Climate change reception studies in anthropology

Sara De Wit,Sophie Haines

doi:10.1002/wcc.742

Abstract

AbstractThe past decade has seen increased anthropological attention to understandings of climate change not only as a biophysical phenomenon but also as a discourse that is traveling from international policy making platforms to the rest of the planet. The analysis of the uptake of climate change discourse falls under the emergent subfield of climate change reception studies. A few anthropological investigations identify themselves explicitly as reception studies; others only mention the term with little explanation. Our review discusses a fuller range of anthropological studies and ethnographies from related disciplines that treat climate change as a discursive reality, which is not independent from how it is intimated through close observations of the environment. The following themes emerged: language and expertise; place and vulnerability; modernity, morality, and temporality; alterity and refusal. The review suggests that the interaction of observation and reception is still not well understood, and that there is scope for more systematic methodological and theoretical synthesis, taking lessons into account from geographies of reading and empirical hermeneutics. By exploring the hermeneutical problem of upholding scientific integrity while being open to other ways of knowing, climate change reception studies' emancipatory potential lie in opening up knowledge spaces for multi‐directional and democratic approaches to living (with) climate change. In closing, we propose an interdisciplinary research agenda highlighting the potential generativity of translation as an idiom for theory and praxis relating to how people come to know climate (change)—through both perceptual engagement with the natural world and interpretations of discursive manifestations.This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge

Highlights

The beginning of anthropology's recent phase of engagement with weather and climate change over the past two to three decades can largely be characterized by a preoccupation with observation studies (Baer & Singer, 2014; Crate, 2011; Crate & Nuttal, 2009).1 The central focus of observation studies is to understand how people around the globe observe—and perceive, experience, give meaning, adapt, or respond to—changes in weather and climate patterns
The review suggests that the interaction of observation and reception is still not well understood, and that there is scope for more systematic methodological and theoretical synthesis, taking into account lessons from the field of empirical hermeneutics, which explores text and “ordinary reader” in dialectical relationship
We propose a forward-looking interdisciplinary research agenda highlighting the potential generativity of translation as an idiom for theory and praxis relating to how people come to know climate—through both the perceptual engagement with the natural world and interpretations of discursive manifestations—as part of meaningmaking and world-making

Summary

Climate change reception studies in anthropology

Citation for published version: de Wit, S & Haines, S 2021, 'Climate change reception studies in anthropology', Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, known as Version of record

| INTRODUCTION