Climate Change: Expanding Anthropological Possibilities

Abstract

Climate anthropology has broadened over the past decade from predominately locally focused studies on climate impacts to encompass new approaches to climate science, mitigation, sustainability transformations, risks, and resilience. We examine how theoretical positionings, including from actor–network theory, new materialisms, ontologies, and cosmopolitics, have helped expand anthropological climate research, particularly in three key interrelated areas. First, we investigate ethnographic approaches to climate science knowledge production, particularly around epistemic authority, visioning of futures, and engagements with the material world. Second, we consider climate adaptation studies that critically examine discourses and activities surrounding concepts of vulnerability, subjectivities, and resilience. Third, we analyze climate mitigation, including energy transitions, technological optimism, market-based solutions, and other ways of living in a carbon-constrained world. We conclude that anthropological approaches provide novel perspectives, made possible through engagements with our uniquely situated research partners, as well as opportunities for opening up diverse solutions and possible transformative futures. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 49 is October 21, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Wind, wood, and the entangled life of disasters

“…And yet climate materializes into each territory, influencing living beings in several ways. With its focus on human-environment interactions, anthropology is increasingly involved in climate research (Crate 2008;Lazrus 2012;Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2019;Ballard, McDonnell, and Calandra 2020;O'Reilly et al 2020). Local ethnography often highlights the vulnerability and the fragility of marginalized communities.…”

Climate Decision-Making

“…Climate change is a newly emerging phenomenon that is difficult to experience across space and time (59). This characteristic means that making sense of climate change can be particularly challenging for nonexpert individuals, groups and societies, and opens space for consideration of the concept of framing, which has had separate although overlapping intellectual trajectories in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and communications.…”

Ontologies of climate change

“…[ ǂoab tsî |nanub |khara|kharasens, xūnī |gaub, xūna hōǃâ |gaub, ǃhūbaib, ǂans, ǂnamipeb, |khurub, Namibiab] M ost people have a story to tell about climate change. Over the past decades, a robust literature has shown that these stories merge scientific explanations with those from other worldviews, forming hybrid understandings of what is happening in the environment (Barnes and Dove 2015;O'Reilly et al 2020;Schnegg, O'Brian, and Sievert 2021). These analyses are often built on the ontological assumption that stories offer different, culturally informed representations of the same "thing"-the weather and its change.…”

“…Although the concepts were available for some time, few mobilized this thinking to ethnographically analyze the changing climate (O'Reilly et al. 2020). A notable exception is the work of Mara J. Goldman, Meaghan Daly, and Eric J. Lovell, who have questioned why Maasai pastoralists and NGOs disagreed about which years were drought years (Goldman, Daly, and Lovell 2016).…”