Climate change reception studies in anthropology (original) (raw)
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Climate Change: Expanding Anthropological Possibilities
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2020
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. 13 ,. • • �-Review in Advance first posted on April 14, 2020. (Changes may still occur before final publication.
Anthropology’s Contribution to the Study of Climate Change
Nature Climate Change, 2013
Understanding the challenge that climate change poses and crafting appropriate adaptation and mitigation mechanisms requires input from the breadth of the natural and social sciences. Anthropology's in-depth fieldwork methodology, long engagement in questions of society–environment interactions and broad, holistic view of society yields valuable insights into the science, impacts and policy of climate change. Yet the discipline's voice in climate change debates has remained a relatively marginal one until now. Here, we identify three key ways that anthropological research can enrich and deepen contemporary understandings of climate change.
Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change
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This review provides an overview of foundational climate and culture studies in anthropology; it then tracks developments in this area to date to include anthropological engagements with contemporary global climate change. Although early climate and culture studies were mainly founded in archaeology and environmental anthropology, with the advent of climate change, anthropology's roles have expanded to engage local to global contexts. Considering both the unprecedented urgency and the new level of reflexivity that climate change ushers in, anthropologists need to adopt cross-scale, multistakeholder, and interdisciplinary approaches in research and practice. I argue for one mode that anthropologists should pursue—the development of critical collaborative, multisited ethnography, which I term “climate ethnography.”
Anthropological perspectives and policy implications of climate change research
Climate Research, 2001
In attempting to bridge global analyses on climate change with locally identifiable processes of community response and perception on climate, one may ask how an anthropological focus on locality can be made relevant to current scientific methods that privilege © Inter-Research 2001 • www.int-res.com
Contribution of anthropology to the study of climate change.
Barnes, Jessica, Michael Dove, Myanna Lahsen, Andrew Mathews, Pamela McElwee, Roderick McIntosh, Frances Moore, Jessica O’Reilly, Ben Orlove, Rajindra Puri, Harvey Weiss and Karina Yager, in Nature Climate Change 3: 541-544. , 2013
"Understanding the challenge that climate change poses and crafting appropriate adaptation and mitigation mechanisms requires input from the breadth of the natural and social sciences. Anthropology’s in-depth fieldwork methodology, long engagement in questions of society–environment interactions and broad, holistic view of society yields valuable insights into the science, impacts and policy of climate change. Yet the discipline’s voice in climate change debates has remained a relatively marginal one until now. Here, we identify three key ways that anthropological research can enrich and deepen contemporary understandings of climate change."
Heating it up: on knowledge, power, and the anthropology of climate change_Draft_EASA2020
2020
Paper short abstract: Observing a growing interest in knowledge and its production in anthropological studies on climate change, resilience, and local adaptation, this paper critically challenges such an epistemological understanding of knowledge as place-based, isolated, static and held by an imagined, homogenised other. Paper long abstract: This paper critically reviews current anthropological debates on knowledge production and climate change. It discusses power inequalities and the positioning of the anthropologist in ongoing research projects that are located in reception and observation studies, vulnerability assessments, and others. We observe that the way in which these projects engage with crucial questions in the emerging field of the anthropology of climate change, is a return to the use of arguments and methods brought up by early ethnoecological approaches. Just like its predecessor such ethno-climatological analysis carries the risk of reproducing dangerous ideas of homogenous, solitary groups, and unreflected hierarchies between local/place-based knowledge and globalised scientific knowledge. We aim to demonstrate the epistemological assumptions that are shaping the process of the anthropological inquiry about knowledge. Furthermore, we argue that research is influenced by utilitarian claims made in climate change adaptation projects and seldom reflects on the control and accessibility over its research outcomes and their uses. In response to this criticism, we argue for an anthropology transcending such binary conceptions of difference that needs to consider knowledge production as a process shaped by historical and current power structures. This requires the radical decolonisation of anthropology, its methods and approaches, the exploring of alternative methodologies and the recognition of dynamic connections and thinking beyond the boundaries of and imposed by western science. Finally, the realistic reflection of the systematic structures in which our discipline and we as researchers are entangled must be visualised, not only theoretically, but also in research practice.
Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2014
Anthropology brings its core theoretical tenet that culture frames the way people perceive, understand, experience, and respond to key elements of the worlds which they live in. This framing is grounded in systems of meanings and relationships that mediate human engagements with natural phenomena and processes including climate change. Anthropology’s potential contributions to natural resources, climate and global warming researches are the description and analysis of the mediating layers of cultural meanings, norms and social practices, which cannot be easily incarcerate by methods of other disciplines. There are vital key contributions that anthropology can bring to understandings of climate change. The foremost is awareness to the cultural values and political relations that shape the production and interpretation of climate change knowledge and shape the basis of responses to ongoing environmental changes as ecological colonialism. Anthropological knowledge is holistic –referrin...