2nd Edition
Anthropology and Climate Change From Actions to Transformations
The first edition of Anthropology and Climate Change (2009) pioneered the study of climate change through the lens of anthropology, covering the relation between human cultures and the environment from prehistoric times to the present. This second, heavily revised edition brings the material on this rapidly changing field completely up to date, with major scholars from around the world mapping out trajectories of research and issuing specific calls for action. The new edition
- introduces new “foundational” chapters—laying out what anthropologists know about climate change today, new theoretical and practical perspectives, insights gleaned from sociology, and international efforts to study and curb climate change—making the volume a perfect introductory textbook;
- presents a series of case studies—both new case studies and old ones updated and viewed with fresh eyes—with the specific purpose of assessing climate trends;
- provides a close look at how climate change is affecting livelihoods, especially in the context of economic globalization and the migration of youth from rural to urban areas;
- expands coverage to England, the Amazon, the Marshall Islands, Tanzania, and Ethiopia;
- re-examines the conclusions and recommendations of the first volume, refining our knowledge of what we do and do not know about climate change and what we can do to adapt.
Introduction: Anthropology and Climate Change 0
Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall
PART 1: BUILDING FOUNDATIONS OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND CLIMATE CHANGE
1. Climate Knowledge: Assemblage, Anticipation, Action
Kirsten Hastrup
2. The Concepts of Adaptation, Vulnerability, and Resilience in the Anthropology of Climate Change: Considering the Case of Displacement and Migration
Anthony Oliver-Smith
3. Apocalypse Nicked! Stolen Rhetoric in Early Geoengineering Advocacy
Clare Heyward and Steve Rayner
4. Complex Systems and Multiple Crises of Energy
John Urry
5. Entangled Futures: Anthropology’s Engagement with Global Change Research
Eduardo Brondizio
PART 2: ASSESSING ENCOUNTERS OLD AND NEW
6. Gone with Cows and Kin? Climate, Globalization, and Youth Alienation in Siberia
Susan A. Crate
7. Climate Change in Leukerbad and Beyond: Re-Visioning our Cultures of Energy and Environment
Sarah Strauss
8. Storm Warnings: An Anthropological Focus on Community Resilience in the Face of Climate Change in Southern Bangladesh
Timothy Finan and Md. Ashiqur Rahman
9. Correlating Local Knowledge with Climatic Data: Porgeran Experiences of Climate Change in Papua New Guinea
Jerry K. Jacka
10. Speaking Again of Climate Change: An Analysis of Climate Change Discourses in Northwestern Alaska
Elizabeth Marino and Peter Schweitzer
11. Too little and Too late: What to Do about Climate Change in the Torres Strait?
Donna Green
12. Shifting Tides: Climate Change, Migration, and Agency in Tuvalu
Heather Lazrus
13. The Politics of Rain: Tanzanian Farmers' Discourse on Climate and Political Disorder
Michael J. Sheridan
14. Cornish Weather and the Phenomenology of Light: On Anthropology and “Seeing”
Tori L. Jennings
15. Making Sense of Climate Change: Global Impacts, Local Responses, and Anthropogenic Dilemmas in the Peruvian Andes
Karsten Paerregaard
16: Climate Change beyond the “Environmental”: the Marshallese Case
Peter Rudiak-Gould
17: “This Is Not Science Fiction”: Amazonian Narratives of Climate Change
David Rojas
PART 3: REFINING ANTHROPOLOGICAL ACTIONS
18. Fostering Resilience in a Changing Sea-Ice Context: A Grant-Maker’s Perspective
Anne Stevens Henshaw
19: Is a Sustainable Consumer Culture Possible?
Richard Wilk
20. “Climate Skepticism” inside the Beltway and across the Bay
Shirley Fiske
21. When Adaptation Isn’t Enough: Between the “Now and Then” of Community-Led Resettlement
Kristina J. Peterson and Julie K. Maldonado
22. Narwhal Hunters, Seismic Surveys, and the Middle Ice: Monitoring Environmental Change in Greenland’s Melville Bay
Mark Nuttall
23. Insuring the Rain as Climate Adaptation in an Ethiopian Agricultural Community
Nicole D. Peterson and Daniel Osgood
24. Pedagogy and Climate Change
Chris Hebdon, Myles Lennon, Francis M. Ludlow, Amy Zhang, Michael R. Dove
25. Bridging Knowledge and Action on Climate Change: Institutions, Translation, and Anthropological Engagement
Noor Johnson
26. Escaping the Double-Bind: From the Management of Uncertainty toward Integrated Climate Research
Werner Krauss
Epilogue: Encounters, Actions, Transformations
Susan A. Crate and Mark Nuttall
Index
About the Contributors
Biography
Susan A. Crate is an associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Environmental Science & Policy at George Mason University. An environmental and cognitive anthropologist, she has worked with indigenous communities in Siberia since 1988. Her recent research has focused on understanding local perceptions and adaptations of Viliui Sakha communities in the face of unprecedented climate change—a research agenda that has expanded to Canada, Peru, Wales, Kiribati, and the Chesapeake Bay. Crate is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and one monograph, Cows, Kin and Globalization: An Ethnography of Sustainability (AltaMira Press, 2006), and she is co-editor of the Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions (Left Coast Press, 2009). Crate also served on the American Anthropology Association’s Task Force on Climate Change.
Mark Nuttall is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. He also holds a visiting position as Professor of Climate and Society at Ilisimatusarfik/University of Greenland and the Greenland Climate Research Centre at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources. He has carried out extensive research in Greenland, Alaska, Canada, Finland and Scotland, and is co-PI of the EU-funded project ICE-ARC (Ice, Climate and Economics—the Arctic Region in Change). He is editor of the landmark three-volume Encyclopedia of the Arctic (Routledge, 2005) and author or editor of many other books.
"The chapters are written mostly by anthropologists for anthropologists, but physical scientists such as myself will find useful information and insights in several of the chapters. The primary audience for the book will be climate change researchers and students in upper- and graduate-level courses in anthropology and the environmental and social sciences. Each of the chapters stands alone, which is useful for class reading assignments… Crate and Nutall's well-referenced volume provides useful information and insight for researchers and students becoming interested in the field."
- Allan Ashworth, Journal of Anthropological Research, review of the first edition
"This effectively organized, crisply presented, and compellingly argued book is essential reading for everyone concerned about the impact of climate change on human communities around the world, and for readers of any background seeking to understand the unique and critical contributions of anthropology to these important questions. The list of contributors, with their highly varied interests and accomplishments, makes clear that anthropologists have been working on issues of environmental change and sustainability for decades, and that their contributions focus on precisely the kinds of questions that have been relatively neglected in the physical sciences of the environment. With its close attention to strategy and tactics,Anthropology and Climate Change will serve as a major resource for anthropologists looking for conceptual and practical tools by which they might refocus their work so as to contribute more effectively to these major debates of our day."
- Susan Greenhalgh, Population and Development Review, review of the first edition
