the degree of warming and thepossibilities for mitigation. One recent imaginaryrelates to the notion of the Anthropocene, directlylinking planetary concerns and human action, andsucceeding the Holocene.11,12 While the label maystill be disputed within the earth sciences, there isno doubt that it captures a general feeling of havingentered a new and truly planetary era.

The Holocene started after the latest glacialperiod and thus comprises the history of humanitysince the invention of agriculture and the emergenceof the earliest known complex, urban societies—ap-parently following another abrupt climate change.13

The technological and social advancement since thenhas now come to a point where it is no longer possi-ble to understand the Earth as independent of humaninfluence; hence the Anthropocene. After more than10,000–12,000 years of agricultural development, ontop of which we have seen some 200 years of intenseindustrialization, an exponential global populationgrowth, and a massive urbanization, the human finger-print is everywhere: on the land surface, in the oceans,and in the atmosphere. The Earth is so deeply markedby human activity that climate cannot be understoodwithout acknowledging this. In that sense, we are at‘nature’s end’, implying that everything has becomepart of a human environment (Ref 14, p. 2–3).

By implication, in the Anthropocene it is nolonger possible to entertain a notion of a self-regenerating nature, beyond the human domain.Humans are all over the place, not only as destroyersof nature, of course, but also as providers ofregenerative solutions. It is part of human andsocial life to take action; agency and resilience aretwo sides of the same coin. For social agents toact consistently and to take responsibility for theircommunity they need to have reasonably well-foundedexpectations to the future; and these expectations willinevitably reflect the larger planetary concerns thatare infiltrating all social and cultural imaginaries.15

While there may be some truth in the allegationthat western enlightenment notions of an ‘objective’climate ‘exerts a stranglehold on the imaginations ofthe academic, political and policy elites’ (Ref 16, p. 3),I am not convinced that ‘the rest of the world remainsdisenfranchised from such constructions of climate,mere spectators, and are therefore emotionally,psychologically, and culturally distanced from theirresulting products’ (Ref 16). Recent studies actuallydemonstrate how an objectified notion of climate ispresent as a backdrop for most, localized perceptionsof environmental change; people do not reason against

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such a notion but live and think with it, in their owncreative ways.17,18 There is no way to isolate ‘climate’from the human world, and we have to learn to livewith a hybrid climate—in the mundane as well as inthe academic world.19

For all its newness, the notion of the Anthro-pocene is actually a direct outcome of the planetaryconsciousness that emerged in the enlightenment.20

The 18th ambition to study and classify the wholeworld opened it up for inspection and for abstraction;the emergent comparative knowledge of natures, forinstance, allowed for a new kind of generalization,where the system of classification took precedenceover the individual plant, to invoke the work of Lin-neaus (Ref 21, p. 88 ff). This was the time of greatscientific, often interdisciplinary expeditions settingout from Europe, and encountering people who livedrather differently in the world. It was therefore alsothe time where an incipient anthropology based onempirical studies took off. Likewise, it is to the enlight-enment that we owe the impetus for a global climatescience, even though it remained anchored in classicalthought—as it still does in many ways. In the his-tory of ideas there seems to be very few clean breaks,and even the enlightenment recognition of a planetarysystem had deep roots in earlier thought.

The notion of meteorology, for instance, is owedto Aristotle. It derived from at concern with ‘meteors’,i.e., those inexplicable appearances that had beenobserved around the Earth. ‘Aristotle’s meteorologycomprehended all phenomena that occurred in therealm below the orbit of the moon, including comets,shooting stars, and effluvia vented from beneath theearth, as well as things that would later be consideredtruly atmospheric’ (Ref 22, p. 204). Aristotle wasalso among the first to announce the spherical natureof the earth, which again gave rise to a notionof climata, zones that had a geographical ratherthan a meteorological (in our sense of the term)significance (Ref 23, p. 94). The notion derived fromclima, meaning inclination, and reflected the relativelength of the day due to the inclination of the sunat various places. This resulted in rather arbitraryand abstract lines, which were to hold a firm grip onthe imagination of the Earth right up to the present.It also gives us the first inkling that 18th centuryenlightenment science was not the first to objectify orclimate and (allegedly) to alienate ordinary experience.

The ancient view of climate was to remainimplicit in enlightenment thinking, even while itwas also increasingly acknowledged that people andlocalized experiences always potentially modify orcontradict the neat lines of climate science. Thepotential dissonance between direct experience and

abstract notions of climate is extensively documentedby Jan Golinski in his book oh the British weatherand the climate of enlightenment.22 He traces thedevelopment of a modern climate science, which inthe 18th and early 19th centuries was closely relatedto medical issues, and the perceived links betweenparticular climates and personalities—later to be seenas racial features. He also shows how toward the endof the 18th century, cleaning the air was a centerpiecein major programs of social reform (Ref 23, p. 159 ff).

Golinski’s principal example is that of theGreat Storm in England in 1703, which was clearlya disastrous climate event. The question, which isenforcing itself upon us even now, if how we may linkthe weather being experienced at the level of weatherevents, and climate being a scientific abstraction.24

Climate scientists stress the distinction and claimthat it is impossible to speak sensibly about climatepatterns if you have data for less than three decades,while five would be even better (Ref 3, p. 3). Evidently,there must be some agreement about the conceptualframework, but again, from an anthropologicalperspective, weather events are always perceived assuch within a larger framework of regularity ornormalcy, defining the sense of the weatherworld,within which people live, and from which they cannotextract themselves to get an external view.25 Thedistinction between climate patterns and weatherevents is not clear-cut, except in theory. This becomesclear also when we move to recent, and burgeoning,anthropological analyses of the local experiences ofclimate change; the new and unprecedented weatherevents are invariably experienced within a largerpattern of perceived regularity, framing both thenormal and the extreme. In the case of the GreatStorm, Golinski shows how this event paved theway for meticulous weather observations by people ingeneral, and for a new climate science, which remainedfraught by uncertainties and lack of predictivepower.22,26 Describing both patterns and anomaliesis probably the most common way of configuringclimate at any point in time, including the present.

Enlightenment scientists practiced fieldwork ona grand scale in the interest of discovering, mapping,and classifying different natures and societies in theworld. A formidable representative of this traditionof discovering—and interpreting—nature by gettingout there with open senses is provided by Germangeographer and biologist Alexander von Humboldt(1769–1859), whose travels to America not onlyreshaped the map, but also created a new senseof nature’s life. Committed to a universal science,it was nevertheless the detailed attention to theindividual elements and their circumstances that

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allowed Humboldt to generalize and to convey ‘thewonder and variety of natural phenomena intendingthereby to provide the reader with the same realfascination and pleasure that he derived from both thescientific and the aesthetic contemplation of Nature’sdelights’ (Ref 27, p. 122).

Humboldt’s work owed much to the philosoph-ical works of Johann Gottfried Herder (1784–91),whose universal history of humankind was a remark-able enlightenment achievement.28 Herder’s work isparticularly interesting for its stress upon the waysin which cultures had grown more or less organi-cally out of nature, yet remained intimately linkedwith the different continents and their constitution.This would have been part of the general backgroundalso for Alexander von Humboldt seeing himself asa ‘historian of nature’ (Ref 27, p. 66), within hislarger commitment to a universal science. Humboldt’sproject lives as much in the text, as outside of it, andit is ‘orchestrated by the infinitely expansive mind andsoul of the speaker’ (Ref 20, p. 121). Like anthropo-logical fieldwork today, Humboldt’s travels were notso much directed at finding new facts as they wereinstrumental to facilitating the knowledge of patternsand relations. Humboldt wrote:

Two main aims guided my travels, published as theRelation historique. I wanted to make known thecountries I visited, and to collect those facts that helpedelucidate the new science vaguely called the NaturalHistory of the World, Theory of the Earth or PhysicalGeography . . . I was passionately keen on botany andcertain aspects of zoology, and flattered myself thatour researches might add some new species to thosealready known. However, rather than discoveringnew, isolated facts I preferred linking already knownones together. The discovery of a new genus seemedto me far less interesting than an observation on thegeographical relations of plants, or the migration ofsocial plants, and the heights that different plantsreach on the peaks of the cordilleras. (Humboldt’sPersonal Narrative, in Ref 27, p. 66)

In the course of his work, Humboldt measured theworld and (re-) invented ‘climate’; to him ‘climatemeant ‘‘in the most general sense all changes inthe atmosphere which noticeably affect the humanorgans’’, including temperature, humidity, barometricpressure, or wind’ (Ref 29, p. 587). He suggested thenotion of ‘isolines’, which—unlike the simple lines oflatitude—would take the height of mountains and theactualities of coastal or inland climate patterns intoaccount. Thus, Humboldt’s definition linked climateto both geographical location and human experience,and it presupposed a composite view of climate,

synthesizing both the whole of the atmosphericphenomena at a particular location, and the whole ofclimates in different locations (Ref 29, p. 587–588).The isoline technique made a new kind of cartographypossible.

When anthropology became a professional aca-demic pursuit in the 19th century, it was closely tiedup with the new geographical knowledge on the onehand, and with a colonial interest to understand thelives of people elsewhere on the other. The latter partincluded issues of health in climates that were oftencalamitous to British regiments abroad, for instance.Heat and humidity were seen as the most dangerousatmospheric conditions, and to counter the repeatedlosses of troops abroad, something had to be done.

‘The rationale was to allow the individual to becomeacclimatized. It was assumed that the settler fromEurope would gradually adjust to a tropical climate ifnature was allowed to do its work. Just as plants andanimals were thought to be transplantable to distantplaces, so people were expected to be modified bythe forces of nature itself to fit the climate to whichthe relocated. This was sometimes called ‘‘seasoning’’’(Ref 22, p. 188).

Such reasoning inspired an early anthropologicalobservation on the ‘acclimatization of man’ that linksthe spatial identification of climate to the constitutionof the human races.30 While humankind as such maylive all over the globe, Hunt questions the idea thatthe races are equally fit to do so and asserts that toolittle is known about the actual influence of climateupon individuals and races to portray humans as trulycosmopolitan beings.

No one will attempt to deny that, physically, mentally,and morally, there does exist a very considerabledifference between the denizens of different parts ofthe earth; and it is not proposed to inquire whetherthe various agents which constitute climate, and theircollateral effects, are sufficient to produce the changeswe find in physique, mind, and morals; but, simplytaking the various types of man as they now occuron the earth, we have to determine whether we arejustified in assuming that man is a cosmopolitananimal, and whether the power of acclimatizationbe possessed equally by all races of man known to us.(Ref 30, p. 51)

Both Herder and Humboldt had stressed theintertwinement of history and nature, and we cansee a similar line of thought in Hunt’s work, beingamong the first anthropological analyses of climate.

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For Hunt, climate was as comprehensive as it hadbeen for Humboldt, incorporating many variables,such as the landscape itself, its vegetation, availablefood-items and so forth.

In speaking, therefore, of climate, I use the wordin its fullest sense, and include the whole cosmicphenomena. Thus, the physical qualities of a countryhave an important connection with climate; and wemust not simply consider the latitude and the longitudeof a given locality, but its elevation and depression, itssoil, its atmospheric influences, and also the quantityof light, the nature of its water, the predominanceof certain winds, the electrical state of the air, etc.,atmospheric pressure, vegetation, and aliment, as allthese are connected with the question of climate (Ref30, p. 52).

All these variables contributed to an overturningof climate as a feature of simple geographicallocation and it is in their various and variablecombinations that they influence the individual racesand differentiate their capacities for adaptation tothe prevailing climates. By providing evidence ‘fromthat most valuable of all modern sciences, statisticalscience’, mainly as applied to British military forcesin India, Hunt went on to substantiate his claimabout different powers of acclimatization. This, again,provides the bottom line for evaluating the degree ofcosmopolitanism inherent in the different races. Notsurprisingly, the British seems to come out among themost successful, in spite of their misery in the Tropes.

ENVIRONMENT, RACE, ANDCULTURE: 19TH CENTURYPERCEPTIONS

Apart from discussing the relative ability to flourish inother climates, Hunt also posed a question of whetherany race of man can ‘move from its own ethnic centreinto another, and become changed into the type of thatrace which inhabits the region into which it migrates’(Ref 30, p. 55). The latter would change people intonew types, better suited to their new position. Heanswers the question in the affirmative based on thecase of America, where the European immigrants seemto have changed their character:

Some writers, in their anxiety to prove that climate hasnothing to do with the varieties of man, deny that thereis any change in the European inhabitants of America;but recent researches give strong evidence that thereis a change in mind, morals, and physique; and while

this change is not to be entirely ascribed to theclimate, there still is good presumptive evidence thatthe Europeans have changed in America, especiallyin North America. In the children of the coloniststhere is a general languor, great excitability, and awant of cool energy. As they grow up, they neglectall manly sports. This general excitability and want ofcoolness and continuous energy is seen in the wholeYankee race. The women become decrepit very early,and consequently cease to breed when still young. Itis also affirmed that the second and third generationsof European colonists have small families (Ref 30,p. 55–56).

It is important to note how both the notion of race andthe notion health are different from what they were tobecome in the 20th century, and that both were firmlyembedded in a particular environment—making theirmark on people as well as animals and plants. What isequally interesting, when see from an Anthropocenicperspective, is the idea heralded by the historian ofAmerica, William Robertson. He had suggested thatmankind had attained the greatest perfection in thetemperate regions of the globe and that the vigor andsensibility of the European settlers in America hadmade it possible for them to change the Americanclimate—by clearing the forests and cultivating theland (Ref 22, p. 180). American writers becameincreasingly aligned in the assertion that climatehad changed considerably since European settlementbegan; the ‘climate Americans claimed as a nationalasset was one they believed they had molded—andwere continuing to mold—to meet the requirementsof their civilization’ (Ref 22, p. 193).

While the weather of the New World didnot really fit Old World experience, it was quicklyembraced and exploited. However, some people ofthe New World seemed to live beyond climates thatcould be moulded. Such was the case of the Eskimos,for instance, as suggested by Hunt. Claiming that itwas chiefly civilization which enabled the European tobear the extremes of climate, and that, indeed, peoplehad to be civilized before they would even desire tovisit distant regions, Hunt continues:

The Esquimaux, for instance, is perfectly happy in hisown way, and has no desire to move to a warmerclimate. His whole body and mind are suited for thelocality; and were he moved to a warm climate, hewould certainly perish. The whole organism of theEsquimaux is fitted solely for a cold climate (Ref 30,p. 53).

At the time, anthropological knowledge about theEskimos was limited; they were known mainly from

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trappers and whalers, and from traders. The first todo an extensive ethnographic study of the Eskimo wasFranz Boas, whose book on the Central Eskimo31 is abaseline study for all later anthropological studies ofthe (now) Inuit. Before becoming an anthropologist,Boas had moved from physics to geography, but aftera yearlong fieldtrip to the Arctic, in 1883–1884, hemoved to cultural anthropology—a new subject atthe time. The formative trip went to Baffin Land,where Boas’ goal was to investigate the influence ofthe environment on people’s perceptions and theirmovements, and he later wrote: ‘A year of life spent asan Eskimo among Eskimos had a profound influenceupon the development of my views, not immediately,but because it led me away from my former interestsand toward the desire to understand the behavior ofhuman beings’ (Ref 32 p. 201).

On the strength of his experience in Baffin Land,Boas was ready to discuss the climate’s influence uponcharacter, thus continuing the discussion started byHunt. In an early article on ‘The aims of Ethnology’,33

which Boas sees as ‘the total study of social life’,he engages with what he calls ‘far-reaching theoriesthat have been built on weak foundations’. And hecontinues:

Here belongs the attempt to explain history asdetermined by the nature of the country in whichthe people live. A relation between soil and historycannot be denied, but we are not in a position toexplain social and mental behavior on this basisand anthropo-geographical ‘‘laws’’ are valid only asvague empty generalities. Climate and soil exert aninfluence upon the body and its functions, but itis not possible to prove that the character of thecountry finds immediate expression in that of itsinhabitants. It is said of the Negro, living in tropicalAfrica and not troubled by lack of food, is lazy anddoes not take the trouble to clothe his body. TheEskimo also is said to be made lazy by the Polarnight which dwarfs his imagination. Unfortunatelysuch generalizations are entirely misleading. There areNegro tribes which punish anyone who appears inpublic improperly clothed; while the tribes of Tierradel Fuego which live in an inhospitable climate arescantily clothed. The Eskimo, during the long winternight, find entertainment in dance, song and storytelling (Ref 33, p. 637).

Boas did his best to denaturalize the notion of race,and not least the idea of vastly different intellectualcapacities. From his own experience in America, itwas the social inequalities that were the basis forracial prejudice, and which had to be addressed.34

Nature in the sense of race was open to change.

The nature of the geographical environments withinwhich people lived, was less susceptible to changeby human will, yet they were also not determiningculture. This dismantling of natural determinismbecame a baseline for 20th century anthropology,forming distinct ‘schools’—American, British, CentralEuropean, French—yet also increasingly committed tounderstand the natives’ point of view, to paraphrasea famous passage in Malinowski’s first monographfrom the Trobriand Islands,35 which came to serve asa baseline for modern ethnographic fieldwork.

CULTURAL HOLISM AND CLIMATE:THE MODERNIST MOMENT

Malinowski’s fieldwork, which took place duringWorld War I, is often seen as the mother of allanthropological fieldwork, at least as an individualenterprise. In fact, it had been practiced before,notably in the so-called Torres Strait Expeditionto Australia 1898–1899, led by Haddon and otherCambridge scientists, working as an (interdisciplinary)team. Anna Grimshaw36 has suggested that thisexpedition constituted ‘the modernist moment’ inanthropology, and it not only instantiated the ideaof being there (in the field) but also a new way ofseeing: no longer a study of mankind as such, oraimed at classifying its sub-species (or races), field-anthropology drew attention to the concrete detailsof actual social life, as it unfolded in a particularenvironment. The modernist turn of anthropology,and the new fieldwork practice, meant that suchcomprehensive categories as ‘climate’ and ‘race’tended to disappear or to become simple backgroundinformation, while close attention to the actualenvironment and its affordances was always paid.The very physicality of fieldwork always made sensoryexperiences an important (if often unacknowledged)part of ‘being there’—including experiences oftemperature, weather, and winds, of course.

The general observations on climate and theseasons receded into the background, while more spe-cific descriptions of vegetation and the affordances ofthe environment and their social and symbolic valuewere foregrounded. We may think of Marcel Mauss’identification of a seasonal social morphology amongthe Arctic peoples, for whom the seasons were con-spicuous in the extreme.37 But we may also think ofMalinowski’s Coral Gardens and their Magic, wherehe states: ‘In this book we are going to meet theessential Trobriander. Whatever he might appear toothers, to himself he is first and foremost a gardener.His passion for his soil is that of a real peasant.He experiences a mysterious joy in delving into the

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earth, in turning it up, planting the seed, watching theplant grow, mature, and yield the desired harvest’ (Ref38, p. xix). Or think of Evans-Pritchard’s The Nueropening with a long discussion of Nuer pastoral-ism and its ecological setting; the book is as muchabout cattle, drought, and seasonal resources, as itis about people.39 Nobody ever doubted that theseworks were masterpieces in anthropology, not leastbecause of their integration of natural affordances andsocial forms into one picture.

What was new in the early modernist anthro-pological analyses was not the observations of natureas such, but the gradual institution of an idea ofholism, each primitive society or culture being aworld onto itself, ecologically, socially, and cultur-ally. Holism in Malinowski’s case was concomitantto the natural boundaries of the islands he stud-ied, but it soon became an implicit model for allsocial systems, including their natural resources. Thelocal became established as a social fact, even whenlarger patterns of navigation and exchange were alsoacknowledged, as in Malinowski’s Argonauts of theWestern Pacific.35 This was to leave a long-lastingimprint on anthropology; fieldwork itself produceda circumscribed object of study. While yielding animpressive amount of detailed knowledge about spe-cific places at particular points in time, it also tendedtoward an unwarranted (analytical) isolation of indi-vidual peoples or ‘cultures’, whose wider movementsand networks were often ignored. This anthropologi-cal concept of closed cultures was critically discussedas a narrative construction rather than a social fact inthe 1980s and 1990s.

Still, in spite of this critical discussion, in many21st century studies of climate change, the legacy ofholism is remarkable, if not actually reinvented, andoften leaves an impression of an anthropology belong-ing to yesteryear. For instance, in a recent review ofanthropological climate research, it is argued that tothe general challenge of climate change and adapta-tion,

anthropology brings its core theoretical tenet: thatculture frames the way people, perceive, understand,experience, and respond to key elements of the worldsthey live in. This framing is grounded in systemsof meanings and relationships that mediate humanengagements with natural phenomena and processes.This framing is particularly relevant to the study ofclimate change, which entails movement away from aknown past, through an altered present, and towardan uncertain future, since what is recalled, recognized,or envisaged rests on cultural models and values (Ref40 p. 87).

The disturbing fact in this passage (which reflectsa larger trend particularly in American culturalanthropology) is the stillness of the image of cultureitself. Elsewhere it has generally been acknowledgedthat cultural models and values are always inthe making, and that (global) historical processesoriginating elsewhere and going nowhere in particularcannot be extricated from ‘local’ cultural values.

The manifest infiltration of larger processes intolocal social forms was first discussed shortly afterWorld War II with the onset of anticolonial struggle.This naturally became another important momentin anthropology, where colonial relations had hada formative impact in the earlier days, in terms ofthe choice of fields as well as topics. The momentfuelled a new interest in Marxist thought as appliedto different modes of reproduction; it also fuelledan interest in economic world systems as part ofa general post-colonial critique of anthropology.41

The colonial encounter, which had been built intoanthropology from its inception, was also analyzedand overwritten.42 Not least because of the newpost-colonial realities, anthropology also increas-ingly addressed transnational migration.43 Clearly,the ‘post-colonial moment’ was rather extensive andcomplex, but looking back we may now identifya postmodern anthropology as a period where thestyle shifted from a holistic to a more fragmentaryethnography.44 It was an important rejoinder againstfacile positivism, but the drawback was that naturewas ‘written out’ of the anthropological works, allwhile it was acknowledged that cultures were noth-ing but written—meaning that they were narrativeconstructs.45 The resulting social constructivism hasbeen tempered if not obliterated in the 21st century;anthropologists have realized that there are limits toconstruction, and that the truly interesting questionsalways come when a particular social constructionmust be accounted for. This certainly also appliesnow that climate change has been cast as yet anothersocial construction.46

Even if climate change is but another socialconstruction, in one sense or another, it has beenremarkably successful, and this is where the interestinganthropological questions begin. The immediateanswer is that the expansiveness and strength ofthe notion is owed to its resonance with humanexperience across the globe. As so many field-studies have documented, local weather worlds aredestabilized and perceived as being out of bounds; thecurrent weather events no longer fit pre-establishedideas of normality. It remains somewhat paradoxicalthat this well-documented development has tended tothrow anthropology back to earlier notions of holism,

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bounded cultures, and local knowledge. Yet it may beexplicable on at least two accounts. First, it reflectsa genuinely respectful stance toward the people withwhom one works in the field, and whose perceptionsand interpretations of what goes on in the world theanthropologist must get to know. Second, it relates to apowerful discourse on vulnerability and adaptation inhuman geography and environmental anthropology,in which it is generally acknowledged that ‘one ofthe greatest problems in implementing adaptation liesin identifying who and what is vulnerable, and evenin specifying who has the right and responsibilityfor identifying who and what is vulnerable’ (Ref 7,p. 9). Such questions possibly induce anthropologiststo focus on their own fields and seek to alert theouter world to new local vulnerabilities in the wakeof environmental changes.47 The new plights areseen to include a sense of cultural loss, owing toclimate change,48 and to being side-lined by thehegemonic climate discourse originating in westernscience.49 As pointed out by Kempf,50 the hemmingin of cultures once again may be less than productivein a moving world, also when done in the best ofinterests.

While, obviously, anthropologists must payclose attention to so-called traditional ecologicalknowledge (TEK) whenever they engage with the newweather realities, right now there is an unwarranted(and unproductive) epistemological closure aroundlocal knowledge as inherently traditional and stable,quite apart from its being inherently more valuablethan other kinds of knowledge. As shown by JulieCruikshank,51 who has studied the encounter betweendifferent stories about glaciers in North-westernAmerica, there has always been a multiplicity ofunderstandings even in the most ‘traditional’ ofcultures. Cruikshank demonstrates how the glaciersplay an active role in negotiating the modern terrainof science, history, and politics in the mountainswhere the different kinds of knowledge add eachtheir own bit to the larger puzzle. This resonates wellwith the position taken in this article; Cruikshank’scomprehensive analysis of various views upon theglaciers from the Little Ice Age until now addssubstance to the critique of seeing indigenousknowledge as a closed epistemological system, whichinevitably will start to fragment when other kindsof knowledge become accessible. The distinctionof traditional environmental knowledge presupposesan equally distinct and a unified ‘modern’ kindof knowledge, which is also untenable—as evidentfrom the many strands of anthropology that weavethemselves in and out of each other in the course oftime, but which is also substantiated in ethnographies

that document shared forms of reasoning betweenscientists and Arctic hunters, for instance.52 But let usreturn to the glaciers:

In the Gulf of Alaska, where European and Aboriginalforms of internationalism have been enmeshed fortwo centuries, physical places and people have alwaysbeen entangled. In the future, they are likely to bemore entangled than ever before. Local knowledge innorthern narratives is about unique entanglements ofculture and nature, humans and landscapes, objectsand their makers (Ref 51, p. 259).

While changes are indeed occurring and fine-grainedethnographies of local perceptions have seen light, notleast in the Arctic,53 there is more at stake in thecurrent discussion of climate change in anthropologyand its bearing on indigenous cultures in particular.As suggested by Cameron, the problem ‘is theequation of Indigeneity and the human self with thetraditional and the local, and the ways in which sucha formulation extends colonial forms of knowledgeand practice’ (Ref 54, p. 111). Even the most well-meaning ethnographic practice of listening to andrecording ‘native voices’ potentially denies peopletheir place in a global order, climatic, political, andmoral.

In short, if climate at first seemed to slipaway with the advent of social constructionism andpostmodern anthropology, it came back full forcein the wake of the new planetary concerns in the21st century, as summed up in the notion of theAnthropocene, for instance. At the same time, climatechange also fostered a disturbing return to a formof holism and cultural closure that was actuallydefinitively undermined by the environment itself. Inthe lived realities of most people, climate change isvery much part of their lives, but not simply as a localfact of peculiar weather events. As noted by a scholarof the Arctic: ‘For most people in Arctic nations thephenomenon of climate change is now a piece oftheir lifeworlds because it has entered the space ofcommunicative action, the social space where peopleengage ideas and have meaningful debate’ (Ref 55,p. 92). The bow to Habermas is well taken because itreminds us that even though in many ways beyond theimmediate horizon of international politics, people‘out there’ are by no means ignorant of the largerclimate threat. In fact, all of us are party to acommunicative space where the portents of the IPCCreports are—to a greater or lesser degree—part of alocalized knowledge hailing from many sources andexperiences.

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ETHNOGRAPHIES OF GLOBALCONNECTION: CLIMATES OFFRICTION

While global climate change has descended into allweatherworlds as part of their frame, a number of gen-erative metaphors have likewise become globalized.Whether based in technologies of computer simulationor in more direct descriptive language, the metaphorspoint to a unified concern with the challenge of config-uring the long-term regularity and the one-time eventwithin one and the same image. Whether the latter areclad in the words of ‘canaries and whistleblowers’,56

‘strange meteoric events’,22 or ‘tipping points’,57 theystand out on a background of presumed regularity,as does any climate change narrative, by implication.The global space for communicative action includessuch broadly accepted metaphors.

This poses a new challenge for field-workinganthropologists for whom the global connections arelocal facts. With a view to another (but not totallyunrelated) environmental issue, Anna Tsing21 hasrecently suggested a new ethnographic take on globalconnection. Tsing studied the fate of the Indonesianrainforest, increasingly threatened by capitalistenterprise and deforestation but also vigorouslydefended by a wide range of local and internationalenvironmentalists with each their vocabulary. Whileall of the vocabularies address the same issue, there aresignificant frictions between them—frictions that donot necessarily prevent a dialogue, but certainly makesit expedient. This is an important contribution to anunderstanding of the actualities of local environmentalvulnerability in the wake of global capitalism and itsuneven infiltration of particular places, where peoplemeet and agree to speak.

Turning back to climate change, it is certainlyclear that factual statements about globalization interms of transnational flows and global encounterscannot account for the interpenetration of phenomenathat belong to different scales. Global warmingintroduces new disjunctions and inequities in theworld, while established knowledge about theenvironment becomes destabilised—in science andelsewhere. ‘The global’ is what envelops the local allwhile becoming part of it. Global terrors, climaticor political, thus ‘descend into the ordinary’, toparaphrase Veena Das58 on violence, but they doso in uneven ways. We need new ethnographies toshow how this imbalance occurs, and how peoplebecome literally unsettled as nature develops out ofbounds—ethnographies that take the entanglement ofthe local and the global for granted.

Even though people obviously continue to liveand act in particular places, it becomes urgent todevelop new modes of understanding the humanand social implications of natural entanglement. Thenotion of entanglement does not preclude ethno-graphic fieldwork; it rather adds to both its necessityand its theoretical potential. It is interesting here torecall Geertz’ circumscription of fieldwork in his bookAfter the Fact.59 He says: ‘It is not history, one is facedwith, nor biography, but a confusion of histories, aswarm of biographies. There is order in it all of somesort, but it is the order of a squall or a street market:nothing metrical’ (Ref 59, p. 2). Today the confusionof histories implies an entanglement of natural, social,political, economic, and other phenomena, possiblyoriginating in different places and different times, yetinseparable in the actuality of the moment. This defini-tively suspends preconceived notions of well-definedlocalities. I contend that it is one of the major chal-lenges for present day anthropology to come to termswith an entangled reality that defies conventionalunderstandings of holism and of causation, and callsfor a new understanding of scale.60 This is the morepressing, since climate change has also set humanityin motion, and thus in many ways contributed to adelocalization of anthropological research.61

It has been argued that globalization has beenmostly negative; ‘unchecked, unsupplemented, anduncompensated for by a ‘positive’ counterpart whichis still a distant prospect at best, though accordingto some prognoses already a forlorn chance’ (Ref 62,p. 96). With climate change, there is little point insimply distributing the blame, however, because allpeople are in it together, and because both culpabilityand justice extend far beyond the present genera-tions—both back and forth in time. Anthropologyworks here and now, but can only do so meaningfullywith a keen eye for the multiple temporal and spatialscales implied in social action. Within anthropologyitself, it may pay off to look both at the differenthistorical turns of anthropology and the different(national) traditions, featuring different views uponthe nature/culture intertwinement.63 On that basis,we may get a sense of an emerging anthropologicalobject, transcending (and incorporating) earlier wis-dom—and opening up new doors for understandingand interdisciplinary conversation.

What anthropologists are facing today is notsimply a new set of connections or new uncertain-ties, but possibly an emerging global imaginary, toexpand the notion of the ‘social imaginary’ suggestedby Charles Taylor.64 His main concern is the modernsocial imaginary as grown out of the enlightenment,and having until this day set the moral framework

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of society. Importantly, Taylor is not positing theimaginary in contrast to the institutional; rather he issuggesting the term for ‘what enables, through makingsense of, the practices of a society’ (Ref 64, p. 2). Itis underpinned by a particular moral order, which inthe modern period became closely associated with theidea of natural law, and with the political entity of thestate and the social contract it entailed. Over the pastcenturies, the modern social imaginary has expand-ed—to places beyond the western core, and to domainsbeyond natural law and state politics (Ref 64, p. 5).

I want to argue that, partly owing to the unifica-tion of the globe through climate change, we are on theverge of a new global imaginary. The political entityof the state and the social contract between the stateand its citizens and between the citizens themselvesneed revision. The moral order must expand beyondnational boundaries, because people’s imaginationsare deeply infiltrated by global connections andimages, with new normative notions and expectationsemerging as a consequence—if still dimly perceived.It has been suggested that climate change constitutesa ‘perfect moral storm’, implying ‘the convergenceof a number of factors that threaten our ability tobehave ethically’.65 At the same time it is a moment ofgreat theoretical potential, because of the redistribu-tion of cause and effect across time and space, and anintergenerational responsibility that distributes sub-jects (agents) and objects (victims) of actions in time,and poses new questions of culpability and justice.

For anthropology, the challenge is to tease out anew sense of causality in the human and social domainthat may embrace several scales at once. The modernmyth of unidirectional progress, maturation, and evencivilization has come to an end, as has the dominantnarrative of the nation and its sovereign people. Weare way past the metrical also in this respect, to re-invoke Geertz; this is once again where the modernsocial imaginary falls short of reality and must abideto the inherent frictions within and between localizedunderstandings, always incorporating different kindsand scales of knowledge.

CONCLUSION: A WATERSHED INANTHROPOLOGY?

The general proposition of this article is thatanthropology itself stands at a watershed, wherenew global connections through climate challengethe 20th century constitutive holistic object in waysthat go beyond previous post-modernist critique. Itis not simply a matter of deconstructing the notionof culture, but of redefining and rescaling the notionof holism itself. The entanglements of natural and

social processes, and the possible anthropologicalstudies, are certainly not delineated by fixed culturesor well-defined societies. This is where 19th centurystudies of climate may teach us a lesson, and remindus that the historical and ideational framework ofanalysis always infiltrates description. With climatechange, it is as important as ever to acknowledgethat our collaborators in the field are no moreprisoners to a unified and closed tradition than arethe ethnographers.

I would argue that the vitality of anthropologylies in its ability to move along with history itself,defining and redefining its concepts as realities shift,and transcending ‘the local’ by identifying its implicitconnections to other places, other times, other kindsof knowledge. Recent concerns about global climatechange constitute a major shift in the world, or atleast in thinking about the world; it has alreadyimpinged upon a global moral order that has beenemerging from way before the announcement of theAnthropocene, but which has become increasinglyimportant because of the new framework forunderstanding that this very notion heralds.

This, in my view, places anthropologists ata watershed: either they look backwards in a(theoretically) nostalgic mode, insisting on the need tobound and protect local ‘cultures’; or they go forwardwith the tide of times, acknowledging that even theremotest of populations are already embedded withina global imaginary, and might even suffer from beingisolated. To act responsibly in the world, it is myconviction that the second road is the only possibleone; as global subjects each and everyone is partof one and the same global communicative space.Surely, people are differently placed within it, butas the resource bases and weather regimes shift somay these emplacements. It is this elusiveness ofplace that field studies now reveal, puncturing theidea of closed cultural spaces, while opening up forrenewed understanding of the multiplicities of scaleinherent in localized knowledge. To conceptualize andpossibly outbalance the inequality of access to natural,economic, and political resources, anthropologistsmust recognize this.

Facing a global problem with stark local implica-tions—environmentally, economically, politically, andsocially, anthropology may contribute vitally to anunderstanding of truly global predicaments by offer-ing theoretical suggestions, not only, and not evenprincipally, about how global warming affects localcommunities differently (threatening their ‘culture’),but about how actions even at the smallest scale influ-ence the flows on the macroscopic surface, and vice

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versa. It took a long time for the climate scientists toestablish confidence and trust in their own models,66,67

and it will take some time also for anthropologiststo align their efforts at creating a kind of unifiedknowledge on the strength of multiple, and radicallydiverse ethnographies, featuring human agency andsocial responsibility as part of the solution to the cur-rent challenges. But I believe that possibly the mostvaluable legacy of anthropology so far is the sincereattempt—through the ages—to come to grips with theentanglement of natural and social realities withoutsimplifying the causal link.68 Throughout, anthropol-ogists have paid heed to human agency and socialresponsibility mediating between the two domains,and this is where we have valuable general knowledgeto offer on a par with natural scientific knowledge.

Given the current challenges—and the long-term anthropological attention to everyday social

action and reflection—anthropological allegiance maybecome truly global and reflect what Hilary Put-nam has called a pragmatic enlightenment.69 Likethe previous enlightenment it combines a revolutionin knowledge with one in ethics. For Putnam, thenew ethics is without ontology; it is not a matter ofprinciples but of practical concerns. This will takethe implicit cosmopolitanism of anthropology70 intoa new era—framed not only by moving subjects, con-tinued dialogue, and respect, but also by a deepertheoretical understanding of the planetary entangle-ments and human responsibilities. While certainly notsuggesting that climate is all there is to the world, Iclaim that climate offers a strategic perspective allow-ing for a new take on the complex issue of globalentanglements—a new way of seeing the world beyondconventional categories such as nature and culture.

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FURTHER READING

Descola P, Palsson G, eds. Nature and Society. Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge; 1996.Hastrup F. Weathering the World. Recovery in the Wake of the Tsunami in a Tamil Fishing Village. New Yorkand Oxford: Berghahn Books; 2011.Ingold T. The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge; 2000.Massey D. For Space. London: Sage.; 2005.Mathews A. Instituting Nature. Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests. Cambrigde, MA: TheMIT Press; 2011.Kopnina E, Shoreman-Ouimet E, eds. Environmental Anthropology Today. London and New York: Routledge;2011.

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