Themetic and Theoretical perspectives within the anthropology of climate change

Themetic  and Theoretical perspectives within the anthropology of climate change

Climate change is a gradual change in the weather conditions over a period, short or long time, This is majorly due to change in natural habitat caused by man-made or natural reason.

Over the past few decades anthropologists have examined climate change from a rather different perspective. Even earlier, physical anthropologists and archaeologists had begun examining the role of primarily natural climate change in the bio-cultural evolution of humans in Africa and their subsequent dispersal to Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas. Climate change appears to have played a prominent role in the formation of various civilizations, the occupation or abandonment of different regions over time, and the collapse of major civilizations and indigenous societies.

This brief focuses on the recent work of socio-cultural anthropologists on anthropogenic climate change, a phenomenon that began with the Industrial Revolution and is characterized by heavy reliance on fossil fuels and emphasis on persistently enduring economic growth. Particularly after World War II, the global economy began to promote and rely on relentless consumption of manufactured products. This economic model has diffused from the first industrialized countries to the developing world through trade, foreign investment, aid and development programs, and its sustainability implications are not confined to anthropogenic climate change.

Themetic  and Theoretical perspectives within the anthropology of climate change

Both archaeology and environmental anthropology provide the needed theoretical basis for contemporary climate and culture research. On a deep time scale, archaeologists have a strong history of investigating climate change and its relationship with cultural dynamics— resilience and decline, florescence and social structure .

Similarly, the well-established sub field of environmental anthropology, including cultural ecology, cultural materialism, political ecology, and human ecology, also have a history of such investigation

Some examples include the “culturology” of neo evolutionist, Leslie A. White (1959), who elaborated lineal stages of cultural development on the basis of quantifiable energy consumption;

Roy Rappaport’s application of the biologically derived ecosystem, delineating human beings as competing against many nonhuman populations and performing religious rituals to maintain ecological balance (1968);

Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism that posits culture to be the result of constantly optimizing human efforts of ecological adaptation (1979);

Julian Steward’s theory of cultural ecology, focused on the interdependence and interaction between nature and culture as an incitement for technical innovation and culture change (1955).

These early works by anthropologists, from both archaeology and environmental anthropology, of the multifaceted interrelationship between culture and ecology—how cultures attribute meaning and value to their interpretations of weather and climate and how people have achieved and continue their adaptation to local climate, temperature, flooding, and rainfall —are the core to contemporary investigations of climate and culture. The main differences are that these early studies in cultural materialism and cultural ecology lacked an accommodation for the “global array of connections” that contemporary climate change invokes

Beginnings of Studies in Anthropology and Contemporary Climate Change:

If scientific predictions are to be believed, environmental changes are going to be more extreme, more frequent, and more widespread than previously experienced in human history. But there have always been floods, fires, famines, and conflicts, and there is already a wealth of anthropological knowledge on how people deal with these disruptions to their lives.

In the past two decades anthropology’s focus on climate and culture has evolved to include the dynamics of unprecedented contemporary climate change. It began with studies of the global environment, where anthropologists bringing to light the crucial role of people and culture in understanding land use and land-use changes—information critical to general circulation models that are used to predict ocean and climate change. Some anthropologists made early contributions to understanding the micro level and eco system level components of land-use change focusing in climate-sensitive world regions where environmental change has been most apparent.

Anthropologists have contributed substantially to climate change research. Anthropologists work at many scales, from local to global, wear many different “hats,” from that of academic researcher to advocate, engage issues of culture by interpreting both cultural breakdown and culturally based responses, and continue to use some of anthropology’s foundational methodologies including ethnography, participant observation, interpretation, documentation, and the like but within a newer global context of issues, collaborators, and audience

CONTEMPORARY CLIMATE AND CULTURE STUDIES

Place-Based Community Research

One early and major contribution of anthropologists to contemporary climate change research included the documentation of how place-based peoples observe, perceive, and respond to the local effects of global climate change.

Founded in the essential capacity for local peoples to develop and practice adaptations to local variance, these new studies highlighted how adaptive strategies did not work as climate change pushed the boundaries of ecosystem variance. Since these seminal studies, anthropologists have initiated project sin other “climate-sensitive” areas of the world, including areas of high and low latitudes, high and low altitudes, near sea-level, and deserts.

In this context, anthropologists began investigating how the local effects of global climate change undermine a people’s capacity not only to inhabit their homelands, but also to maintain their cultural orientations and symbolic frameworks that ground their specific adaptations.

Global Negotiations and Discourses

Climate change is a human rights and a human security issue. To these ends, anthropological initiatives often work to empower local populations, regions, and nation-states to seek redress. Climate justice, a reframing of environmental justice in the face of climate change, is one important focus for anthropologists, particularly those already working in the field of human rights and largely spurred by studies of displacement, migration, and forced relocation of affected communities. Studies highlight how, on the one hand, global climate change is one more issue that local populations face in the context of contemporary globalization processes and how, on the other hand, it presents novel challenges, especially by rendering what were once suitable survival strategies as obsolete. One area that anthropologists as experts in local contexts play a key role is carbon offsets and REDD, which, although appearing to benefit local peoples, have raised serious equity concerns.

Many anthropologists are advocates for affected groups who have organized themselves to speak out for climate justice  and are involved in newly developed initiatives to bridge affected peoples with international policy and negotiations with the aim of empowering local communities.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENT WITH CONTEMPORARY CLIMATE CHANGE

Although contemporary anthropological engagement with climate change incites a new sense of urgency, this urgency often is lost owing in part to the phenomenon’s lag effect.. Anthropology’s task is to bridge what we know and those who know it with the rest to facilitate global understanding and reach. One example of anthropology responding to this urgency is proposing a “Red Book” for endangered cultures (Lempert 2010) to include all of earth’s humans. In many ways complicit in that new sense of urgency is a new level of reflexivity. Anthropology is founded in reflexivity— to “know” the other, we need to understand our own cultural context, frames, and assumptions to see “objectively.” With contemporary climate change we are tasked further to reflect on how the issue we are confronted by is a result of our lifestyle, that is to the extent we engage in energy-intensive Western consumption. “Whoever discovered water, it was not a fish” (Geertz 1996, p. 259). Geertz here suggests that because humans are in “place” the way fish are in water—immersed, dependent, supplied, given meaning, finding wisdom—then to “discover” place, we need to take the perspective of the other, not of that place, but from the outside looking in. In the context of climate change, Geertz’s analogy informs the argument for a new reflexivity to both engage the other and to see from that local place outward and clarify how those of us dependent on a Western consumer lifestyle need to transform our own culture’s ways of being. This new level of reflexivity incurs responsive reflection and action while also increasing anthropology’s moral responsibility to act and advocate.

The environmental and the social complexity of global climate change is daunting for most, if not all, of earth’s human population. Because of this inherent complexity, there is no “silver bullet” explanation or solution. It is only through an integration of knowledge, from local to global, and via collaboration and cooperation across geographic, stakeholder, and geopolitical/socioeconomic scales that we will be able to reach understandings and find ways forward. Anthropology not only plays a central role, but also carries a large responsibility in bringing about this transformative epoch via its unique capacity to identify, track, describe, interpret, and communicate the human predicament.

Refference:

1.     Susan A. Crate .Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change

2.     White L. 1959. The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New York: McGraw- Hill

3.     Rappaport  RA. 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press

4.     Harris M. 1979. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Random House

5.     Steward JH. 1955. Theory of Culture Change. Urbana: Univ. Ill. Press

6.     Lempert  D. 2010. A call to anthropologists to develop a red book for Endangered cultures. Pract.  Anthropol. 32(4):9–13

7.     Geertz C. 1996. Afterword. In Senses of Place, ed. S Feld, K Basso, pp. 259–62. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Semin. Ser.