Anthropology Of Climate Change Research Articles

Local wisdom in infectious disease surveillance: an anthropology of climate change in Indonesia.

Local wisdom in infectious disease surveillance: an anthropology of climate change in Indonesia.

Ignoring environmental change? On fishing quotas and collapsing coastlines in Bykovskiy, Northern Sakha (Yakutiya)

The Indigenous village of Bykovskiy is located 40 km from Tiksi, the administrative center of Bulunskiy District (Ulus), in the northern part of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutiya), Russia. Founded as a Soviet fishing cooperative, it became home to Indigenous Sakha, Evenkis, Evens, as well as to Russian settlers and political prisoners from the Baltic states. Post-Soviet transformations, coupled with escalating environmental change processes, has been altering the local economy and subsistence activities since the 1990s. Although our interlocutors directly observed and experienced such changes, they seemed to ignore the visible problem of severe coastal erosion that was destroying a local cemetery. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the study region in 2019, and combines approaches from the anthropology of climate change with reception and communication studies. It examines “ignorance” as a strategy of adaptation to multiple stressors under historically reproduced colonial structures of governance.

Identifying and Partnering Ecoallies through Perceived Natural Environment Futures in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa

Through an experiential, field-based investigative opportunity in the anthropology of climate change, this project introduced college and university students from the United States and Guinea-Bissau through active research encounters. This article examines one part of the larger project, perceptions of natural environment futures via 287 drawings collected by three United States-based undergraduate students from 145 college and university students and alumni (ages 18–53) in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. Guinea-Bissau is a climate change hotspot. This study’s specific focus was on how participants represent natural environmental change over time. Participants were asked to produce two drawings, one depicting their natural environment hundreds of years in the past (pre-European contact) and one representing their natural environment twenty years in the future. Using content analysis, descriptive statistics, Chi-squared test, and McNemar’s test, the study finds that (1a) participants’ depictions of the future contain statistically significantly more pollution, scarcity, deforestation, desertification, and less biodiversity than those in the past, and (1b) these depictions of environmental change hazards highly correlate; (2) participants draw the natural environment statistically significantly more in the past than in the future; (3a) women are statistically significantly more likely than men to draw environmental management in the past and future, and (3b) men are statistically significantly more likely than women to draw commercialization in the past and future; and (4) environmental sciences and teaching professionals are statistically significantly more likely than business professionals to draw environmental management in the past and future. The study found no differences in perceptions of the natural environment based on age, place of birth, or religion. Results indicate that people perceive real differences between their past and future natural environments, especially related to future environmental change hazards. Furthermore, gender and professional differences in participant drawings of environmental management suggest that women and non-business professionals are likely ecoallies. This concept is important from an applied perspective because through this research project, United States- and Guinea-Bissau-based undergraduate students and alumni are able to recognize in each other their shared advocacy capacities, acknowledge the systematic nature of the climate change problem, and establish a common cause around sustainable environmental management.

Reversing the question: Malinowskian legacies and the anthropology of climate change

Reversing the question: Malinowskian legacies and the anthropology of climate change

Antropología y cambio climático: recorridos, temáticas y propuestas

El cambio climático se ha convertido en una de las principales problemáticas a la que nos enfrentamos hoy y el eje sobre el que giran nuevas políticas, valores, intereses, horizontes y ansiedades. Aunque los estudios antropológicos del cambio climático se encuentran aún en ciernes, están generando una serie de replanteamientos y abriendo un conjunto de líneas de estudio que no solo nos permiten un conocimiento más complejo, situado y simétrico sobre este fenómeno, sino que además sitúan a la antropología en una posición privilegiada de cara a participar en estudios multidisciplinares. Urge por lo tanto realizar una revisión de estos trabajos a nivel internacional, con el objetivo de detallar los principales aportes y líneas de investigación desarrolladas, los interrogantes y respuestas planteadas y el diálogo establecido con otros campos de estudio. Comenzamos con un recorrido por los orígenes y las distintas fases y campos por las que se han extendido los trabajos antropológicos sobre el cambio climático, con especial atención a la literatura hispana y lusófona. Seguimos con sus principales reivindicaciones y planteamientos y los ejes temáticos más consolidados, así como los emergentes. Terminamos con una serie de reflexiones sobre los nuevos escenarios que trae consigo el cambio climático, sus implicaciones para los fundamentos epistemológicos de la antropología y algunas propuestas sobre posibles direcciones que tomar en el futuro.

Locating the Anthropology of Climate Change: An Interview with Ben Orlove by Virginia R. Dominguez

Locating the Anthropology of Climate Change: An Interview with Ben Orlove by Virginia R. Dominguez

Turbulent Climate Discourses in Northern Sweden

I examine how tensions between locals, environmentalists, and State politicians in a small town in northern Sweden are reinforced through national discourses of climate change and sustainability. Turbulence emerges across different scales of responsibility and environmental engagement in Arjeplog as politicians are seen by local inhabitants to be engaging more with the global conversation than with the local experience of living in the north. Moreover, many people view the environmentalist discourses from the politicians in the south, whom they deem to be out of touch with rural life, as threatening to the local experience of nature. These discourses pose a threat to their reliance on petrol, essential for travel, and are experienced locally as a continuation of the south’s historical interference in the region. Based on thirteen months of field research, I argue that mistrust of the various messengers of climate change, including politicians and environmentalists, is a crucial part of the scepticism towards the climate change discourse and that we as researchers need to utilise the strengths of anthropology in examining the reception (or refusal) of climate change. The locals’ mistrust of environment discourses had implications for my positionality, as I was associated with these perceived ‘outsider’ sensibilities. While the anthropology of climate change often focusses on physical impacts and resilience, I argue that we need to pay due attention to the local turbulence surrounding the discourses of climate change, which exist alongside the physical phenomena.

Another Climate Change Story: Looking Upstream

Abstract The applied anthropology of climate change seeks to bring the anthropological lens to the study of and social response to life on a warming planet. Recently, Practicing Anthropology published a special issue on Storying Climate Change! Here, we provide a critique of this set of papers from a political economic perspective based on the assertion that a threat of the magnitude of contemporary climate change warrants a more fully mobilized anthropological response than the local narrative approach called for in the special issue. Specifically, we argue that local stories of climate change experience are knotted together by the reigning global political economic system of capitalism and that this is a story we need to tell to build a sustainable future.

The elephant in the sky: On how to grapple with our academic flying in the age of climate change

This article discusses the author’s personal journey into the anthropology of climate change and his concern about the multiple drivers of anthropogenic climate change, among them an increasing number of aeroplane flights around the world, including those made by academics and more specifically, anthropologists. Given that the people who anthropologists often study will be those most severely impacted by the ravages of climate change, it is imperative that anthropologists find strategies to drastically reduce their flying in relation to attending conferences, research meetings and undertaking fieldwork. In this article, the author urges anthropologists to turn their attention to a growing global ‘fly less’ movement.

Wound-up worlds and The Wind-up Girl: on the anthropology of climate change and climate fiction

ABSTRACT In recent years, climate fiction has exploded on the literary scene. Meanwhile, climate change is occurring in the Mekong river basin. In this paper, I put these phenomena into contact in an ontologically multi-sited ethnography of climate change and climate fiction. Rather than assuming a radical separation between real and fictive worlds, this entails a comparison that moves back and forth between the realms. On the one hand, as objects of ethnography, works of cli-fi can be examined in terms of the climate-changed worlds they construct and the responses generated within those worlds. On the other hand, as objects for ethnography, these worlds and responses can be laterally compared with different situations, like those found around the Mekong basin. Inhabiting a zone of indiscernibility between Mekong climate change and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-up Girl, I suggest that lateral comparisons of climate change and climate fiction make it possible to broaden the imaginative spectrum of climate futures and to recover the “strange and adventurous task of believing in this world.”

Anthropological Engagement with the Anthropocene: A Critical Review

The Anthropocene refers to the planetary scale of anthropogenic influences on the composition and function of Earth ecosystems and life forms. Socio-political and geographic responses frame the uneven topographies of climate change, while efforts to adapt and mitigate its impact extend across social and natural sciences. This review of anthropology's evolving engagement with the Anthropocene contemplates multifarious approaches to research. The emergence of multispecies ethnographic research highlights entanglements of humans with other life forms. New ontological considerations are reflected in Kohn's “Anthropology of Life,” ethnographic research that moves beyond an isolated focus on the human to consider other life processes and entities as research participants. Examples of critical engagement discussed include anthropology beyond disciplinary borders, queries writing in the Anthropocene, and anthropology of climate change. We demonstrate the diverse positions of anthropologists within this juncture in relation to our central trope of entanglements threaded through our discussion in this review.

Dove, Michael R. (ed.): The Anthropology of Climate Change. An Historical Reader

Anthropos , Seite 224 - 226