Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Environment

Atmospheres

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 07:40:13 +0000

"Morning rituals", 2022. Picture by Jason Boldero.

Michael Schnegg Jonas Bens

University of Hamburg

Initially published 25 Nov 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25atmospheres

Abstract:

Introduction & social science antecedents

Every situation has an atmosphere: a general feeling, tonality, or vibe that people experience collectively and individually. When we enter a room, or any other social space, its atmosphere makes us feel something: at ease or uneasy, comfortable or uncomfortable, included or excluded. Atmospheres contribute in important ways to meanings, feelings, and behaviours. They circumscribe what we can say, how we can move, or even which behaviours we consider appropriate. But atmospheres are never quite clear to us; they feel—at least to some extent—fleeting, indeterminate, and difficult to grasp.

There is an intuitive importance of this kind of affective in-between captured in the term ‘atmosphere’. Despite this, it is remarkable how late anthropologists began to theorise atmospheres more thoroughly. Instead, they have used a series of closely related concepts in the past to make sense of them. One good starting point for understanding atmospheres is the ancient Greek etymology of the term and its early uses. The word atmosphere comes from ἀτμός (atmós), ‘vapour, steam,’ and σφαῖρα (sphaîra), describing a ‘sphere’ produced by it. In line with these meanings, scientific writings of the sixteenth century used the term in two different ways: to describe the gaseous envelope of a celestial body (e.g., the Earth) and to refer to emanations of the human body. In relation to humans, these effluvia and material airs were perceived to vary with social categories, including gender, age, race, and class. Social emanations were the forces that influenced relationships and led to attraction or repulsion between people (Corbin 1982). Even in these early uses, however, the term ‘atmosphere’ referred not only to the emanations of a particular person but also to the totality of ‘atmospheres’ created by all kinds of bodies interacting in situations and places.

These ideas entered social science debates about a century ago but were not yet named ‘atmosphere’. To clarify the relationship between experiencing and knowing, Georg Simmel (1917, 130), for example, stipulates that we know that something is alive because a living being is surrounded by an ultramateriellen Wirksamkeitsumkreis (literally ‘ultramaterial sphere of influence’) that touches us immediately. Accordingly, we grasp our environment in its entirety before we can reduce it to specific sensory impressions, such as seeing the entity’s movements, smelling its vitality, and cognitively categorising other sensory impressions as belonging to a living organism. Simmel goes on to show that in situations where multiple beings are present, they form an atmosphere that can become characteristic of a particular place, like a city or even a country, foregrounding the spatial and situational meaning of the term.

In a related manner, Émile Durkheim’s notion of a ‘collective effervescence’ captures the affective in-between a situation describes. In his theory of shared affectivities in ritual, Durkheim argues that rituals contribute significantly to the solidarity that helps maintain social order in a group (1995). While rituals are salient, he says, they are threatened by individualistic interests. Therefore, rituals must produce a shared collective feeling, which he referred to as the ‘effervescence’, something which goes beyond the sharing of meanings and categories. It gives the ritual its power and ultimately enables it to maintain social representations and thus the social order of a group (von Scheve 2012).

The study of atmospheres as a force which emanates from bodies can also be linked to the early anthropological study of gift giving, as part of which Marcel Mauss (1925) argues that gifts may have their own power that makes them circulate. Drawing on ethnographic writing on property understandings among late nineteenth and early twentieth century Māori of Polynesia, Mauss discusses the Polynesian concept of the Hau (lit. wind, soul, power) as an object-centred force said to accompany gifts and drive people to reciprocate them. The Hau aligns with the term atmosphere as a force that emanates from a person and extends to objects. Moreover, the Hau is similar to atmospheres in that it has a spatial component, being linked to the gift-giver as much to the soil and the territory where it originates (Mauss [1925] 2016, 70–1). In his methodological reflections, Mauss also refers to the situational meaning of the term atmosphere. To describe the ‘tonalité morale’ (‘moral tone’) that prevails among a group of people he uses the French term ‘atmosphere’ (Mauss [1926] 2002, 282).

In the middle of the twentieth century, concrete situations became more central to social research. Ethnographers tended to study specific ‘encounters’ in which people interact ‘face-to-face’ (Goffman 1961). Thus, several researchers focused on the ways people produce their cultural (and emotional) worlds through everyday interactions (Garfinkel 1967). In face-to-face encounters, people communicate in a variety of ways and in constellations that involve human and non-human participants (Murphy 2023). For example, people may empathise with other species that are part of their world, as Michael Schnegg and Thiemo Breyer (2024) demonstrate with Damara pastoralists in Namibia. Here, embodied empathy creates a multi-species world that incorporates the perspectives of elephants, tricksters, and livestock. This world is distinct from any world in which these perspectives are absent.

Influenced by this focus on micro-situations and their affectivity, anthropologist Clifford Geertz distinguishes ‘ethos’ from ‘moods’. He understood an ethos to be the general aesthetic or moral style of a culture (1973, 89). A people’s ethos may feel universal and objective to them, but it stems at least in part from the specific ways in which people adapt to their lives’ circumstances. Moods, on the other hand, were more temporally- and spatially-bounded phenomena: ‘Like fogs, “moods” just settle and lift; like scents, suffuse and evaporate. When present moods are totalistic: if one is sad everything and everybody seems dreary; if one is gay everything and everybody seems splendid’ (Geertz 1973, 97). Moods also distinguish themselves from an ethos, in that they are made meaningful with reference to their sources, rather than being explicable through the ends they may serve (Geertz 1973, 97).

Two important dimensions of atmospheres are already apparent in these early sets of atmosphere-adjacent concepts. First, atmospheres can describe what is ‘in the air’ at very different scales. On a smaller scale, atmospheres are relevant to concrete situations: face-to-face encounters in which all kinds of bodies, human and non-human, material and immaterial, create an atmosphere. On a larger scale, atmospheres can also characterise situations: a city, a country, a community, a generation, and so on can come with specific atmospheres. Secondly, an atmosphere is usually experienced as a totality, as a sense of a whole in which people cannot immediately identify all the individual elements that make it up.

Affect studies and phenomenology

It is only recently that anthropologists have begun to explicitly theorise atmospheres. Two major theoretical developments may be responsible for this: Affect studies—an interdisciplinary field in the social sciences and humanities which explores the fundamentally relational character of feeling and emotion—has broadened scholarly attention to include more subtle, elusive and intangible affective dynamics, such as atmosphere. Secondly, phenomenology—an approach which pays close attention to people’s experience of concrete situations—has developed a particular focus on atmospheres (Schnegg 2023).

The ‘turn to affect’ in the social sciences and humanities since the late 1990s (Clough and Halley 2007) has been part of a broader movement to rethink feeling, emotion, and subjective experience in terms of the material constellations of bodies in space, rather than as internal feelings. This approach has also gained prominence in anthropology. From an affect perspective, atmospheres are primarily ‘out there’, generated in relational arrangements of bodies, even if they are subjectively felt by individuals.

An important precursor for this understanding of atmosphere is the social science scholarship of emotions beginning in the late 1970s, strongly influenced by feminist and queer studies. These scholars explicitly challenged the assumptions of mainstream psychology, which conceptualised emotions primarily as the internal states of individuals. Instead, they argued that emotions are the result of processes of social construction in culturally specific situations and performances—through everyday interactions and encounters (Hochschild 1983; Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990). From the 1990s, scholars began to move away from the idea that emotions should be understood merely as cognitive concepts that people construct in everyday interaction and began to explore that material bodies also play an important role in the experience of feeling (Leavitt 1996). From then on, queer-feminist scholars in anthropology and beyond began to use the term ‘affect’, which seemed to denote a stronger connection to bodies, while still arguing that affect is primarily shaped by society, culture, and history, rather than biology (Stoler 2002; Sedgwick 2003; Ahmed 2004).

Since the late 1990s, scholars began to introduce a much wider understanding of the body as a basis for the study of affect (Massumi 2002, Thrift 2007), including human and non-human, material and immaterial entities: ‘a body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (Deleuze 1988, 127). Affect, then, emerges from such a relational constellation of all kinds of bodies that form an ‘affective arrangement’ (Slaby, Mühlhoff and Wünschner 2017). These arrangements in which affect comes to the fore shape how people experience a situation.

Early phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger developed the term Stimmung (often translated as ‘mood’) to capture how we shape situations affectively and how they in turn shape us. Following their conceptual lead, the term ‘atmosphere’ was further developed with the aim of rethinking human emotionality (Tellenbach 1981, Schmitz 2019; Schmitz, Müllan and Slaby 2011; Schnegg 2023). Hermann Schmitz (1974), a central figure in recent phenomenological debates, argues that emotions (and feelings) have long been misconceived as something located in the individual psyche. Instead, they are not private but rather ‘out there’. In Schmitz’s reading, emotions are atmospheres, also ontologically, and largely beyond the individual’s control—something that overcomes or befalls us. The feeling body (Leib) is the medium through which we resonate with them and feel them subjectively (Eisenlohr 2024, Schnegg 2024).

In recent years, Schmitz's radical ontological approach has been further developed (and, some might say, watered down). While he theorises that atmospheres are epistemic wholes that include the subject and cannot be reduced to their parts, Gernot Böhme introduces a ‘constellationalist perspective’ (Riedel 2018, 173), claiming that atmospheres are constituted by the elements present in a situation even as they transcend these elements. As such, atmospheres can be curated and transformed by changing the elements that constitute them, including the built environment, the arrangement of objects, their material makeup, symbolic nature, light, smells, etc. Churches and public spaces in cities are prime examples that demonstrate what constitutes atmospheres and to what extent atmospheres can be constructed, manipulated, and experienced.

Both of these traditions of affect studies and phenomenology use slightly different terminologies, and scholars have debated the distinctions between the concepts of feeling, emotion, and affect. When it comes to the study of atmosphere, it is possible to understand ‘feeling’ as denoting the realm of subjective experience, like a single person or a collective feeling something in their bodies. ‘Emotion’, then, refers to culturally formed and semantically expressible subjective experiences, for which people also normally have words to describe and qualitatively differentiate them – for example love, hate, shame, or joy. The term ‘affect’ is broader and also cross-cuts these categories. In the terminology of affect studies, feeling and emotion can be described as affective phenomena. The concept of affect, however, proposes a strictly relational perspective, understanding feelings and emotions as emerging in-between bodies within a constellation rather than as properties of individual subjects. Over the past three decades, these theoretical resources from affect theory and phenomenology have increasingly been used not only in anthropology, but also in sociology, geography, and other disciplines to theorise atmospheres (Anderson 2009; Gugutzer 2020a; Trigg 2022; Stewart 2011).

Thereby, the notion of atmosphere we discuss here is only one of the several concepts used to describe shared affectivities (Thonhauser 2021). Related terms include ‘affective spaces’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009), ‘Stimmung’ (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017), ‘attunement’ (Stewart 2011; Throop 2020; Zigon 2014), and ‘moods’ (Throop 2018; 2014; 2020). Given the range of definitions for all these terms, it is impossible to separate them neatly. It will be one of the major challenges for the larger field to work this out more clearly. However, some tendencies can be discerned. Whereas Stimmung and mood tend to focus more on internal states that frame our experience of the world while simultaneously acknowledging that we are framed by them, atmospheres are thought to be primarily out there, happening to us and thus leading to the feelings we have. In this sense, one comes to a classroom with a particular mood, which has its atmosphere, and while one changes the atmosphere by being present, it also changes one’s mood. When leaving the classroom, however, one takes the mood along while leaving the atmosphere behind. Furthermore, whereas Stimmung and affective spaces describe shared affectivities with some temporal duration, atmospheres also refer to a shorter temporal scale. Finally, compared to affective spaces and atmospheres, Stimmung and moods place less emphasis on the non-human bodies, materialities, and networks of affective relations that constitute them.

In the following, we narrow the focus to anthropological discussions of atmospheres. Building on previous work (Schroer and Schmitt 2018a), we describe what atmospheres are, what they do, and how they can be analysed ethnographically.

What atmospheres are

Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies that comprise a situation, yet an atmosphere is at the same time more than the sum of its parts. People often experience atmospheres as something that cannot be put into words easily; nevertheless, they enable or disable certain behaviours in situational and sometimes unpredictable ways. Didier Eribon’s autobiography Returning to Reims offers a vivid case. On his return and to explain what it meant for him to leave home, Eribon invokes his family’s conflictual constellation: ‘the atmosphere was a harsh one, painful on a daily basis, even unbearable. This constant climate of conjugal warfare must have counted for a lot in producing my will to flee both my family and my circumstances’ (2013, 83). Eribon thus underscores, first, that situations are suffused with atmospheres that shape how people feel; and second, that atmosphere is an affective layer that enables some actions while constraining others. In this view, atmosphere—alongside individual aspiration and structural constraint—becomes a further analytic for understanding the behaviour of persons and groups.

The anthropology of atmospheres has also suggested that atmospheres may be neither subjective nor objective. While an atmosphere may already be there when we enter a room, or any other social space, our presence changes it. At the same time, the atmosphere changes us, and as subjects, we are partly constituted by it. It is therefore difficult to describe atmosphere as either a purely objective or a subjective phenomenon. Rather, several scholars have insisted that atmospheres transcend this distinction. An example can illustrate this: During a recent fieldwork stay in Namibia, I (Michael Schnegg) went to a neighbour’s house to ask for a tool. The absence of people outside already signalled that something was amiss. Inside, the room was quiet; no one spoke. I was immediately solicited by an atmosphere of grief. On asking gently, I learned that a close relative had died in an accident only hours before. The situation’s affective intensity rendered me out of place; with limited language, I offered condolences. My presence, I sensed, altered the shared atmosphere, even as that atmosphere altered me—producing a felt mixture of sorrow, disconnection, and misfit.

Such atmospheres are synaesthetic, meaning they may stimulate various senses or cognitive pathways at the same time. It may be this multisensory experience of an atmosphere that makes us feel it as a whole before we can distinguish particular sensory impressions of sound, smell, and touch (Eisenlohr 2024, 40; Schmitz 2016, 18). For example, visitors to an art installation in Denmark complained about its strong smell although no chemical or material sources could be found in the environment. But as the overall tonality of the installation—its walls, its colours, its light—was reminiscent of a hospital floor, the arrangement was experienced synaesthetically as an atmosphere with odour (Stenslund 2018). Such findings suggest the existence of an embodied capacity to store atmospheres and their memory, which are then triggered when a similar arrangement is experienced again.

Atmospheres have also been shown to contain suggestions of movement. Being immersed in an atmosphere can literally move us in ways over which we have little control. This is most obvious with atmospheres that are largely created by sound, which we often experience as shaking and moving the body in particular ways. The musical recitation of devotional poetry (na't khwan) among Mauritian Muslims is a good example for this. Consisting of hymns and poems that are usually recited in Urdu, this form of poetry stirs feelings of religious affection and creates a desire for prayer among devout Muslims. It does this both through its meaning, but also very much through the mode and style of its vocal rendering and through the sonic nature of the voice involved in it. The latter creates an atmosphere that envelops and suffuses the body and changes its sense of being in space. It ‘grips you powerfully’, ‘makes you vibrate’, and ‘directly enters your soul’, as people put it (Eisenlohr 2018, 2024, 8). The sound and resulting movements become all the more meaningful insofar as they are part of ritual practices that incorporate the discursive and iconographic dimensions of a religious tradition (Eisenlohr 2022, 2018).

A final major aspect of atmospheres that the anthropological literature has insisted on is that they can be shaped or curated. For instance, by arranging the lighting in a way that fosters a sense of community, solitude, and ‘security’, a feeling called hygge ('feeling home') can be induced in Denmark (Bille 2020; 2015; Bille, Bjerregaard and Sørensen 2015). In a similar manner, urban spaces can be designed to make people feel particular ways, when, for example, the high ceilings in Christian churches are intended to make people feel small in the presence of God (for more examples, see Stenslund 2023). This possibility to craft and design atmospheres has also been demonstrated for experimental theatres (Gatt 2018), pharmacies (Liu 2023), churches (Gregersen 2021), commercial settings (Kolehmainen and Mäkinen 2021), courtrooms (Bens 2018), or even aquariums where enthusiasts create an atmosphere with water, air, and light (Schmitt 2018, 96).

What atmospheres do

We are only beginning to understand that in addition to individual motives and structural possibilities and constraints, atmospheres are a third layer that shape both meanings and behaviours. As such, atmospheres can create, for example, belonging. To this end, anthropological research has shown that people actively create the atmosphere in the Night Church, held in a cathedral in Copenhagen, through the arrangements of both human and non-human bodies, making it a special place for worship and belonging. To theorise this, Andreas Melson Gregersen (2021) introduces the term ‘atmosphering’ and demonstrates how this act involves creating a sense of being in a church without being in a traditional one, and how people perceive this atmosphere.

Similarly, to ‘feel at home’ in Japan means to create an atmosphere where practices that create intimacy (often referred to as ‘social heat’) such as sleeping, eating, and bathing are balanced with household members’ desire for autonomy and distance (Daniels 2015). In related ways, white, urban, upper-middle-class American women use ‘ethnic’ objects such as Malian bògòlan candles and cloth to create domestic spaces, which in their words, are full of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘life’ (Bodil Birkebæk Olesen 2010). They feel that exoticised objects can help them overcome the ‘coldness’ of other materials and bring life, and ultimately social relationships, into their homes. In certain British pubs the atmosphere immerses people in the essence of the place not only to make them feel at home, but primarily to encourage consumption (Shaw 2018).

While this sounds mostly positive and inclusive, atmospheres may just as well limit or exclude people in various ways. In Black skin, white masks (2008), Frantz Fanon analyses what it feels like to be Black in mid-century French society. In a much-quoted scene, he describes sitting at a table and contemplating reaching for matches. He feels inhibited and describes how the gazes of others (whether they are in the room or not) create an ‘atmosphere of certain uncertainty’ (Fanon 2008, 83) that hinders him. This atmosphere is not just something that imposes itself on him in the moment. Rather, it has become a ‘definitive structuring of the self and the world’, part of a dialectical relationality. Because of the oppressive and dangerous atmosphere in which Fanon lived, it is impossible for him to move freely and without fear. His analysis has inspired a vast literature on how the gaze of dominant groups of people can create atmospheres that inhibit or exclude others (Magrì and McQueen 2023).

Sara Ahmed (2007) is one of the most prominent contributors to this literature. In her analysis of whiteness, she shows how certain atmospheres can be created in such a way as to exclude non-white bodies. To explain how these atmospheres are formed, she extends Fanon’s account of living under a hostile, white gaze. Ahmed describes the limited scope of action of people of colour in a white world through the notion of ‘orientation’, understood as the different directions people can take in any given moment, which determine what is and is not within their reach (2007). Reflecting on the political dimension of atmosphere more generally, Janis Jenkins (2025) recently added that within any political ethos, the constitution of political subjectivity takes place at the nexus of and orientation and the atmosphere in which we orient.

The stifling effects of atmospheres that Fanon developed with respect to ethnic and racialised limitation and exclusion have been extended to other social categories such as gender, age, and class. Take, for example, outreach events by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in northern Uganda in the late 2010s. Here, ICC staff aimed at curating a ‘transitional justice atmosphere’ which included foreign media audiences but excluded in-person audiences in the village through linguistic and spatial regimes. The constellation of material arrangements contributed significantly to this exclusion: monitors displayed proceedings from The Hague in English, accessible to media representatives but incomprehensible to most local attendees who lacked adequate translation. The small screens and language barrier generated an atmosphere of boredom and restlessness among the physically present audience, yet this remained invisible to distant viewers. Television cameras and photographers transmitted a carefully curated visual atmosphere that suggested engaged participation, while the actual bodily experience of confusion and exclusion felt by local attendees was systematically filtered out of the mediated representation (Bens 2022, 46–71).

Recent scholarship on the political dimension of atmospheres also explores whether some emotions and feelings might not only be shaped by atmosphere but, in Schmitz’s sense, be atmospheres. In this line of theorising, Schnegg (2024) describes boredom in rural Namibia as an atmosphere that grows in a space created by a longing for a different future. At the same time, people experience the path to this future as being blocked—by the environment, by political and economic marginalisation, by their own bodies, and by others. This atmosphere grips people who describe boredom as ‘riding on their backs’. It can only be lifted if the determining structures change. Here, emotions as atmospheres are intertwined with the political processes responsible for materiality and its lack. In a similar manner, historical, material, and political processes, as well as the routines of the school day, contribute to an atmosphere of boredom in a Berlin Hauptschule (Wellgraf 2018). The particular school is attended by the less privileged children in a part of the city characterised by increasing ruin and decay. The feeling of boredom grows in this environment of high unemployment where students experience education as having no future.

Political atmospheres of violence have equally been observed in the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict in Kashmir, for example. These atmospheres have developed in the militarised, ecologically fragile borderlands of Pakistan and India, shaping the lives of people in the two mountain valleys described ethnographically by Omer Aijazi (2024). At the same time, Aijazi convincingly demonstrates how people overcome these violent atmospheres through everyday micro-practices such as sharing and fostering friendships with Allah. This situation compares very well to the ways in which narco-stories within the Mexican and U.S. governments' militarised war on drugs in a Mexican prostitution zone contribute to a violent atmosphere. Here, rumours about how violent narco-criminals are contributed to an affective atmosphere of terror and vulnerability. This atmosphere in turn rendered the public more passive and ultimately led sex workers and other local residents to stop working in the area and move away (Luna 2018).

While the study of atmospheres foregrounds the importance of affect, feelings, and emotions, it also matters for rational deliberation. At the ICC judging on Uganda’s past conflicts, actors such as prosecutors, defence lawyers, victims, witnesses, and judges compete to influence the atmosphere in these ‘legal spaces’ (Bens 2022, Philoppopoulos Mihalopoulos 2015). They shape the atmosphere to establish specific historical truths about Uganda’s violent past, ‘moral truths’ about who is responsible for this violence, the plausibility of both, the guilt or innocence of individuals, and the justice and legitimacy of whole legal systems, such as international criminal law. To influence these atmospheres, actors try to rearrange bodies in an ‘affective arrangement’ (Slaby et al. 2017), for example by bringing human and non-human witnesses into the courtroom (Bens 2022, 92–110). These atmospheres inside and outside the courtroom serve as ‘affective frames’ for assessing the plausibility of narratives about the past, present, and future (Bens 2022, 71–91).

Beyond rationality, atmospheres help us create meaning. A comparative analysis of museum exhibitions has revealed how atmospheres make things appear to the visitor, as in the case of the exhibition Villa Sovietica which ran from 2009-2010 at the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva and focused on Soviet objects of everyday life. These objects can never simply be seen. Instead, they require movement of the perceiving body to reach them. This arrangement dissolves the Soviet nature of these objects and opens up other perspectives on them, focusing for example on their materiality, which is similar to that of other objects in the room (Bjerregaard 2015). Similary, it has been argued that the special atmosphere of live recordings of ritual mourning taking place in a Pakistan neighbourhood emanate the mahaul, a moral atmosphere of the ritual. When the consumers of Shia Islamic media listen to these live recordings, they contribute to the atmosphere of the public spaces in which they are played (Cooper 2022; 2024). Mahaul, here, is the Urdu articulation of atmosphere, a category of knowledge and experience, with interesting ethnographic stakes. Importantly, Mahaul is not only the affective background that gives meaning to things, but also a ‘container’ that holds and frames a situation, as well as the human and non-human entities within it (Cooper 2024).

Studying this interplay of atmosphere, rationality, and meaning-making shows that atmospheres are powerful social forces that shape collective and individual behaviour (Bille and Schwabe 2023). This is evident in the atmosphere created during the temple festival in a Badaga community in southern India (Heidemann 2021). The rituals manifest and reproduce the social order and the positions of groups within it—not unlike in Durkheim’s effervescence, mentioned above. They are also experienced as a tremendous relief by devotees and visitors. In a similar manner, unmarked religiosity has been shown to exist in secular Ukrainian society before the war. Theorising this form of religiosity as an atmosphere allows us to show how, in moments of crisis, the religious atmosphere becomes an important resource for political projects, such as the popular uprising of 2013–14 (Wanner 2020).

Sporting events are prime example of how atmospheres connect, but studies can also show the ambiguous dynamics of such connections. The ‘atmosphere’ of the 2012 London Olympics, for example, embraced and fostered a nationalism that made it difficult, and at times impossible, to express a critical perspective, for example by pointing out that the Olympics were the most expensive security operation in recent British history (Stephens 2016, 183). The impact of atmospheres was particularly evident when, during the Covid-19 pandemic, fans were not allowed into football stadiums and the 22 players played in front of up to 80,000 empty seats. This atmosphere clearly affected the players’ vitality. While many lacked motivation, some reported feeling more secure and relaxed (Gugutzer 2020b, Edensor 2015). These findings point to an open challenge in atmospheric studies: explaining how an atmosphere can affect different people in different ways.

While many studies of atmospheres focus on the relationships between humans and their built environments, non-human beings can become part of the atmosphere as well. Pigdogging—an Australian form of recreational hunting—relies on close collaboration between people and dogs to locate and catch wild pigs. Hunting with dogs extends human perception into the animals’ extraordinary olfactory range. In this partnership, scent appears not as a mere trace but as atmosphere: an enveloping field that signals where pigs have moved, rested, or turned. The hunt also transforms the landscape’s atmosphere: Human, canine, machine, and terrain become frictionally enmeshed in an embodied, unfolding practice that makes—and remakes—the landscape through a multisensory chase (Keil 2021, Schroer and Schmitt 2018b).

In a related manner, recent scholarship mobilises the idea that atmospheres are an underlying dimension of our connection to all entities we find in this world. Currently, climate and environmental changes are drastically altering these entities. As a result, the soil dries out, and the grasses and eventually the livestock die, which changes the overall environmental atmosphere (Schnegg 2025). To describe this atmosphere, Damara pastoralists in Namibia use the term ǃŪke-ai, which translates as ‘collective loneliness’. Similarly, in the Pontine Marshes in Italy, an atmosphere emerges from everyday agricultural practices, like burning reeds, and becomes part of the environment itself (Gruppuso 2018). The marshes are both extremely productive and a breeding ground for mosquitoes and malaria, the Italian contraction for mal’aria (aria cattiva, or ‘bad air’). As such, the atmosphere connects to the environment (here also meteorologically), with breathing playing an important role in the process. Exploring the atmospheric links we create to other species and to post-humanist mixtures of life and technology remains a major research gap for the years to come.

How atmospheres can be analysed and studied

Given that atmospheres, by their very nature, defy precise description, they pose significant challenges for anthropological analysis. One of the first systematic attempts to address the methodological challenges that atmospheres raise came with the productive distinction between ‘knowing in atmospheres’, ‘knowing about atmospheres’, and ‘knowing through atmospheres’ (Sumartojo and Pink 2019). Thereby, ‘knowing in atmospheres’ names the researcher’s in-situ attunement as an atmosphere unfolds: staying with its contingencies, rhythms, and micro-shifts through go-alongs, recordings, and sensory notes. ‘Knowing about atmospheres’ is a reconstructive, after-the-fact account that draws on interviews, elicitation, and traces to parse how spaces, media, bodies, and histories configured what was felt. Finally, ‘knowing through atmospheres’ treats concrete episodes as engines for concept-building, connecting atmospheric experience to broader social and material formations.

Understanding people’s feelings as lying ‘in the air’ makes them more accessible (and less deterministic) than placing them in the inner psyche and the minds of our interlocutors. However, it poses another salient challenge: how can we explain that individuals can sometimes experience the ‘same’ atmospheres quite differently? Some describe feeling in one way, while others feel differently. Some seem to be completely immersed in an atmosphere, while others merely notice it. Fully understanding and theorising this is still an outstanding theoretical challenge (Seyfert 2012, 29). Recently, the notion of ‘resonance’ has been proposed to explain such individual variation (Schnegg 2025). In this view, people have different ways of resonating with an atmosphere. At least two dimensions may influence how people experience or resonate with a given atmosphere: affective dispositions and symbols.

Affective dispositions can be defined as ‘an individual’s repository of affective traces of past relationships, events, and encounters. These function in the present as potentials to affect and be affected’ (Mühlhoff 2019, 119). Experiencing atmospheres, like other experiences, leaves traces in the subject. Having experienced the exuberance of a festival, the collective excitement of a sports team’s victory, or the wind before the long-awaited rain become part of an individual’s disposition that can be triggered in certain situations. These dispositions are likely to shape how to (re)experience an atmosphere. However, other, even more personal experiences can become part of one’s affective disposition and influence how the atmosphere is felt. Someone will respond differently to the atmosphere of a funeral if they have recently experienced death. Similarly, a herdsman who depends on cattle and rain will resonate differently with an atmosphere that announces rain than a teacher who does not depend on rain at all.

The study of symbols is equally important to understand whether and how atmospheres resonate with us. Atmospheres are, to a certain extent, pre-reflective, but they still require the interpretation of symbols which contribute to them. Consider walking past a group of noisy football fans, which might feel uncomfortable to some but perfectly normal to people who are used to it. At the same time, it may feel different again to those who can read the symbols on their skin and clothing, which in Germany, for example, sometimes refer to extreme right-wing movements. The symbols may thereby co-create an atmosphere, and they take on meaning through it (Bens 2022, 71–90).

How seriously one takes the role of affective dispositions and symbols in the study of atmospheres depends on the degree to which one believes that experiencing atmospheres is pre-reflective. The ethnographic record seems to show that atmospheres can not only be consciously curated, but also that people can ‘learn’ or ‘be socialised’ to resonate with particular atmospheres by becoming familiar with their symbols (Schnegg 2024, 2025).

Methodologically speaking, atmospheres can, first, be successfully studied through participant observation. This enables an ethnographic description of the situations and affective arrangements in which atmospheres emerge. It allows us to grasp in detail how human and non-human bodies relate to each other—what sounds, smells, lights, and other diverse components form the building blocks of a given situation. To explore their saliency, ethnographers can ask themselves which components of an arrangement cannot be omitted without significantly changing the atmosphere: this could be a person, a landscape, a view, a smell, a story, and so on. They can also ask about the specific sequence of events that brought an atmosphere about, as people often only become aware of them when people, landscapes, views, smells, stories, or anything else shifted (Riedel 2019, Bens 2019).

These observations usually trigger atmospheric experiences that the readers themselves have had: affective dispositions evoke a feeling in which similar atmospheric experiences were embedded. Of course, there are several methodological problems with this, including the presumption that the audience of an ethnography has experienced similar atmospheres in order to imagine and reexperience them. For this reason, atmospheric descriptions should be complemented by interviews with participants in the field as well as by autoethnographic reflection.

A second promising method to study atmospheres are phenomenological interviews that explore how our research participants understand and feel in certain situations. Phenomenological interviews ask people to re-experience a particular situation (Schnegg 2023). They begin by eliciting a moment in which an atmosphere, such as eeriness, was felt. In a second step, the interviewees are asked to describe the situation in which something happened as precisely as possible and to mentally reposition themselves in this experience. In the final step, the ethnographer asks the interlocutor to recall the atmosphere and, to some extent, to re-experience it and describe how it felt, without using categories that are too abstract. This elicits an experiential description (Levy and Hollan 1998). In such interviews, ethnographers avoid naming and categorising the atmosphere in advance. Sometimes atmospheres may have names that are not easily translated into English, in which case interviewees can be invited to use non-English terms for them. While phenomenological interviews are typically conducted for moments that the anthropologist has not experienced, they can also be used to describe atmospheres that are known to all participants in the conversation, allowing the data to be triangulated with the descriptions made as described above.

A third method is autoethnography, i.e. describing how an individual themself has experienced a certain situation. Imagine the boredom of waiting with people for a bus, the sadness of a funeral, the excitement of a wedding. Researchers are affected by these atmospheres to varying degrees, and reflecting on these experiences can become a powerful methodological tool, as, for example, Fanon’s work demonstrates. It makes the ethnographer’s own affects and emotions a starting point and an ‘epistemic resource’ for analysis (Stodulka et al. 2018). Ethnographers may also experience liminal moments of change, when constellations in the situation change and atmospheres shift. These affective dissonances in the atmosphere can be an important starting point for ethnographic analysis. All three of these methods—participant observation, phenomenological interviews, and autoethnography—broadly align with approaches generally subsumed within sensory ethnography (Vannini 2024).

Conclusion

Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies that comprise a situation, yet an atmosphere is at the same time more than the sum of its parts. Anthropologists have begun to conceptualise this affective in-between. Most of them agree that atmospheres are situational, that they are formed by the affective forces emanating from bodies present, and that they encompass the sensory impressions left by these bodies, including appearances, smells, views, touches, sounds, lighting, and more. This entry has shown how atmospheres shape how things are perceived, how they become meaningful, how we feel, and what behaviours are appropriate and likely to happen next. As such, atmospheres have significant explanatory power that anthropology should continue to explore.

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Note on contributors

Michael Schnegg, PhD, is an anthropologist at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and Namibia. His current research explores what it feels like to live a rural life in an increasingly urbanised and warming world. To this end, he is contributing to the development of a phenomenological anthropology that brings together philosophers and anthropologists to work towards an empirically grounded theorisation of pressing issues, including climate change. His work has been published in a wide range of journals in anthropology, sociology, economics, communication studies, geography, and theoretical physics.

Michael Schnegg, Universität Hamburg, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, D-20146 Hamburg, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9240-8836

Jonas Bens is Heisenberg Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on how people navigate conflicts within plural normative orders, combining long-term ethnographic studies with analyses of various legal systems, including state law and indigenous normative orders. From this perspective, he explores central legal and political concepts such as sovereignty, justice, property, value, and punishment. His most recent monograph is The sentimental court: The affective life of international criminal justice (2020, Cambridge University Press).

Jonas Bens, Universität Hamburg, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, D-20146 Hamburg, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3485-0436

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Energy

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 01:22:10 +0000

Picture of a solar panel engineer in Tinginaput, India. Picture by Abbie Trayler-Smith, 2009.

Katja Müller

Merseburg University for Applied Sciences

Initially published 5 Nov 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24energy

Abstract:

Energy is central to everyday life and industrial production, and is a major concern and focus of public policy. Its production from different sources, its use, and the societal and climatic consequences of energy systems have increased the attention paid to energy in recent years. Energy anthropology provides an in-depth understanding of the social, cultural, and ecological implications of extractivism for energy consumption and of the introduction or transformation of energy systems. Energy anthropology considers resource materialities, infrastructure, institutions, ethics, political power, beliefs, habits, and truth claims involved in energy production, distribution, and consumption. Concepts such as ‘energopower’, energy ethics, and cultures of energy allow us to make sense of the lived realities and cultural understandings involved in energy transition efforts. They recognise that energy is simultaneously personal, collective, and political. They also emphasise that energy transitions are both a climate-political imperative and essentially socio-cultural processes.

Introduction

Energy is what enables life on earth. We all depend on the energy the sun is providing, enabling photosynthesis and therefore plant growth, which animals and human beings feed upon. The intake of energy by animals and humans, measured in joules or in calories, determines the work they can carry out, and hence influences all forms of production, from agricultural to cultural. This omnipotence and importance of energy led, in the middle of the twentieth century, to an argument for a cultural anthropological analysis of energy:

Everything in the universe may be described in terms of energy. Galaxies, stars, molecules and atoms may be regarded as organizations of energy. Living organisms may be looked upon as engines which operate by means of energy derived directly or indirectly from the sun. The civilizations, or cultures of mankind, also, may be regarded as a form or organization of energy […] Cultural anthropology is that branch of natural science which deals with matter-and-motion, i.e., energy, phenomena in cultural form, as biology deals with them in cellular, and physics in atomic, form. (White 1943, 335)

This thinking laid the foundation for anthropology as a discipline to engage with energy. Anthropology has been analysing energy in relation to societies and culture, norms and values, changes and transitions. Anthropologists often think of energy systems as socio-technical intertwinements of resource extractivism, electricity and fuel, infrastructure, institutions, as well as ethics, political power, and beliefs, all of which are situated in the environment and the planetary condition. In physics, energy transformed into applied force equals work; energy can neither be produced nor destroyed, only transformed from one form into another. However, in everyday life (as well as in economics and anthropology), we use the term ‘energy’ with regards to something that can be used and used up: empty batteries are a common phenomenon and so are power cuts, fuel price hikes, empty gas stations, heat poverty, or oil wars. Anthropologists have addressed this experienced reality of energy along all parts of its life cycle, examining, for example, fuel and electricity in regards to their production, transmission, and consumption.

Power and politics

The lived realities of energy systems show that ‘energy is, at once, personal, collective and political, an experienced reality and a total social fact’ (Coleman 2021, 181). Electricity and fuel have become relevant to individual well-being and progress, social arrangements, and industrial and economic development. Electricity’s invisibility allows for its flow to be taken for granted, yet the establishment, maintenance, and transformation of energy systems are highly politicised issues, where the word ‘power’ can be deployed in two senses. One concept used to politically frame energy systems—across production, transmission, and consumption—is that of ‘energopower’ (Boyer 2014). This term refers to both the political and energetic dimensions of a phenomenon and implies rethinking political power through the analysis of electricity and fuel (Boyer 2014, 325; Loloum, Abram and Ortar 2021). Energopower is related to Michel Foucault’s idea of ‘biopower’, in that it is a mode of controlling and subjugating large numbers of bodies and populations in various aspects of their lives (1981). Conversely, anthropologists have also examined how control over energy becomes an essential part of, if not a precondition for, control over people.

The coal miners’ strikes that occurred in Europe and North America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are an historic example. Mining companies, with the help of state police, tried to subdue coal miners’ fights for better working conditions, but the miners continued the strike and challenged the state’s authoritarian control over energy supply. In effect, the strikes became an essential contributing factor for the formation of worker’s unions in Europe and Northern America and for democratic participation in state formations (Mitchell 2011). This energy workforce co-determined labour conditions, ideas of the welfare state, notions of private and public ownership, economic systems, and political formations, among other things. Oil drilling, as a contrasting example, did not have the same political effects. Its decentralised infrastructure and a minimised workforce with little ability to organise, along with the fluidity and flexibility involved in bypassing and detouring oil tankers, proved less suitable in helping to form democracies. We can hence talk of ‘carbon democracies’ as ones that are influenced or even formed by the way carbon, in its physical structure and materiality, has been drilled, mined, transported, sold, or used. Thus, the concept of energopower allows us to see the various energy-related materialities, transformation processes, discourses, and truth claims as socio-political phenomena, where the power to influence or control events or people serves as a critical factor for the formation of both energy and political systems.

A second, closely related concept to make sense of the political nature of energy is ‘energopolitics’, denoting the various ways in which this power is applied and operates. Thinking of energy systems as energopolitics allows us to re-politicise energy systems, rather than taking for granted their historically evolved material infrastructure and physico-chemical aspects. Turning attention to energopolitics sheds light not only on critical issues of energy systems, but also on its rough edges and sometimes highly violent forms: energy systems can lead to the murder of activists and system opponents or to the creation of ‘sacrifice zones’ that make life unbearable or impossible (Kaur 2021). Politicisation in the form of increased attention and control over energy has occurred whenever energy provision or energy prices were in turmoil. The global oil price crises in the 1970s have led to an increased investigation into energy systems, with a strong stance in anthropology for the voices of Indigenous and other communities affected by energy production to be included (see Rogers 2015, 366). The nuclear armament and reactor dismantling of the 1980s and 1990s, the US war for oil in Iraq, and more recent climate change discourse have contributed to a re-politicisation of energy systems, as did the Russian war on Ukraine and the subsequent rise in European energy prices in 2022.

These energy price crises demonstrate distinctly that there is a nexus between state, energy, and economics. Oil is a prime example: The capital accumulation based on extraction, distribution, and consumption of petroleum, called ‘petrocapitalism’, has been shaping economies as well as political institutions. In the US, for example, big oil companies like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company used money made from oil to monopolise industrial organisation. Here, petrocapitalism comprises corporate economic power, intertwined with political power, as well as their impact on the patterns of ordinary life: gasoline and plastic are common products for mobility, consumption, and comfort, and their ubiquity shape understandings of freedom, security, and national pride (Huber 2013). Like petroleum, other forms of fossil fuels also co-shape capitalist logics. Extractive capitalism, which accumulates fossil capital and uses it for political ends (Malm 2016), relies on ‘nature’s free gifts’, which are commoditised and used as cheap energy. Extractive capitalism focuses on creating surplus value based on exploiting natural resources and human labour. In the process, it pays less attention to (often externalised) costs such as deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, workforce exploitation, or environmental degradation (Moore 2015; Degani et al. 2020). The accumulated fossil capital is one basis for today’s financial markets that have an extraordinary power of their own. The oil market, for example, is increasingly detached from the actual circulation of oil. Rather, it has turned into a financial instrument for investments and profits (Labban 2010), with its own financial narratives to determine future extraction of fossil fuel deposits (Field 2022). Renewable energy has become enveloped into this market. Examples are fossil capital, or ‘petrodollars’, used for building complete ‘green’ cities like Masdar in the desert of Abu Dhabi (Günel 2019; Koch 2022), green bonds (Bracking et al. 2023), or fossil fuel divestment (Langley et al. 2021).

Energy transitions and conflict

Paying attention to the financial aspects of renewable energy production is not least a consequence of climatisation, i.e. the spillover process of climate issues and concerns into international negotiations as well as into wider society (Aykut et al. 2019; Müller et al. 2024). Protecting the climate and trying to keep global warming well below 2°C^[1]requires transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy. These new energy frontiers necessitate new fields of investment, but they also bring energy conflicts. Energy transitions from fossil fuels to renewable resources are but the latest example of how societies scrutinise the socio-technical, cultural, and politico-economical aspects of energy systems. The consequences and impacts of energy transitions have been subject to debate and contestation: What social and cultural impact does an innovation in or exit from an energy industry have? What will be the results of energy transitions for individuals, communities, and societies at large, including their political systems and financial dependencies? Are new energy frontiers and energy transitions predestined for energy conflicts between their beneficiaries and negatively affected parties (see Abram et al. 2023)? Energy conflicts may be driven by fundamental questions over the use or rejection of particular sources of energy. Yet, they can also comprise distributional conflicts, such as the question of who benefits from the financial rewards of energy projects. They may raise procedural questions, involving planning and decision-making processes, access to information, and opportunities for participation and transparency. Or they may raise locational and territorial issues around the use of land for energy projects, as well as questions of identity and belonging (Becker and Naumann 2018).

One widely used typology for the assessment of energy projects is the distinction between different principles of energy justice, which are often lacking in one or multiple forms (see e.g. Abram et al. 2023; Bickerstaff, Walker and Bulkeley 2013; Degani 2022). These principles include: energy availability, or having sufficient energy resources when needed; affordability, encompassing stable and equitable prices for energy use; due process, including stakeholder participation in energy policymaking and fair and informed consent; good governance, including transparency and accountability. Energy justice also comprises the principles of ecological sustainability; inter- and intra-generational equity in accessing energy; and the responsibility of nations towards societies and the natural environment, to minimise their energy systems’ negative impacts (Sovacool and Dworkin 2015). Normative assumptions and European canons of value—Western philosophical ideas of virtue, reason, or equality—form the basis of this justice concept (Sovacool and Dworkin 2015).

Anthropologists have formulated energy ethics as an alternative conceptual framework to assess how just and equitable energy systems, and parts thereof, are (Smith and High 2017). Combining moral questions regarding justice and fairness with an anthropological tradition of taking emic perspectives seriously, energy ethics take into account the heterogeneity of energy as different people experience and conceptualise it. Energy ethics stress the way people judge energy’s place in their lives, working with a bottom-up approach rather than a predefined moral canon. Energy ethics then aim to identify how people themselves evaluate the role energy plays for what they understand as the good life. This can comprise notions of justice, fairness, and equity but it can also go beyond them (Smith and High 2017). Renewable energy technology, for example, can involve different concepts of ‘nature’ that is to be protected, and a highly specific understanding of natural elements such as wind. Take the isthmus of Mexico as an example, where large-scale wind parks are being installed, transforming landscapes and income structures, providing benefits for landowners and often non-local wind park operators. Wind became a valuable energy resource in this stretch of land. The introduction of wind energy to the isthmus is consequently welcomed and highly regarded by some who see wind as an exchange of air due to heat differentials, and wind as a salvational object or a promissory force (Howe 2019, 25ff.). Yet, for others in the isthmus, wind is part of the local Zapotec cosmology and of the Indigenous traditions of communal land use. They see contemporary wind parks as problematic energy projects. Renewable energies have the potential to provide what is frequently ethically required and demanded in a climate-affected life: distributed models of social control of renewables as a public good (Goodman et al. forthcoming). But the practice of energy transitions also can spur displacement, disenfranchisement, and disenchantment, which lead people to contest renewables, thereby delaying energy transitions and further locking in fossil fuels (Goodman et al. forthcoming). Studying people’s energy ethics, therefore, considers energy with the diverging values, paradigms, and expectations that people have in mind, as well as of the consequences of these systems (see e.g. Franquesa 2018; Boyer and Howe 2019).

Energy’s meanings and materialities

Just as anthropology highlights the multiple meanings and evaluations of energy systems through an energy ethics framework, by focusing on cultures of energy, anthropology similarly looks into how energy is variously imagined, understood, used, and contested as a cultural entity (Strauss, Rupp and Love 2013). Acknowledging cultures of energy necessitates being open to different notions of what energy can actually mean, allowing an understanding of energy as a cultural artefact rather than a given universal truth. Energy and its various forms can be framed mythically and cosmologically, and they can be imagined as something political, magical, spiritual, social, or technical (Rupp 2013; Chapman 2013). People use energy in many ways, from animistic worship of sun, wind, and other energy sources, to fetishising commodities or machines (Strauss, Rupp and Love 2013, 12). Nuclear energy and its use as weapons, for example, are seen by peace-groups as anti-humanistic and mad, while engineers with a more technocratic view experience nuclear testing as professional rites of passage (Gusterson 1996). In hydropower and electric infrastructure, by contrast, we find heroism and sacrifice as cultural conceptions. Jahawarlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, considered hydropower dams to be akin to the temples of modern India and inaugurated a vast canal irrigation system in 1954.^[2] They can also be seen as a necessity, and the subsequent relocation they may demand as a sacrifice—as for people in Portugal, who understood large-scale dam projects in the second half of the twentieth century by drawing on Catholic norms of sacrifice (Küpers and Batel 2023). Another example of culturally-specific understandings of energy is embodied by the smokestack of an electric power plant in Vinh City, Vietnam, which turned into a mythical, heroic symbol for perseverance against US aggression (Schwenkel 2018, 103). After 1954, the reconstruction and development of Vietnam’s electrical energy generation had turned into a post-colonial project. It signified emancipation from both colonial enslavement and assumed lack of enlightened thinking among the local population by colonisers. Unlike under colonial rule, electricity was to now be produced and provided for everyone, not only for colonial rulers—aligning with socialist ideas of social justice and freedom. The electric power plant with its smokestack in Vinh City came to symbolise both these ideas and a sense of technological advancement. Consequently, when the US war on Vietnam between 1964 and 1973 targeted the power plant and other critical infrastructure, workers repeatedly defended and repaired it.

The postcolonial power plant that had signalled the nation’s advance toward global socialism, now under the threat of imperialism, came to stand as a symbol of the resilience of the Vietnamese nation. (Schwenkel 2018)

Being but one example of what energy and its materialised infrastructure entails, there is, in consequence, no universal or stable concept for its meanings. Energy’s meaning is, rather, subject to individual and collective understandings, framed by society, politics, and history.

Understanding energy as a more open concept, a vessel to be filled with meaning—see this entry’s opening statement, that everything may be described in terms of energy—also allows for analyses that shift focus onto the concept of ‘resource materialities’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). The resource materialities approach stresses that resources come into being through human thought as well as human action involved in production, drilling, mining, and technical invention. Resource materialities are also held to be of a distributed and relational nature, co-constituted by people’s ontologies and their knowledge about them, as well as by their infrastructure, and the ways people experience them (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014). For example, uranium is ‘provided’ by nature and geology, but its chemical and physical structure alone do not make it an energy resource. It needs to be identified as a resource to become part of a technical process for energy production. It needs to be named, mined, scientifically analysed, and desired for exchange and use. Given that electricity and fuel are produced from energy sources, resource materialities as an approach amplifies energy’s various forms and material transformations. It conceives of energy as an assemblage of resources, infrastructure, electrons, petrochemical compounds, human and non-human agency, concepts, and ideas. It thereby shows that human thought and action in interrelation with the physicality of resources co-determine the form that energy takes across space and time.

The consequences of energy’s materialities can be severe, affecting human beings, flora, fauna, and geology. Objectifying and exploiting ecological, geological, and sociocultural worlds often go hand in hand (Bollig and Krause 2023), and environmental approaches to energy speak to the impact that resource extraction and further energy infrastructures have on their immediate surroundings. Industrial extraction projects can cause pollution and environmental degradation, and affect landscapes (Powell 2018). Coal mining causes pulmonary diseases and acidic rain; nuclear power production bears the risk of nuclear accidents and radiation contamination (Parkhill 2010; Powell 2018; Fortun and Morgan 2016). Upstream and downstream aspects of energy production heavily impact the environment too, albeit often in other regions and hence other immediate surroundings. For example, before generating wind energy, the copper, nickel, and rare earth metals mined for wind turbines are often tied in with the long history of vices and violence in mining (Jacka 2018). On the other end, the debris from dismantled power plants and infrastructure can remain on site or very close to it, as when radioactive waste is kept in former nuclear power plants and hence in the vicinity of former workers (Liubimau 2019) and thus continues to impact humans and non-humans alike.

In addition to energy-related accidents, devastation of regions, and pollution of air and rivers, energy’s environmental impact is now also geo-environmental, threatening all species including the future of humanity (Howe 2019). We have come to call the planetary consequences of energy systems and human consumption in the current age ‘the Anthropocene’, or, when referring to the atmospheric impacts, ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’.

Forms and materialisations

The concepts and analytical lenses presented so far have evolved from detailed anthropological research on energy production, transmission, and consumption and on the ruptures and contestations that electricity and fuel have brought about. The sources of electricity and fuel have guided energy research for several decades. One example is oil, because ‘for the better part of a century, petroleum has been the energy source of industrial capitalism’ (Appel, Mason and Watts 2015, 9). Oil is tightly linked to global finance, but oil drilling is also a very localised, concentrated, and highly profitable form of extractivism. It raises hopes for prosperity and a better future (Weszkalnys 2016), but when it is drilled for, it often comes with conflicts over oil rents, i.e. culturally and politically determined struggles over profits and benefits (Reyna and Behrends 2008). Oil is a prime example of the ‘resource curse’, holding that countries rich in resources show less economic growth, get exploited, and tend to suffer from more corruption and political instability than those countries with few resources. Unpacking the resource curse in the context of oil, anthropologists have pointed out that prevailing modes of domination within a nation-state play a determining role in whether oil is experienced as a boon or a bane in countries such as Venezuela, Chad, Sudan, Norway, or the US (Behrends, Reyna and Schlee 2011). These comparisons of different countries and their use of violent and non-violent forms of allocating profit from oil show that there is no ‘resource curse’ or ‘oil curse’ per se.

Anthropology has also attended to the contestations around energy sources. In the 1940s and 1970s, these were predominantly economically and energy-security induced concerns. Contemporary arguments around oil and other fossil fuels have been emanating particularly with increased awareness about their impact on the climate. The potential end of oil drilling and the combustion of petroleum might be publicly demanded or contested, but is hard to execute. Norway, for example, could take a lead in a responsible exit from oil, but it produces arguably the ‘cleanest oil’, i.e. with less environmental impact, which remains a blessing to the state rather than a curse (Lautrup 2022). Oil drilling is the basis of the Norwegian welfare state. Hence, climate activists in Norway, who demand an exit from oil, contest local jobs and living standards as well as national values of prosperity and oil-as-welfare. Goodness for the nation might no longer be enough, given the global effects of burning fossil fuels (Lautrup 2022; see also Schöneich 2022). Historic trajectories continue to impact localised social structures as well as modes of trade and global economies, while at the same time new frontiers, such as fracking, are crossed (Rogers 2014).

Coal mining and combustion have been central to the Industrial Revolution and for regionalised mining communities for over more than one and a half centuries in several countries, laying the foundation for fossil capital (Malm 2016; Mitchell 2011). As part of a coal-development nexus, governments have wanted the resource extracted and combusted to ‘develop’ nations and their industries (Goodman et al. 2020). Coal mining induces incisions into the earth’s surface as well as into social systems: it spurs the devastation of villages, the creation of new mining towns, dust, and the material pollution of the surroundings, and emits greenhouse gases as the single-largest source (Lewin 2017; Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Goodman et al. 2020). Yet, coal mining has also provided for a strong sense of community and coalition among workers, especially when done underground. With the comparatively large, but little-supervised, workforce required to mine it, and a place-based, easy-to-sabotage infrastructure, coal mining has historically contributed to union building and democratisation (Mitchell 2011). At the same time, the economisation of this resource extraction, i.e. the exploitation of nature and workforce at the lowest economic costs, has led to threats or actual abandonment of former mining communities and towns, while coal miners as a workforce continue to be exploited, often with little concern for their dignity, health, and life (Smith 2019; Lewin 2017; Ringel 2018). Coal and coal mines have turned out to variously be colonial death pits, creators of working classes, and symbols of nationalism, fostering militarisation, love for landscape, or a sense of belonging (e.g. Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Kikon 2019; Powell 2018; Morton and Müller 2016).

The lived realities of coal mining resemble those of mining minerals or stones, in that they are simultaneously highly exploitative and life-threatening, and engender conceptualisations of community and identity. As several countries are planning for and executing coal-mining phase outs, especially in Europe and Southeast Asia, they foster demands for just transitions as a form of energy justice. Coal exits provoke identity politics because coal has been providing employment and economic potential as well as shaping people’s lives and cultural understandings. In the former German Democratic Republic, for example, brown coal was the prime energy source and in the 1980s the country was the world’s leading brown coal producer. Mining engineers and mineworkers received the highest recognition; their work was essential for the country’s economy. The state’s establishment of a ‘Day of the Miner and Energy’ is but one expression of this appreciation (Müller 2017). However, the mineworkers’ massive layoffs in the 1990s and the more contemporary coal exit invalidates this. These transitions consequently require individual and regional ethical, economic, and political realignments.

Mining minerals such as rare earths, iron, or copper is an important part of the construction of wind turbines and solar panels. Due to the location of mineral deposits and due to cost efficiency considerations (with companies aiming for low wages and low environmental standards), materials used in constructing wind turbines and solar panels are often mined in countries of the Global South. For example, Brazil is a major exporter for iron ore, as is China for rare earths, while Peru, Chile, and Brazil lead copper exports. Central contributions to energy anthropology, however, investigate predominantly the sites of installing and operating wind turbines and solar farms. Wind turbines in general have the advantage of co-existing with human activity. With rotor blades turning several metres above the ground, people can make use of fields, forests, or meadows underneath (Müller and Morton 2021). There are, however, two major sources of conflict over wind energy: concentration of capital and conflicts over land. The former connects renewable energy production to an extractivist capitalism from fossil fuels. The installation and operation of wind parks marks the area as wasteland, which becomes productive of value in an economic logic. Wind parks in Spain’s Southern Catalonia, for example, are being installed as large investments of centralised, international Spanish corporations. The produced electricity is transported to and used elsewhere in Spain and abroad (Franquesa 2018). Such extractivism can become a site for contestation. The local population supported the first wind parks, but the corporations’ attitudes and their questioning of local understandings of a dignified, self-determined way of living in this rural region led to disputes (Franquesa 2018). Anthropologists have noted similar developments in Mexico, Greece, and elsewhere, where investors see wind energy as export opportunities and wind parks as safe returns on their investments. Meanwhile, local populations often underscore the costs of wind energy production, which is borne by local communities and fauna, in the form of noise, exclusion from surrounding lands, and disturbing gregarious animals and avifauna (Boyer and Howe 2019; Siamanta 2019). The concentration of wind parks in particular areas or regions is a result of trying to govern wind energy production: to prevent rank growth, to regulate investments, to foster technical development, or to optimise infrastructure use. But the concentrating of wind turbines significantly contributes to locals’ feelings of being surrounded, impaired, and used: concentrated capital and wind turbines reinforce centralised patterns of exploitation with both the electricity and the profits consumed elsewhere.

Photovoltaics tend to entail similar conflicts, especially when concentrated, i.e. installed as green-field solar parks rather than rooftop solar arrays, and when seen as investments for internationally operating investors. The Pavagada Solar park in India is but one example, where an allegedly arid area has been turned into a mega-project for energy production. As the world’s largest solar park at the time of its construction in 2019, the Pavagada solar park covers 53 km² with an installed capacity of 2000 MW_p. While the government brokered the solar park, drawing on the trust of local landowners in state government officials rather than private companies, resulting changes to the local social system were massive (Ghosh, Bryant and Pillai 2022). With a prevailing system of landowners and dependent landless labourers tilling the land, rents produced through energy production went solely to landowners, while the landless labourers were completely deprived of their means of existence. Adding to the unbearable situation for some was the absence of promised ‘development’, as jobs in the solar (as well as wind) energy production sector are very limited aside from installation (Ghosh, Bryant and Pillai 2022). The mutually exclusive use of land for solar parks, often underscored with fences around the parks, can take neo-colonial form, and renew or reinforce existing domains of governance. They often become ‘green grabs’, i.e. a form of land grabbing that comes with an ecological or climatic benefit and associated moral heft (Stock 2023; Cantoni and Rignall 2019).

Each of the fuels, used resources, and the produced electricity require an infrastructure, which again has the potential for becoming a contested site. Energy infrastructure can be invisible, apparent only at times of dysfunctionality: we may take for granted that electricity comes from the plug socket, that we can turn the heat or the air conditioning on, and that switches will work (Star 1999; Müller 2021). Yet, the set-up of energy transport systems—think of coal on rails and ships, oil and gas in tanks, steam and hot water for heat or hydrogen in pipelines—has seen its own glitches and histories. The same goes for the secondary infrastructure needed for energy systems, such as coal mining towns, supply systems for workers, financial portfolios and investments, policies, rules, and regulations. Electrical grids and fuel transport infrastructure with their technical setups facilitate an inclusion of parts of society and co-constitute people’s feeling as part of it: flying trained coal miners in and out of mining towns in central Australia (Askland and Bunn 2018) will not contribute to democratisation in the same way as did, historically, coal miners’ joint work underground in Europe (Mitchell 2011). The informal sector of collecting coal that falls off lorries, prevailing in India’s coal mining areas, again creates different communities of energy workers (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The electric grid, as another example, epitomises energy’s potential for social inclusion and social construction once again: living off the grid can be a deliberate choice for some, but much more frequently, people perceive brown-outs or black-outs as a form of mismanagement and failure of maintaining the grid (Bakke 2016). Furthermore, when energy infrastructure is entangled with citizenship claims, people often prefer the electrification of remote rural areas through the grid rather than through solar lamps. In these instances the grid can be seen as citizenship materialising in wires (Cross 2019).

Electrifying villages or areas that have not yet been connected to the grid, and the resulting energy consumption, have the potential to change individual lives and interpersonal relationships. People understand electricity as a marker of modernity, signifying citizenship, and rearranging social status. Electrifying a village in Zanzibar in 1990, for example, meant that people got access to mass media and communication, reclaimed outdoor spaces at night, or could meet for watching television in the evenings (Winther 2008; Winther and Wilhite 2015). The fact that electrification can speed up the pace of life, with new cultural practices and a dissolving limitation of activities due to sunlight, makes it a biopolitical project that potentially brings liberation as well as surveillance and control (Gupta 2015). The effects of energy consumption also show in transitions from one energy source to another, i.e. when wood is substituted for low pressure gas cylinders, when solar cookers are introduced, or when biogas plants replace heating systems based on fossil fuels. Such transitions can bring individual advantages when shifting from consuming one fuel to another, such as less smoke pollution and fewer health hazards when used in cooking. They may also serve the interests of constituent energy communities requiring improvements in energy access (Campbell, Cloke and Brown 2016).

Individual choices in energy consumption also figure in the mobility sector, but they are framed by infrastructure. The choice of transport—a car or shared car, electric or diesel train, tram or bus, cycles, scooters, etc—is shaped by people’s socioeconomic conditions and aspirations, by available infrastructure as well as considerations of energy consumption. Each individual decision becomes part of the energy system and hence contributes to an ambivalent relationship between prevailing energy systems’ will to persist and the transformative capacity of (un)conscious changes in energy consumption. Ambivalence also marks many of the conscious and unconscious changes in energy consumption that accompany digitised energy consumption, via smart metre rollouts, for example. Digitisation potentially allows for reduced and optimised energy consumption, e.g. when people have digital metres that monitor and reduce their in-house heating. This works well in idealised industry scenarios, but these ideals do not necessarily prove to be true in reality: prople could use energy and digital appliances in ways rational or economical but, in fact, lifestyles and household preferences tend to be more dominant than energy tariff awareness and response (Kaviani et al. 2023; Strengers et al. 2021). Habits and conventions, daily behaviour, and social practices bear multiple possibilities of rebound effects, leading energy consumption to remain constant or even increase in times of digital energy control (e.g. Morley, Widdicks and Hazas 2018; Røpke 2012). Digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions make for a complicated twin transition (Sareen and Müller 2023).

Conclusion

This entry has only mentioned a handful of sources and material forms that energy can take. Much more can be said about heat pipelines, nuclear fission, batteries, petroleum gas, oil shale, peat, or hydrogen, for example. They feed on similar promises of energy availability and security, of being beneficial for the state, its citizens, the economy, and development. As anthropologists studying energy have pointed out, it is not only systemic availability, political regulations, and price that determine energy use, but also our social and cultural understandings. Furthermore, energy forms and sources often require someone to make a sacrifice, devastating villages, infringing on people’s rights, and violating cultural understandings. People find themselves forced to accept radiation or environmental degradation, living with the risk of accidents and calamity, rearranging social structures, or facing death when fighting against it (see e.g. Perrin 2005; Kelly 2019; Fortun and Morgan 2016; Ortiz 2024).

In the Anthropocene, we tend to group energy sources according to their CO₂ emissions, leading us to distinguish between renewable and non-renewable energy sources, or fossil and non-fossil fuels. This logic, however, has not been the same across space and time (Malm 2016, 38ff.). Energy sources comprise more than chemical and geo-environmental aspects. They can be evaluated according to their ethical, financial, political, environmental, social, and cultural aspects. Transitions from one energy source to another may seem economically and ecologically reasonable as well as technically feasible. We might overcome lock-in effects, be able to balance stranded assets, or convince ourselves of the planetary necessity of energy transitions. Yet, energy also remains subject to individual and communal understandings, experiences, and conceptions.

How we take the human and more-than-human stakeholders and their comprehension of energy into account will determine the future of energy systems. There is a threatening energy future scenario, where growing energy demand is not decoupled from greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. Weakening climate change mitigation efforts and shifting from mitigation to adaptation seems to be in line with forecasts of continuously increasing energy demand and a tardy decarbonisation. More optimistic energy futures expect technology-led transitions, where digitisation and new technology, ideally combined with changing consumer behaviour and social consent, have positive outcomes. They might lead to ‘exnovation’, i.e. terminating the use of an energy source in a just form. Or they may bring about creative destruction, simply making some of our current energy uses obsolete. Optimists thus hold on to the idea that energy systems can bring about greater prosperity and social benefits (see e.g. World Economic Forum 2023). Anthropological studies dampen some of these hopes, as they foreground the neo-colonial tendencies and problematic rebound effects of digitised energy consumption (Sareen and Müller 2023). They also show the great risk of failure of any energy transition that ignores how people handle energy and technology (Pink et al. 2023, 4). Being able to imagine various different energy futures (Watts 2024, 2019) will require collaboration and mutual human recognition. It will also require radically new forms of work. Transitioning from one energy system to another will likely be marked by ruptures, new infrastructural politics, and new extractivist frontiers.

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Note on contributor

Katja Müller is a social anthropologist conducting research into energy systems and digitalisation, as well as material and visual culture. She is Heisenberg-Professor for Technology, Ethics and Society at Merseburg University for Applied Sciences. Her latest books include Digitisation and low carbon energy transitions (2023, Palgrave), Digital archives and collections (2021, Berghahn), and Beyond the coal rush (2020, Cambridge University Press), analysing digital technology's impact on energy systems, online access to heritage material in India and Europe, and the coal rush in Germany, Australia, and India, respectively.

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[2] HT Correspondent. 2023. “From HT Archives: ‘Temple of modern India’ thrown open.” Hindustan Times, July 8. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/jawaharlal-nehru-inaugurates-bhakra-nangal-canal-system-symbolizing-india-s-progress-and-selfreliance-101688755029139.html.

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Infrastructure

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 18:58:08 +0000

Rehabilitation of the L train tunnel in New York, 2019. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York

Hannah Knox Evelina Gambino

University College London, University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Mar 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23infrastructure

Abstract:

Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world: roads, railways, airports, ports, pipelines, fibre optics cables, data, and logistics centres. Built above and below ground, they connect, channel, and, at times, halt the movement of humans, commodities, and resources that populate the earth. Infrastructures can also be immaterial: software, flows of data, and capital and the systems that organise them. A most basic definition can be gleaned from the term itself: the prefix ‘infra-’ means ‘below’, which highlights infrastructure’s role as the ‘underlying structure’ that allows a system to function. Infrastructures are not traditional ethnographic sites, yet in recent years a growing number of anthropologists and other social scientists have started to analyse them. Ethnographies of infrastructure have shown how these overlooked objects and networks offer exciting insights into the processes that make up social life. These studies have often highlighted the paradoxical quality of infrastructures, showing how they underwrite mundane daily interactions at the same time as being sites where dreams of alternative worlds are played out. Infrastructures remind us of the past and shape ideas of the future. They are both concrete things, and also structures that enable other things to move and be brought into relation with one another. For all of these reasons infrastructures are needed, coveted, and fought for. They channel new forms of power and act as catalysts for political struggle. This entry traces a growing body of work on infrastructures and their social implications. It shows how following infrastructures has allowed ethnographers to extend their analyses across multiple scales, shedding new light on practices of statecraft, ideas of the environment, political possibilities, and conceptions of time and space. Attention to infrastructures helps us analyse past and present societies and push for a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that the future might take.

Introduction

Rarely a day passes without infrastructure being mentioned in the news, with recent crises making their importance ever clearer. Climate change raises questions over the sustainability of fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure; the COVID-19 pandemic showed the fragility of infrastructures of health care, equipment supply chains, and the emergence of new infrastructures of care and surveillance; and the war in Ukraine and its effects on both energy and food has demonstrated the contingency and importance of the networks that enable the systems of production, extraction, and accumulation on which much of contemporary life is dependent. Pipelines, roads, railways, airports, and ports are at once fragile and ubiquitous, mundane and political, extending far beyond any one human society whilst they (re)organise the humans and objects out of which such societies are made.

In spite of the intensity of contemporary concern over infrastructure, until recently, it was not a category or class of objects that anthropologists were particularly known for studying. As a material substrate (‘infra’ meaning ‘below’) for social life proper, infrastructures tended to remain in the background as mundane, unremarkable, and technical objects rather than controversial, vibrant, and cultural forms. However, in recent years all this has changed. What would once have been seen as a niche topic for anthropological study has blossomed into a lively comparative field which brings together political and economic anthropology, material culture studies, science and technology studies (STS), and the anthropology of the state to interrogate, in a huge range of places and contexts, what infrastructures are, how they come to be, and the role that they are playing in contemporary social life. This entry provides an orientation to this developing field, exploring why this turn to infrastructure has taken place, and what the payoff of studying infrastructures might be.

Anthropologies of infrastructure

The anthropological study of infrastructure has emerged in part from a long-running question facing anthropologists about how to study the large-scale systems within which we are all entangled (Larkin 2013, Troillot 2003). Anthropology is a discipline which specialises in understanding local experience and forms of social life that take place in particular communities. However, anthropologists are also aware that any experience in place is shaped by things and processes happening elsewhere. Understanding things like capitalism, globalisation, colonialism, and the state have been long-running concerns within the discipline, leading to the creation of key concepts such as ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1990), ‘friction’ (Tsing 2005), ‘structural violence’ (Farmer 1996), and ‘socio-technical networks’ (Latour 1991).

Anthropologists have found infrastructures promising in this regard for they are both concrete material forms which can be studied ethnographically in particular places, but they also function as infrastructures precisely because they traverse and transgress space and place (Harvey et al. 2017). Whilst the method of ethnography may have been developed in small-scale social settings, it is nowadays invariably conducted in relation to issues like globalisation, economic exchange, global religion, media, and migration which exceed the boundaries of any one research project in any particular place (Eriksson 1995, Anand et al. 2018; Anand 2011; see also Amin and Thrift 2014). By turning their attention to infrastructures, anthropologists have shown how their systemic qualities are created through tangible activities that take place in offices, in laboratories, in communities and neighbourhoods, in debating chambers, on websites, social media platforms, and in images and documents which circulate through social networks online and offline. Many social scientists understand infrastructural systems in terms of technological progress, the pursuit of seamless connectivity, and the materialisation of geopolitical relations (cf Harvey 1989; Therbon 2007; Levinson 2006; Easterling 2014; Cowen 2014). Within the anthropology of infrastructure, the emphasis has been on how these ideas (of technological progress, seamlessness, and geopolitical importance) come to be attached to infrastructure. Paying attention to infrastructures allows us to account for the everyday work that goes into making, breaking, and living with systems of power, control, possibility, and inequality (see also Megoran 2006).

Another reason why anthropologists have been drawn to infrastructure is that more and more state projects that they encounter in their field sites are now classified under this term. Things like roads and energy systems have not always been grouped together as ‘infrastructure’. As Ashley Carse shows, the term has a particular history, emerging initially in English to describe the substrate that underlay railroads, rather than the railroads themselves. Over time, infrastructures have gradually come to be conceptualised as a class of things in their own right—as ‘hard technical artefacts or systems, rather than processes’ (Carse 2014, 11), allowing engineers and anthropologists alike to think about diverse material systems all as forms of ‘infrastructure’. This is not just a matter of terminology. With the term we have seen the emergence of a much broader set of concerns about the appropriate techniques and practice of governmentality that infrastructures demand. This has particularly been the case when it comes to the relationship between infrastructures and the governance of risk.

For Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2020), the identification of infrastructure as a class of object that entails particular kinds of risks and possibilities has shaped the kinds of projects that states invest in. Specifically, Collier and Lakoff link state-led infrastructure projects to processes of securitisation, showing through a historical analysis of twentieth century military organisation how infrastructures emerged as a material response to challenges of international security. In an analysis of the emergence of the concept of ‘critical security infrastructure’, they trace how the problem of infrastructure for the US Army emerged first as a logistical problem of how to move troops and their resources across land, a challenge which stimulated socio-material inventions, from floating pontoon bridges to the very idea of supply chains. Over time the concern with building infrastructures to support military incursions shifted into a concern with how to protect them from attack, thus opening the way to thinking of infrastructures of production and circulation as critical sites of risk. This state preoccupation with infrastructures as subject to and technologies of risk management has stimulated investment in both national and international megaprojects, whose structural complexity and social impacts have come to shape anthropologists’ field sites in profound and unavoidable ways. As a result anthropologists have found themselves exploring such issues as the place of speculation, futures, and markets in the making and reshaping of people’s lives, the exclusionary quality of infrastructure megaprojects that disconnect some people even as they connect others, and the ongoing legacies of power and colonialism that are made evident when new infrastructures appear.

If infrastructures have emerged empirically as sites of contestation, politics, and social change within anthropological field sites, they have also become available as topics for study. This was the result of shifts in theoretical discussions and debates within the social sciences and humanities. Infrastructure studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field which traverses geography, science and technology studies (STS), political sciences, history, sociology, and urban studies. Across these disciplinary boundaries, scholars are held together by a range of shared theoretical approaches that foreground questions about the role of materiality, object agency, process, and form in processes of social and political change. Key influences in this broader interdisciplinary discussion include actor network theory (ANT) (Latour 2005, Law 1999), and in particular the work of Bruno Latour and his early studies of the production of scientific knowledge and the workings of infrastructure, such as the collected essays in Pandora’s hope (1999), and his parable about a speculative rapid transport system, Aramis: or the love of technology (1996). ANT helped draw attention to the active role that seemingly inert objects play in social life, and to the way that knowledge and understanding of the world is the outcome of material practices of ordering, translating, and transforming signs and matter.

One of the most well-known definitions of infrastructure is ‘matter that moves matter’ (Larkin 2013, 238). Infrastructures like roads and railways are tangible material forms that exist in particular places and that people use in their everyday lives. Yet infrastructures are not just material forms that exist in one location, but function precisely because they hold together a range of things—rail tracks, standards, ideas, policies, labour practices. It is this ability to connect that enables things and people to move, and societies to function. Brian Larkin therefore argues that infrastructures are not only things ‘but also the relations between things’ (2013, 239). Those who have sought to understand the more explicitly political implications of these mutable socio-material relations have built on the work of scholars like Langdon Winner, whose pioneering publications in the social studies of technology illustrated how artefacts can come to act violently and reproduce or rework social inequality (Winner 1986). This is most clearly articulated in Winner’s discussion of the bridges built by the planner Robert Moses over the Long Island Expressway. These bridges were too low for public buses to pass under, with the effect that they kept low-income citizens away from the beaches of Long Island. Extending this attention to infrastructural power, scholars have also drawn on the work of scholars such as Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and Paul Edwards who have shown how the standards, classifications, and knowledge systems that frame and shape infrastructures are both informed by, and in turn inform, relations of inclusion and exclusion (Star and Bowker 1999, Lampland and Star 2009, Star and Ruhleder 1996, Edwards 2003).

Pushing this critical attention to the political life of materials further, infrastructure studies have also been deeply influenced by the feminist STS scholars like Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Karen Barad, whose work has sought to recover the political possibilities inherent in the hybrid, categorically transgressive, and messy work of making knowledge and making worlds (Barad 2007, Haraway 1991, Stengers 2005). In the 2010s, much of this conversation about materiality and object-agency coalesced into a field of study known as the ‘new materialisms’, which brought together these materialist approaches with political science to advocate for a more explicit attention to the affective properties of lively matter in shaping political relationships (Coole and Frost 2010, Braun and Whatmore 2011). Proponents of this school argued we should pay attention to the specific chemical properties of materials such as oil, gas, coal to learn about how different forms of political consciousness take shape. For example, Timothy Mitchell has demonstrated that the specific composition of coal, its heaviness, location, and the methods necessary for its extraction have played a crucial role in shaping workers’ ability to make democratic claims. This is because, unlike oil, coal extraction is predicated on the concentration of large groups of workers in one place (2011).

Although there are tensions between these different intellectual threads, what they share is an openness to understanding human worlds as inherently entangled with material processes and properties, and a curiosity as to the implications of this entanglement in domains ranging from science to politics, religion, health, technology, and, of course, infrastructure.

As we can see, there is no single anthropology of infrastructure, nor a unique definition of what infrastructures are. Instead, the way anthropologists have come across infrastructures and sought to incorporate them into their analysis has created practical and conceptual challenges that have in turn reshaped wider debates within the discipline. The sections below outline how an attention to infrastructures have produced new perspectives on: the state, the environment, conceptualisations of space/time, and, finally, how these elusive networks have helped anthropologists to develop new understandings of politics.

Infrastructures and the state

With ethnographic studies of infrastructure frequently taking anthropologists into the offices, field laboratories, and spaces of protest associated with infrastructure projects, it is perhaps unsurprising that their study has often also been the study of the state (Harvey and Knox 2015, Von Schnizler 2010, Collier 2011). As large-scale public works projects, infrastructures are dependent on states to finance or underwrite their investment. They are also tied to states through standards, regulations, legal regimes, planning systems, and political decision-making processes (Collier et al. 2016). Arguably, large-scale infrastructures like roads, electricity networks, and railways would not be possible without the existence of modern nation states, and thereby offer a promising way into studying the everyday life of the state itself (Sharma and Gupta 2006, Gupta 2012).

One of the issues that has faced anthropologists of the state has been the challenge of actually studying the state ethnographically (Mitchell 1999). ‘The state’ is a concept that points to political institutions such as councils, governments, military, and the courts, but it also includes a wider range of people—tax payers, citizens, businesses, charities—objects and processes, such as forms, elections, referendums, consultations, policies, and standards, through which norms of appropriate behaviour and conditions of belonging are worked out (Taussig 1997, Coronil 1999). Anthropologists have found in state infrastructure a promising object through which the subjects and objects which generate ‘state effects’ can be traced and followed in practice (Harvey 2005).

If infrastructures are not possible without the state, then the opposite is also true: namely, that the state is not possible without infrastructure. Infrastructures can thus be thought of as key technologies through which states enact, perform, and reproduce themselves. Ethnographies from South America to Central Asia to Europe have shown how roads, railway borders, and other structures are the crucial threads through which the limits of nation states are stitched and, indeed, unstitched (Harvey and Knox 2015, Mukerji 1997, Reeves 2014). In this sense, infrastructures have been central technologies of colonisation and machines of colonial and racial violence (Zeiderman 2020; Viatori and Scheuring 2020). The recent history of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway exemplifies this infrastructural (un)stitching. In the aftermath of the first Nagorno Karabakh War in 1993, the railway was rerouted away from Armenia, creating a corridor connecting Azerbaijan with Turkey, through Georgia. This effectively and willingly materialised a logistical border to Armenia’s participation in regional and international trade. Furthermore, as Tekla Aslanishvili and Evelina Gambino explore in their ethnographic film, A state in a state (2022), this geopolitical function and the funding structure of the train gave life to a series of borders of different kinds, exacerbating forms of marginalisation along ethnic lines and generating new insecurities amongst the populations affected by this infrastructure (Aslanishvili 2022; Gambino 2022, 2019).

Anthropologists have pointed to the frequently inherent coloniality of infrastructures, showing how rather than being just a means to an end, they have shaped the logic through which colonisation has been enacted (Cupers and Meier 2020, Vaughn 2021). Sarah Vaughn’s research on water infrastructure and climate adaptation in Guyana, for example, has shown how contemporary attempts to manage the watery coastline of Guyana rests on infrastructural histories of dam construction that involved colonisation, slavery, plantation agriculture, and racial politics. Contemporary infrastructure projects demand a reckoning with these embedded histories, even as they seek at times to depart from them. In other contexts, infrastructures have enacted a politics of colonisation by enabling peripheries and frontiers to be tamed and tied into state systems of bureaucratic oversight and governmental control. They have shown how roads and supply chains, for example, link sites of extraction and allow novel forms of circulation, exchange, and profit (Tsing 2005, Scott 1998). Not content with seeing this as just a matter of domination, however, anthropologists have sought to tell more complex stories about these incursions, showing how large-scale projects of domination are domesticated and embodied by those who inhabit these infrastructural worlds. Laura Bear, for example, who studies the Indian railways, has shown how as railways travelled to corners of the subcontinent never connected before, a myriad of new relations emerged that would permanently reconfigure not just the institutional but also the intimate lives of Indian citizens (Bear 2007).

If some infrastructure projects have been a way of inserting state power over territories, people, and the environment, others have been part of a process of state transformation as state forms become obsolete, splinter, or are replaced over time. Stephen Collier’s ethnography (2011) of the attempted neoliberalisation of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union charts how infrastructure becomes a means through which such change is pursued and also thwarted. Collier’s ethnography looks at the attempted privatisation of heating systems across the territories left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union, demonstrating how communal heating systems emerged problematically as material instantiations of the Soviet political system. The author explores what happens to such infrastructures in the face of political change. Focusing on the transition from socialism to neoliberalism, Collier follows pipes and flows of heat to show how the establishment of the free market in a former Soviet town took the shape of a battle against the infrastructures of Socialist urbanism. Here, the pipes heating the USSR operated according to centralised estimates of the city’s needs and could not be controlled by individual households. Similarly, Antina von Schnitzler has shown how water meters became political in the South African context of post-apartheid politics. When these meters were installed in South African townships in the 2000s, this seemingly benign technology operated as a tool of governance that sought to counter an anti-apartheid era of payment boycotts and usher in an era of neoliberal citizenship. Through the implementation of water metering, township residents were asked to become ‘calculating subjects’, whose civic contract with the state entailed an entrepreneurial ethos (von Schnitzler 2008). Here the water meter was a technology that helped bring into being a new form of governmentality.

If the material work of grappling with pipes and meters is one way that states transform their modes of governance, another is through the knowledge infrastructures of paperwork, bureaucracy, standards, regulations, and law. Ethnographers have shown how contracts (Appel 2019, 137–204; Tsing 2005, 69), forms of expertise (Ong 2005; Mitchell 2002, 2011; Harvey and Knox 2015; Gunel 2019) or the calculations that sustain global financial flows (Appel and Kumar 2015; Ho 2009) operate as powerful knowledge infrastructures of contemporary capitalism. Ethnographies show that infrastructures of information—such as documents—operate very similarly to the more obviously material infrastructures we can observe around us. Hannah Appel’s ethnography looks at the place of contracts in establishing petro-capitalism in Equatorial Guinea. Like bridges and roads, contracts work by connecting some entities (i.e. the state and private enterprises), and, like territorial borders, they disconnect others. As juridical tools, contracts come to fix the relationship between corporations and the state, with the latter guaranteeing profits for the former. This fixing has infrastructural qualities. Hannah Knox and Penny Harvey highlight how ‘a finished road makes invisible or seemingly unimportant the conditions of its construction’ (2012, 529). ‘There are several ways in which things can become un-noticed’, says Hannah Appel, ‘there are things that you don’t notice because you rarely come across them, and there are the things you don’t notice because you come across them so frequently’ (2019, 137). In its mundane, modular form, a signed contract provides a legal coat under which the terms, parties, and negotiations brought together by a specific deal can remain unseen and therefore unquestioned (Appel 2019, 137–61; Tsing 2005, 69). As scarcely visible substrates, contracts are shown to have powerful infrastructural effects, enabling legal practices such as offshoring and sanctioning the distribution of underground oil deposits between private corporations. As such, they effectively function as key infrastructures of this particular kind of extractive capitalism, organising its economic and social impacts.

Whether depicting infrastructures as public works, splintered networks, arteries of domination, or invisible substrates, they provide us with a greater understanding of state processes by allowing us to study the state in a concrete manner. In this way, ethnographies of infrastructure propose new ways to understand how state power is formed and maintained, and the shapes states take within different historical moments.

Infrastructures and space/time

Infrastructures also enable social scientists to reconsider the importance of time and temporality in social life. Time is a foundational topic for anthropologists, both in terms of understanding how time is constructed, measured, and valued in different social worlds, and in terms of an on-going reflexive critique of the temporal assumptions embedded in the socio-cultural study of society (Wolf 1982, Fabian 1983, Gell 1992, Pels 2015). Many of the questions that animated these debates about time in anthropology have been reinvigorated in recent years by studies of infrastructures.

Attention to infrastructures has revealed how shared conceptions of time are codified (Bear 2016), opened up questions about the relation between space, place, and time (Gupta 2015, 2018), and allowed an interrogation of how different ideas of time are enlisted into projects of accumulation, exploitation, and, indeed, revolution (Bear 2014, Appel 2015, Pedersen and Nielsen 2015). Crucially, anthropologists have found that infrastructures actively ‘work on time’ (Mitchell 2020). That is, they change and modulate basic assumptions about how societies are temporally ordered and they do so in often unexpected ways. One good example of this is the temporal effects of the introduction of the railways in the nineteenth century. Railroads revolutionised the relation between space and time, shrinking the time that travel took in ways that created not just shorter journeys but also a whole new concept of space. The arrival of trains quite literally informed a new understanding of time and landscape: the necessity to synchronise train schedules across a national territory pushed for the unification of national time under a single time zone; the speed of travel separated people from the land through which they travelled; and new railways into frontier zones materialised a sense of progress into the future (Schivelbusch 1986).

The spectacle of new infrastructures often manifests as a kind of technological sublime (Nye 1996), with infrastructure megaprojects presented as indices of progress and the presence of concrete, steel, and glass symbolising the appearance of modernity (Anand et al. 2018, Barker 2005, Laszczkowski, 2011, Schwenkel 2015). Anthropological studies of infrastructure have long been replete with examples of this, particularly in urban settings (Rabinow 1989, Graham and Marvin 2001, Joyce 2003). Today as in the past, infrastructures continue to have a powerful capacity to enact the future in the present (Mrazek 2002; Mitchell 2020). They do this in various ways. First, infrastructures provide durable structures upon which investors can secure a revenue of capital into the near future. In this sense, they provide a concrete anchor for the promises of development made by states and international institutions alike (Abourhame and Salamanca 2016). Second, in order to attract investment, infrastructures are presented by states and corporations as promissory, enchanting, and at times almost magical tools through which politicians, speculators, and other institutional and non-institutional actors can claim to be able to secure a better future (Anand et al. 2018, Abram and Weszkalnys 2011). Yet ideas of modernity materialised by infrastructures also coexist and are entangled with other very different conceptions of time.

This is the case of the Soviet-era electrification programme in Mongolia described by David Sneath (2009). Electricity was of utmost importance to the Soviet modernising mission; Lenin famously described communism as ‘Soviet power and the electrification of the whole country’ (Lenin [1920] 1965). The establishment of cables and transmission lines and the extraction of hydropower and fossil fuels were key technologies through which the Politiburo (the main policymaking committee of the Communist Party) sought to tame the peripheries of the Soviet Union. A new rational and modern ‘cult of light’ was set to permanently eradicate the unmodern imaginaries that populated the margins of the USSR. However, rather than displacing the imaginative registers of traditional practices, as Sneath describes, electricity became domesticated by local publics and started to coexist next to the very beliefs it was set to displace. As divination remains widely practiced to this day, in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, one might visit a diviner famous for using ‘modern technical devices’ such as a pocket calculator to tell fortunes, all the while experiencing ‘Lenin’s light’ as the glow of modernity (Sneath 2009, 88). In this case the infrastructures of electrification in Mongolia did not establish a new modern subject; instead, they contributed to a new mixed world made of imbroglios between the technical and the magical, the scientific and the prophetic.

As well as ushering in modernity, infrastructures also intervene in temporality through their promise of creating speed (Harvey and Knox 2008). The technological ideal of overcoming ever-greater distance in increasingly less time remains at the heart of contemporary ideas of progress (cf Marx [1857] 1993, Virilio 1986). Following Marx, the geographer David Harvey has famously termed this this tension ‘space/time compression’ (1989), which he places at the core of contemporary capitalism. Indeed in our daily lives this compressed space/time seems to be everywhere: commodities we buy arrive on our doorstep in less than 24 hours, the fruits and vegetables we eat have travelled thousands of kilometres before even becoming ripe, and fibre optics cable allows communications in seemingly ‘real time’ (Riles 2004). The most remote corners of our planet are interconnected through seemingly continuous flows, so that when a giant container ship became stuck in the Suez Canal in the spring of 2021, impacts were felt across markets all over the world. The complex logistical choreographies of this constant circulation and compression have been at the heart of lively debates in the social sciences about the relationship between infrastructure and time, in particular in relation to shipping, trade, and commodity flows (Cowen 2014; Khalili 2021; Chua et al. 2018, Mezzadra and Neilson 2019).

Anthropology’s original contribution to these interdisciplinary debates can be found in its unique ability to account for the frictions that populate the world of logistics (Tsing 2004, 2009; Lee and Li Puma 2002; Rofel and Yanagisako 2018; Bear et al. 2015; see also Katz 2001). Paying attention to actually-existing logistics from specific places, anthropologists have criticised the idea of space/time compression as the dominant condition of contemporary capitalism. Nicole Starosielski shows this well in her study of the cables that make possible the real-time communications sustaining financial markets and global trade (Starosielski 2015). She shows that ‘thinking of time-space compression through infrastructure paradoxically draws attention to the slowness of the process of speeding up’ (Anand et al. 2018, 15), the time it takes for cables to arrive in communities and the slow speeds that result once they are there. She describes how our ‘wireless world’ is made possible by a resolutely material undersea network of cables. These cables, made up of resources extracted from a variety of places, are laid by armies of workers and disrupt already existing environments populated by animals and people, and which are sometimes deemed as sacred by local populations. Starosielski’s ethnography sheds light onto the actual temporalities of infrastructure, as well as considering what, and indeed, who, is left out from collective imaginations of the high-speed internet. The space/time compression that we experience when speaking in real time with a distant friend through the internet, thus, exists not separate from but in accretion with a host of other logics of time and space (Anand 2018).

Here, anthropological inquiry works once again ‘against the grain of paradigm setting’ (Navaro-Yashin 2007, 16). Ethnographic attention to the infrastructures of logistics has produced thick descriptions of the time/spaces that populate global flows, allowing anthropologists to develop a ‘polyglot language’ (Tsing 2009) that is capable of showing how diverse times and spaces are made by contemporary forms of circulation.

Infrastructure and the environment

If the anthropology of infrastructure cut its teeth on the study of national and global networks such as canals, fibre-optic cables, or electricity networks, the focus on infrastructure ‘proper’ has expanded since to include things that might not at first glance look very ‘infrastructural’. Indeed, as we saw in the introduction, the field is not defined by studying a particular class of things generally called ‘infrastructure’ but it studies the relationships whereby some things take on the quality of being ‘infrastructural’. For example, for a driver in a car travelling along a highway, we might say that the highway is ‘infrastructure’ in that it enables driving to happen. However, for the road maintenance worker, the road appears less as infrastructure and more as an object of repair. As Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder famously put it, we should not be asking ‘what’ is an infrastructure, but rather ‘when’ is an infrastructure (1996). Understanding infrastructures in this relational way has meant that the term has been opened up by recent scholarship. If ‘infrastructure’ is merely something that enables something else to happen, a ‘system of substrates’ that support other forms of life (Larkin 2013), then it may make just as much sense to say that soil, or air, water, or carbon, are infrastructures as much as bridges, electricity networks, or shipping routes.

In the face of climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss, the infrastructuring qualities of environmental forms have become increasingly evident. This has linked environmental anthropology and the anthropology of infrastructure in a range of insightful studies, seeking to bring into view the role that non-human life forms play in sustaining human lifeworlds. Their broad understanding of infrastructure encompasses insects, forests, sand, and waves. Leading discussions about the entanglement of humans and non-humans in the face of environmental destruction, Anna Tsing, in her monograph Mushroom at the end of the world (2015) and multimedia project Feral atlas (2021), attends to the ways that labour, cultural practice, and the material agency of things swirl together to create world-shaping and world-breaking forms. Tackling the role of natural forms in sustaining infrastructure, a recent study of the Panama Canal draws attention to the way that engineered infrastructures always also entail a reckoning between ‘nature’ and technology (Carse 2014). In this case, Carse describes how the flow of water that feeds the Panama Canal is regulated by forests and their hydrological properties. Deforestation by farmers and loggers in the region not only threatens local ecosystems but also poses a threat to the infrastructure of the canal itself—thus linking local environmental dynamics to a key infrastructure of global trade. Plants, states, and citizens can also become co-implicated in environmental destruction, as a recent study of soya bean farming in Paraguay shows (Hetherington 2013). Here, attempts by monocrop agribusinesses to manage their environmental harms demonstrate the limits of government as a tool to tackle socio-natural destruction. Instead of a simple story of power (of agribusinesses) and resistance (by local people), what we find here is a more complex tale of how swathes of land in Paraguay came to be given over to soya bean farming, and how this form of agriculture persists through the everyday interactions of regulators, growers, peasant activists, migrants, and non-humans such as pesticides and the beans themselves. What these studies show is the complex imbrication of engineered infrastructures with ecological systems which become co-implicated in attempts to bring about social change (see also Knox 2020, Dewan 2022).

All of these studies of infrastructure and the environment tend to build on a tradition of research that has fundamentally dismantled the idea that nature is an inert substrate upon which human affairs are conducted (Latour 1993). Instead, by positing an infrastructural approach to the environment, they demonstrate the inherently political status of ‘nature’ as a space of extraction, enclosure, conservation, labour relations, and state making. Those studying environment/infrastructure have shown how landscape, environment, and matter are being imagined and created as infrastructures of consumerism and capitalism. They also draw attention to the environmental effects of engineered infrastructures from dams to data centres, including the social and material conditions of mineral extraction, pollution, disposal, repair, and contamination (Parikka 2011). In doing so, such studies have brought discussions of infrastructure squarely into debates about the human experience of living in ‘the Anthropocene’, a term that denotes the entanglement of people, technology, and matter in the contemporary era. Indeed, the historical emergence of the Anthropocene epoch, particularly during the twentieth century, coincides with the spread of engineered infrastructures. Whilst the Anthropocene has been a somewhat contested concept within anthropology (Moore 2016), the issues that it raises are well served by the work that has already been conducted under the umbrella of the anthropology of infrastructure.

At the same time as the environment has become understood as inherently infrastructural, so too infrastructures have undergone their own shift to become themselves more ‘environmental’, in the sense that they are becoming active and responsive parts of the milieux in which people live (Gabrys 2018). This has manifested particularly through the digitalisation of infrastructure whereby existing infrastructures have undergone a transformation, with materials becoming augmented or ‘informed’ through the use of continuous monitoring or sensing (Barry 2005, Fortun 2004). We see this with things like urban dashboards (Mattern 2015), networks of sensors in the ocean or on trees (Helmreich 2019, Myers 2018), driverless cars (Tennant and Stilgoe 2021), and anything designated with the adjective ‘smart’ (Halpern et al. 2017). These studies show how, as infrastructures become augmented with sensors, digital communication, and AI, they take on cybernetic qualities. That is to say, infrastructures are no longer simply stable forms, inserted into social worlds, but are now expected to respond to and ‘learn’ from their milieu (think of the ‘smart motorway’, iteratively changing speed limits in relation to road conditions). This has led some to argue that infrastructures are in this sense becoming ‘environmental’ in that they are both substrate and agent, thus dismantling the figure-ground relationship upon which the very concept of infrastructure has until recently rested (Knox 2022, Gabrys 2018).

Counter-political infrastructures

A final area to highlight is the recent ethnographic attention to dynamics of resistance, repurposing, and reappropriation of infrastructures by both local and international communities of citizens and activists. One risk with the anthropology of infrastructure is that it draws too much attention to the capacity of top-down imposed socio-material change. A powerful counter to this is the extensive work that now exists on bottom-up, often counter-political forms of infrastructure development. These have emerged either as alternatives to dominant infrastructural systems, or in the gaps left by failing or crumbling infrastructure (Dalakoglou 2016, Corsín Jiménez 2014, Simone 2004, Barry and Gambino 2019, Gambino 2022). Ethnographies of squatters, activists, programmers, laborers, and migrants have explored how the centralising, exclusionary, and extractive logics of dominant infrastructural forms are being countered by alternative principles of open source, collaborative, and collective design based on principles of sharing, participation, and care (Kelty et al. 2010, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The ethnographic sites for this work are diverse. Chris Kelty and Gabriella Coleman, for example, have taken as their focus the high-tech world of the free and open source software communities, community hacker spaces, and open hardware movements (Kelty 2010). Others have focused on the infrastructural work done by activist groups like the Occupy movement, 15M in Spain, and the solidarity movement in Greece (Postill 2020, Chan 2015, Corsin-Jimenez and Estalella 2017, Juris 2008, Dalokoglou 2016). This has drawn attention to much longer-running forms and methods of bottom-up civic action, bringing into the study of infrastructure an appreciation of the importance of community-based networks of social support. Here people and their social relations of exchange and mutual support are created by groups like migrants, inhabitants of informal settlements, or racially marginalised communities that are either excluded from or subjected to the violence of state-sanctioned infrastructural systems (Holston 2009, Simone 2004).

The key contribution of these studies of alternative, distributed, and bottom-up ways of making and doing infrastructure is to offer a reconfiguration of anthropological understandings of how power and politics work. AbdouMaliq Simone, for example, asks how collective will is enacted. For over three decades, Simone has observed the way in which informal urban networks come to be assembled in cities of the Global South. His work demonstrates how an attention to infrastructures refigures politics as ‘a choreography of experimentation’ (Simone in Bear et al. 2018, 49; Simone 2004) that binds together designs, materials, pipes, places, and relationships between urban dwellers as they seek to intervene in the worlds in which they live. It is from this makeshift (infra)structure that forms of resistance materialise. Anthropological work on these bottom-up infrastructural forms has served to counter techno-determinist analyses of infrastructures and their effects. Instead, they have shown how infrastructures are sites of political struggle, on-going negotiation, and social and cultural creativity. There is often an activist register to these studies. They illustrate how even in the face of seemingly immovable material structures put in place by states and corporations, people find ways of tinkering, reworking, and altering infrastructures to forge not only new material arrangements but also, perhaps even more importantly, alternative anticolonial trajectories of imagining possible futures. These studies deploy ethnographic description to the ends of a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that society might take (Estalella and Criado 2019, Pink et al. 2018).

Conclusion

Infrastructure has emerged as an alluring topic of study for anthropologists, but it has not been without its critics. The 2015 meeting of the UK based Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory discussed the motion: ‘Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political’ (Bear et al. 2018). The discussion pivoted around the tendency of infrastructure scholars to extend the category to a bewildering array of things and topics, including affects, values, languages, ethics, temporalities, exchanges, and culture. Those in opposition to the motion argued that this risks depoliticising and generalising the specific historical and cultural saliency of engineered infrastructures as built forms (Lazar in Bear et al. 2018). They also held that extending the category risks forcing incommensurable ‘ontologies’ or world-views, such as those upheld by the Indigenous communities that are so often affected by infrastructural developments, into a universalising, Western techno-political lens (Rival in Bear et al. 2018). In substance, infrastructure was criticised for being at once too vague and too narrow, risking erasing diverse ways of seeing the world as well as becoming too diluted to have any analytical purchase (Harvey in Bear et al. 2018, 4).

While the motion did not pass, many anthropologists remain committed to exploring human and non-human worlds through an attention to infrastructure. Expanding the definition of infrastructure further, some argue that it is best understood as ‘the movement or patterning of social form […] the living mediation of what organises life: the lifeworld of structure’ (Berlan 2016, 393). Others highlight infrastructures’ character as the ‘enablers’ of different systems and encourage seeing the infrastructural turn in the human sciences as a sign ‘that we are conceptually re-arming ourselves for the struggle against the Anthropocene and the modernity that made it’ (Boyer 2017, 226). However, rather than proliferating an endless list of things to categorise under the heading ‘infrastructure’, ethnographic accounts speak more importantly to the ability to detect when and how the infrastructural quality of things comes to matter, and to map the different kinds systems they underwrite (Star 1999).

Finally, as the study of infrastructure has become consolidated as a subfield of anthropology, it has begun to explore what role scholars might play in making and imagining future infrastructural systems and shaping people’s entanglement with them (Bryant and Knight 2019, Pink 2022). This work involves awkward but necessary collaborations between anthropologists and a range of other scholars and practitioners (Aslanishvili and Gambino 2022; Knox 2022, Khandekar et al. 2021, Bremer et al. 2020, Ogden 2021). These kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations are already underway, with studies such as the Feral atlas (2021) coming into being at the intersection of different forms of knowledge, including history, art, architecture, engineering, and natural science. As the anthropology of infrastructure comes of age, it has thus begun to extend beyond the discipline, seeking out collaborations with local communities, artists, programmers, architects, and infrastructures themselves. Its goal of tracing and creating alternative ways of seeing, being, and organising life is all the more important in the face of challenges to come.

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Note on contributors

Hannah Knox is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. Her work explores the relationship between technology, environment and the state with a particular interest in communications and data infrastructures. Her books include: Roads: An anthropology of infrastructure and expertise (2015, Cornell University Press); Ethnography for data saturated world (2018, Manchester University Press); Digital anthropology (2012, Berg) and her most recent monograph, Thinking like a climate: Governing a city in times of environmental change (2020, Duke University Press).

Hannah Knox, Department of Anthropology, UCL, Room 241, 14 Taviton Street

London, WC1H 0BW. h.knox@ucl.ac.uk

Evelina Gambino is the Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her research applies a feminist-materialist lens to the study of large infrastructural projects and developmental horizons in the South Caucasus. She is one of the editors of the volume Gendering logistics: Feminist approaches for the analysis of supply chain capitalism (2021, Bologna University Press), co-author of the experimental film A state in a state (2022), directed by Tekla Aslanishvili, and is currently completing a monograph on infrastructural failure and practices of future-making.

Evelina Gambino, Girton College, University of Cambridge Huntingdon Rd, Girton, Cambridge CB3 0JG. eg666@cam.ac.uk

Pandemics

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 17:15:36 +0000

Frédéric Keck

Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS)

Initially published 2 Mar 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22pandemics

Abstract:

Pandemics tend to be defined as large epidemics, i.e. as sudden and widespread rises in disease incidence that occur over a very wide area, cross international boundaries, and affect a great number of people. However, this conventional definition neglects the fact that some diseases that reach a global scale, such as influenza or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), are usually considered to be pandemics while other diseases that are similarly widespread, such as tuberculosis, are not. It is therefore necessary to investigate how scientific and medical knowledge led experts to frame only some pathogens as actually or potentially pandemic. The history of past pandemics shows the extension of both the human species and its parasitic microbes over the globe, foregrounding that humans and pathogens co-evolved and that immunity is as much a process as it is a state of being. As the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism have accelerated environmental change and caused the emergence of new pathogenic microbes, the medical concept of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ was developed in the 1970s. It relied on the technical possibility to track microbes as they cross borders between species and territories, turning microbes into objects of surveillance under a logic of security and emergency. Preparing for and responding to pandemics has since transferred technologies of anticipation from civil defence to public health, and the collective management of uncertainty associated with pandemic preparedness and response redefined the publics of medical care. Social anthropology improves our understanding of these publics and processes by enlightening the entanglements between species, the co-infections between diseases, and the structural violence of inequalities that drive pandemics, particularly in the Global South. Studying pandemics as fundamentally social phenomena also allows anthropologists to investigate figures such as the prophetic expert or the virus hunter, who question the efficacy of science at a time when infectious diseases become more and more commonplace.

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently defined a pandemic as ‘the spread of an infectious disease over three continents’ (Doshi 2011). This definition was implemented to anticipate the emergence of influenza viruses by global warning systems, and to control their spread through public health measures in nation-states. Since December 2019, the WHO has faced a respiratory disease pandemic caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and the number of victims has rapidly and dramatically increased despite strong measures such as population lockdowns and mass vaccination applied worldwide. Anthropologists have been engaged in this and previous pandemic emergencies on both applied and more theoretical levels, trying to understand which public health measures work best, what such measures mean for populations, what long-term conditions enable the emergence and severity of pandemics, and what pandemics themselves can teach us about the human condition (Abramowitz 2017; Higgins, Martin and Vesperi 2020).

Past pandemics have shown that an infectious disease does not just limit itself to a series of individual cases on human bodies but instead questions the very foundations of social life. Pandemic pathogens raise fears about the effects of human contact and contagion because they cross the boundaries of social groups, which tend to define people in terms of immunity as well as purity and even moral decency (Farmer 1992). Pandemics also show that the human species does not control its autonomous development in the domestication of nature, but is entangled with other species in unstable ecosystems. This makes pandemics one of the most pressing challenges for the human species, because they reveal the fragile conditions in which we co-evolve with microbes that can become pathogenic (Latour 2020). Investigating the human fabric of pandemics leads anthropologists not only to question how pandemics are configured as global threats but also to study how they emerge at the ecological scale of the planet.

Since anthropology studies the relations between humans and non-humans in local sites (Descola 2013), it can ask how these relations produce pandemics at a global scale, but also how some aspects of these relations are ignored or left aside through, for example, models of calculation and techniques of anticipation. How is an infectious disease configured as a pandemic, and can the notion be extended to non-infectious diseases? What kinds of vulnerabilities do pandemics reveal in the globalised infrastructures of human societies? How does the scale of ‘totality’ (pan-) that pandemics rely on transform what we understand society to be? Are societies defined by the immune protection of different human groups exposed to a disease?

This entry will describe four aspects of pandemics that have been covered in some depth by social anthropology. Pandemics expose vulnerabilities in global connections, they amplify existing social inequalities, they serve as horizons in that they force us to anticipate the future, and they foreground entanglements of relations between human and non-human species.

Vulnerabilities in global connections

The term ‘pandemic’ was first used to describe the effect of climate at the scale of the planet. In 1862, the British army doctor Robert Lawson invoked ‘pandemic waves’ to account for global fluctuations in the spread of infectious diseases by a mix of social, hygienic, and meteorological forces (Harrison 2016: 131). When the Ancient Greeks coined the term epidemic to describe how diseases moved from one body to another, they did not think that it could spread to the whole human species. The term pandemos was used by Plato for a vulgar and pathological form of love extended to all human bodies, in contrast to the intellectual love of ideas, and referred to self-government rather than to the government of the human species (Foucault 2005). Epidemics such as bubonic plague moved from the East to the West, following the movements of persons and commodities across burgeoning cities and spreading empires, and were most often interpreted as divine punishments (McNeill 1976). When humans, animals, and plants circulated massively between the Old World and the New World, smallpox and tuberculosis ravaged the Amerindian population while syphilis came to Europe (Crosby 1976). As epidemics were increasingly related to global trade, discussions on how to control the contagious transmission of diseases were linked to debates on how to regulate flows of commodities and persons (Delaporte 1986).

The development of microbiology as a laboratory science in the nineteenth century led to the replacement of climate as a vague causality for epidemics with a more precise causality: the infection of human bodies by invisible microbes. While Robert Koch discovered the bacteria causing tuberculosis and cholera in land fields and water sources, Louis Pasteur showed that pathogens could be modified in the laboratory and be used to cure diseases. Following Bruno Latour (1993), the strength of Pasteurian medicine, by contrast with public hygiene, was its capacity to displace relations between humans and microbes from the laboratory to another site, the countryside or the colonies. If pandemics are diseases of globalisation, the microbiological response to pandemics is the globalisation of the laboratory as a space where serums and vaccines are made to mitigate their effects (Latour 1983). Society itself was defined by the study of the mechanisms of immunity, separating good microbes from pathogens in their encounter with the human body. Thus, Emile Durkheim (1916) compared what it feels like to live and think in a society to the inoculation of a small amount of pathogens through vaccines, since they allow the body to know what is proper and not proper under a collective form of memory (Esposito 2011). The organisation of public health relied on maps of distribution of infectious diseases and on access to vaccines and drugs, following the principle of solidarity between all participants of a social group.

The First World War confirmed the microbiological revolution while challenging it at the same time. The globalisation of war multiplied contacts between bodies but also standardised military forms of control, leading to the decrease of cholera or yellow fever by simple techniques of hygiene and social distancing. Yet new pandemics appeared with this accelerated form of globalisation. The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more humans than the war itself, and apparently caused diseases independently from social classes or climates (Crosby 1989). As the search for the microbe that caused it failed, despite the discovery of an associated bacteria by Richard Pfeiffer in Germany, no vaccine could be made (Honigsbaum 2020). While the influenza pandemic moved from America to Europe and Africa through the circulation of soldiers, pandemics of plague moved from Asia to Europe through steamship and railway, revealing the acceleration of global transportation by war and colonialism. The use of surgical masks against pneumonic plague in Manchuria in 1910 was extended to the United States against influenza in 1918, which shows that prophylactic measures could be invented against pathogens for which no vaccine or treatment was available or effective (Lynteris 2016).

It took a century after two global wars to redefine how we understand the relations between humans and microbes in the sociological notion of immunity. If ecosystems in which humans co-evolve with microbes are constantly changing, immunity must be remade by adapting treatments and vaccines to new pathogens and being attentive to their conditions of emergence. This was the foundation of the ecology of infectious diseases, a medical form of thinking illustrated by immunologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet in Australia and bacteriologist René Dubos in the United States, who argued that medical intervention should ‘run’ to keep nature in a state of balance (Anderson 2004). These two prophetic voices were confirmed with the emergence of new pathogens in the 1970s, such as Ebola or Lassa, which could spread rapidly through accelerated means of transportation. In 1996, microbiologist Joshua Lederberg declared,

we come then to social intelligence as our remaining option to counter the evolutionary drive of the microbial world. That intelligence must include a profound respect for the ecological factors that enhance our vulnerabilitity. From this perspective, we have never been more vulnerable (King 2002, 768).

Ledeberg encouraged biologists to ‘think from the microbe’s perspective’ and saw globalisation, with its increasingly rapid connections between distant points of the world, as multiplying opportunities for microbes to thrive. Latour, following the works of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, has described relations between humans and microbes through the concept of Gaia, a symbiotic entity conceived at the scale of the planet and its atmosphere. He asks how it is possible to reassemble the social in the ‘critical zones’ where pathogens signal disruptions and call for attention (Latour and Weibel 2020). Relations between humans and microbes, in that perspective, are sites of vulnerability which require local forms of investigation, rather than a rigid sociological definition of immunity as a kind of border.

Social inequalities, from local causes to global amplifications

If pandemics are caused by microbes spreading globally through human means of transportation, they are also caused by social inequalities, which they amplify. Epidemics are often ‘syndemics’, as the effects of one pathogenic microbe are added to other social factors of vulnerability, including other infections (Singer 2009). Unequal access to health care is caused by poverty, racism, hierarchy, discrimination, and violence, thus contributing to the emergence and spread of infectious diseases (Nguyen and Peschard 2003). Pandemics produce global inequalities and prejudices, between populations in the Global North who are often protected from these diseases by their governments, and populations in the Global South who are predominantly affected by them and tend to be depicted as the origins of emerging pathogens (Wald 2008). Anthropologists have questioned global health interventions by the WHO or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for example, because when focusing on pandemic pathogens that they want to anticipate, mitigate, or eradicate, they tend to ignore or simplify the social distribution of pandemic pathogens. Here, microbiology must be connected to epidemiology, which studies the differential exposure to infectious diseases, and to social anthropology, which reflects patients’ vulnerabilities as well as feelings of suffering and injustice.

The virus causing AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), identified in the United States in 1981, spread to a slow pandemic, killing around 30 million people. While it first affected gay urban communities who could mobilise to promote research on medical treatments, it reached poor communities through sexual relations or blood transfusion with little access to a cure (Epstein 1996). Paul Farmer, as a physician and anthropologist, studied the transmission of infectious diseases in Haiti and the local idioms in which people made sense of their suffering, such as through accusations of sorcery. Refusing to oppose the cultural explanations rooted in belief and the biological causality of the microbe, Farmer followed narratives of illnesses in which AIDS occurred in long-term infections such as tuberculosis (Farmer 1999). For him, the global narrative of AIDS connected places where different and sometimes contradictory idioms to make sense of illness were used. ‘The AIDS pandemic is a striking reminder that even a village as “remote” as Do Kay is linked to a network that includes Port-au-Prince and Brooklyn: voodoo and chemotherapy, divination and serology, poverty and plenty’ (Farmer 1992, 8). Indeed, these different idioms can enter in tension when a migrant worker from Haiti arrives in New York with AIDS, and seeks medical treatment at hospitals while making sense of the disease in his own concepts.

The contradictions between idioms of illness produce what Paul Farmer calls a ‘geography of blame’, which traces pandemics to poor territories where they are considered to emerge. AIDS became a target of global health measures a few years after the Ebola virus was detected in Central Africa after 1976. This coincidence raised concerns that Ebola could infect North Americans, thus reinforcing security measures to control its spread on the African continent. Some anthropologists, such as João Biehl and Adryana Petryna, want social anthropology to enter into a critical dialogue with global health. They show that the technologies to detect pandemic emergencies predominantly as a security concern tend to forget the people who are affected and the narratives by which they make sense of their suffering. These aspects should play a role in the mitigation of pandemics:

Global health players can become impervious to critique as they identify emergencies, cite dire statistics, and act on their essential duty of promoting health in the name of “humanitarian reason” or as an instrument of economic development, diplomacy or national security (Petryna and Biehl 2013, 7)

In his ethnography of AIDS in South Africa, Didier Fassin (2007) analysed the accusations launched by president Thabo Mbeki that the disease was caused by poverty and not by a virus, and that treatments proposed by Northern countries were too costly and non-effective. These claims, portrayed as heresy in the language of global health, were accepted by many South African citizens because the context of the post-apartheid regime made sense of experiences of suffering and inequality. For Fassin, the national accusations of a president captured local experiences of disease in a long history of colonisation and racism, which became public with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

When they emerged in China in 1997 and 2003, H5N1 avian influenza and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) were described as potentially the first pandemics of the twenty-first century, as they revealed the increasing connections between China and the global economy. They were also understood as epidemics of information, because a ‘viral network’ coordinated by the WHO followed the mutations of respiratory pathogens in real-time as they circulated from one country to another, which raised the question of how to distinguish true information from fake news in social networks (MacPhail 2014). Arthur Kleinman and others analysed these diseases with a biosocial approach of inequalities between humans faced with emerging pathogens. In the US, members of the Chinese diaspora were stigmatised by prejudices about wet markets as sites of contagion (Kleinman and Watson 2003). In Southeast Asia, small poultry breeders were replaced by big industrial farms which could implement biosecurity measures (Kleinman et al. 2008). While biological approaches in global health tend to correlate target and response, biosocial approaches take into account the local, national, and global scales that shape the context of the response.

A biosocial approach may question why some diseases are considered as pandemics while others are not, even if they also spread globally and are caused by social inequalities. Thus, obesity and diabetes have been described by global health authorities as epidemics because they followed the globalisation of sugar and Western modes of consumption. And yet they are not objects of mobilisation with the same urgency as infectious diseases, because they do not jump borders rapidly and cannot be expressed in the language of security. Moreover, their causes in the unequal distribution of food are more complicated to target with a standardised distribution of medical treatments (Moran-Thomas 2019; Sanabria 2016; Yates-Doerr 2015). While the origins of obesity and diabetes are apparently more complex than the emergence of a new pathogen, their outcomes are more difficult to model than infectious diseases. Beyond the opposition between biological and social causes of epidemics, anthropologists can thus ask how the notion of pandemics has become a tool to anticipate the future at a global level.

Horizons to anticipate the future

How are experts led to think that a disease will become a pandemic in the future, and how does this mode of reasoning affect relations between living beings? Pandemics have become one of the horizons to generalise a contingent event, resonating with other forms of anticipation in environmental knowledge, such as climate change or nuclear accidents. They are what Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs called a ‘chronotope, a narrative device for connecting social, biological and spatial elements and ordering them in temporal sequences and interpretive frameworks’ (2003, 276). Thus cholera, one of mankind’s oldest diseases caused by a bacteria that spreads through water, was described by the WHO in 1961 as a pandemic, and retrospectively six pandemics of cholera were traced to Asia as its region of origin. When it reached Venezuela in the 1990s, the state, ruled by Hugo Chavez, tended to under-report cases to avoid quarantine, in such a way that the voices of the Warao people affected by cholera were unheard in the global discourse of pandemics. Such obstacles to making sense of pandemics have led global experts to anticipate them without relying exclusively or even heavily on national statistics but rather by involving populations in the imagination of pandemics as catastrophic events.

According to Andrew Lakoff, the emergence of infectious diseases in the 1970s has been framed in a new form of anticipation of the future. Infectious diseases such as tuberculosis or cholera were managed by public health experts in the last two centuries through techniques of prevention, based on the calculation of risks shaped by territory and the ability of distributing treatment. Infectious diseases after Ebola and AIDS were described by global health experts as ‘events’ whose probability cannot be calculated but whose catastrophic consequences can only be mitigated. Pandemics are now imagined through worst-case scenarios as events for which populations must be prepared, in order to contain panic when they do occur. Pandemic planning regulates the distribution of vaccines and treatments that are being stockpiled and secured to avoid looting. Pandemic preparedness is about creating a constant state of vigilance and readiness produced by techniques of anticipation of the future, such as exercises simulating an outbreak of smallpox in the New York City subway. ‘Preparedness envisions the future not to predict what is going to happen but to generate knowledge about the vulnerabilities in the present’ (Lakoff 2017, 23).

With Stephen Collier (2021), Lakoff has traced the history of techniques of preparedness in the US to the beginning of the Cold War, when civil defence experts identified vulnerabilities in ‘vital systems’, such as public transportation, the food industry, or banking systems, that could be targeted by a nuclear attack. These experts organised exercises or simulations to imagine such improbable events and mitigate their consequences. After the end of the Cold War, this style of reasoning was transferred from civil defence to national security in order to anticipate ‘generic threats’, a range of unpredictable events from terrorist attacks to hurricanes and floods. By shifting from national security to global health, pandemic preparedness has become one of the languages to think and act in a world struck by disasters, be they intentional or not, short-term or long-term, by simulating their effects rather than modifying their causes (Samimian-Darash 2009).

Carlo Caduff has studied how pandemic preparedness has transformed the work of microbiologists, particularly in the domain of influenza viruses. Because these viruses are constantly mutating, public health authorities have to anticipate new influenza viruses when a new strain replaces another, as in the cases of the 1918, 1957, and 1968 pandemics. When virologists study viral mutations in the lab, they have to bet which strain will become pandemic, leaving aside other strains considered as not ‘potentially pandemic’. This leads some of them to make what Caduff calls ‘prophetic claims’ by projecting previous pandemics into the future (2015, 7). When the H5N1 avian influenza virus emerged in Hong Kong in 1997, with a high lethality but a low transmissibility (12 persons were infected, out of whom 8 died), virologist Robert Webster warned of a pandemic more severe than the 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ which had killed around 50 million people. These prophetic claims draw on apocalyptic images when they predict disasters at the global level. However, they are not promises of redemption but rather invitations to act in order to mitigate the disaster they announce. ‘At the core of pandemic prophecy is a particular prospect: destruction without purification, death without resurrection - in short, dystopia without utopia’ (Caduff 2015, 7).

Edwin Kilbourne, the founder of the department of microbiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City where Caduff did his fieldwork, promoted a policy of stockpiling vaccines for future flu pandemics with the motto: ‘better a vaccine without a pandemic than a pandemic without a vaccine’ (Caduff 2015, 61). The US Strategic National Stockpile also included masks and antivirals distributed during exercises to test for the allocation of scarce resources during a pandemic. These simulations of pandemics, based on scenarios similar to those used in novels or films, produce a sense of disaster imminence, and engage participants in a presumably realistic course of action. They blur the distinction between reality and fiction in such a way that a pandemic, when it happens, is taken as a simulation of the next one. Hence the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which killed fewer persons than seasonal flu, could have led to a disengagement in preparedness, but the ‘lessons learned’ in stockpiling masks have been used, for better or worse, during the Covid-19 pandemic. In China, criticisms for the failure to control SARS in 2003 led public health authorities to take the H1N1 pandemic as an exercise, showing their ability to trace contacts and control its spread better than their US counterparts (Mason 2016).

Pandemic preparedness can be criticised as privileging the future over the present, calibrating faith and reason. Caduff analyses precautionary measures as a way to justify action by betting on the future in a competition between truth-claims about viral mutations where the most catastrophic claim wins over others. The logic of pandemic preparedness defers the present for a future that it indicates or signals. It is not regulated by the opposition between true and false, since no false signal can be criticised for failing to anticipate the pandemic.

The fact that this form of preparedness is causing too many signals can also be seen as a sign of its sensitivity: it actually constitutes a part of its functionality. The false alarm is a consequence of the exceptional vigilance that is considered necessary to prepare for the inevitable pandemic (Caduff 2015, 135).

This preference for the future in the logic of preparedness has produced new kinds of ‘publics’ (Prince 2019) in the neoliberal management of uncertainty. Vinh-Kim Nguyen (2010) has studied patient groups anticipating the end of the AIDS pandemic through their participation to clinical research projects. He shows that the possibility to treat HIV/AIDS with antivirals has led global health experts to collect narratives about living with the virus in West Africa, thus operating a triage between those who could receive treatments and those who could not. Although it has colonial antecedents, triage is in part a simulation technique of global health, since it defines priority populations for the administration of treatments in times of pandemics. These populations can become publics, in the sense that they are trained by NGOs and activists to argue reflectively. They institute forms of sovereignty below the nation-state, by referring to themselves as responsible subjects.

If Nguyen is critical of the social boundaries set up by exercises of triage because of the violence they institute, he is more positive about software simulations of pandemics that retrospectively track emerging viruses. These simulations reflect possibilities of social life. Based on pandemic scenarios, they calculate probabilities of new pandemics and imagine modes of ending existing ones, often through the problematic notion of ‘eradication’. Working as a health professional during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, Nguyen testifies to the differences between slow epidemics such as AIDS and a fast epidemic such as Ebola: while the origins of HIV/AIDS were traced by phylogenetic analysis to a transmission from apes to humans in Central Africa in the 1920s amplified by human trade, the arrival of Ebola in West Africa by contact between bats and humans in a village in Guinea was much more difficult to prove. Anthropologists are called upon by biologists to speculate on the speed at which viruses travel across global infrastructures, and not only to understand cultural obstacles to public health measures. ‘In effect, an anthropology of infectious diseases must be attentive not only to the social drivers of biological emergence but also to the conditions which allow biological events to be detected and made tangible in situ’ (Nguyen 2019, 166). Participating in debates about the origins of pandemic viruses allows anthropologists to imagine alternative futures based on ethnographic knowledge, and thus question and improve techniques of preparedness.

Entangled relations between human and non-human species

Concepts such as ‘vital systems’ and ‘interspecies contacts’, which play a central role in pandemic preparedness, have led anthropologists to rethink social life not only as shared vulnerabilities in a human collective but also as changing webs of relations in which pathogens emerge. Pandemics are often caused by ‘zoonoses’, diseases transmitted across species by ‘spillover events’ (King 2002; Keck and Lynteris 2018). While some infectious diseases are transmitted by mosquitoes, such as malaria or dengue, and others by water, such as cholera, some pathogenic microbes circulate without symptoms among animals before spreading to humans, such as tuberculosis among badgers, coronaviruses among bats, or influenza among waterfowl. To describe these chains of transmission from ‘animal reservoirs’ to infectious outbreaks, the epidemiological concept of contact is not sufficient, because it presupposes that zoonotic emergence is a unique event. More ethnographic concepts are necessary, such as habit, proximity, and entanglement, to describe long-term relations that condition emergence (Brown and Kelly 2014; Nading 2014; Narat et al. 2017). How humans perceive and treat the animals they live with is a structural factor in the early detection of zoonoses, either in the use of apes and bats as bushmeat, or in the consumption of poultry and pigs as domesticated animals. New modes of human habitat have brought humans closer to mosquitoes and ticks carrying pathogens, whose behaviour has been modified by climate change. Under the concept of ‘One Health’, reframed and extended as ‘planetary health’, environmentalists, veterinarians, and physicians share information on relations between human and non-human animals to prepare for and fight against pandemics. If these associations are driven by demands of biosecurity, they can also be attentive to biodiversity, which increasingly appears as a protection against pathogenic emergence (Hinchliffe 2015).

Here again, the anticipation of an avian influenza pandemic has been a field of experimentation for virologists and anthropologists alike. The massive precautionary killings of poultry suspected of carrying influenza viruses has raised concern regarding the shared immunities that have been lost by the globalisation and commodification of the industrial chicken (Haraway 2007). In the Indonesian archipelago, the dispersion of backyard poultry has led villagers to resist biosecurity measures, which can be related to the mode of existence of viruses as ‘clouds’ of information (Lowe 2010). In Vietnam, the massive vaccination of poultry promoted veterinarians as central actors in a national ‘war’ against influenza viruses, but raised suspicions about the advantages they offered to industrial farms (Porter 2019). In Hong Kong, unvaccinated chickens were placed as sentinels at the entrance of poultry farms, while birdwatchers monitored the health of wild birds (Keck 2020). In mainland China, the recent scaling up of industrial breeding remained compatible with small poultry farms mixing wild and domestic birds (Fearnley 2020). The global scale of a pandemic affecting humans has led anthropologists to study the different scales at which humans perceive the movements of birds, from farms to markets and migratory flyways.

When they are seen from the perspectives of animal reservoirs in which they mutate, emerging pathogens such as influenza viruses and coronaviruses are not only warning signals of future pandemics but also signs of communication between species in disrupted ecosystems. Christos Lynteris (2019) has proposed to take seriously the idea that pandemics should be understood not only as extending epidemics globally but also as reminding of the potential extinction of the human species. While humanity has caused the ‘sixth extinction’ by its impact on other species’ conditions of life, the multiplication of zoonoses in the recent decades has led many observers to interpret pandemics as a ‘revenge of nature’—a popular idea quite different from René Dubos’s evolutionary race between nature and humanity. When pandemics reveal the vulnerabilities of infrastructures of social life, leading to the massive interruption of human activity to stop contagion, they question more generally the claim to autonomy which separates humans from other species. ‘The pandemic is imagined as striking not simply human populations – or even the human species as a whole – but rather at the heart of humanity as a project for mastery’ (Lynteris 2019, 9). Pandemic preparedness can thus be interpreted as a way in which humanity confronts alterity in the process of domesticating nature, either focusing on spillover events on the side of animals or superspreader events on the side of humans. This reversal of apocalyptic time is compared by Lynteris to mythological narratives in Amazonian societies, where humans have been separated from animals by an original conflict which serves to explain the diversity of species (2019).

While the figure of the prophet can be mobilised to understand how experts of pandemics make truth-claims about the future, the figure of the shaman can explain how scientists manipulate past relations between humans, animals, and microbes in new forms of ritual practices. The regular sampling of animals to check if they have potentially pandemic pathogens turns them into allies for global health: if a virus is declared the enemy of humankind, birds or bats carrying this virus offer biologists the possibility to ‘take the enemy’s point of view’ (Viveiros de Castro 1992). While biosecurity interventions separate subjects of care from sacrificial victims when they cull animals or conduct triage, the attention to biodiversity as a limitation of pandemic risks produces more inclusive forms of surveillance and monitoring. Borders between species and territories have become sites of intense production of knowledge under the horizon of future pandemics. The border between China and Russia was a site of rehabilitation of the knowledge of marmot hunters at the time of the pneumonic plague (Lynteris 2016), and the border between China and Hong Kong was constantly monitored by birdwatchers to prevent outbreaks of avian influenza (Keck 2020). Pandemic preparedness has transformed natural sites into reservoirs of signs of the future perceived by ‘virus hunters’, who can read microbial mutations to describe continuities and discontinuities between populations and between species.

Conclusion

Pandemics are among the main drivers of the globalisation of knowledge, as they lead experts to follow a pathogen at the scale of the planet and recommend measures to control it. As such, they have had complex and often contradictory impacts on human-animal relations, global social policy, belief in the efficacy of science, and visions of planetary solidarity. Lessons from the past show that pandemics start and end with environmental changes, but they do not provide models on how to anticipate the next pandemic. The technological capacity to detect potentially pandemic pathogens at their early start and to raise alarm has led global authorities to manage pandemics as security issues by targeting microbes as enemies. But the unfolding of a pandemic as a long-term process reveals an entanglement of relations between social groups, non-pathogenic microbes, and animal species that does not follow the logic of eradication, which requires cleaning animal reservoirs and distributing medical treatment. By reaching the scale of the planet, the notion of pandemics can reduce the work of science to globalised networks of surveillance, or enlarge the understanding of diseases to the complex web of causes that interlaces different forms of trouble, from remembering past illnesses to detecting future pathogens, often producing violence and inequality. Social anthropology can contribute to the redefinition of solidarity at the time of pandemics, because it stands at the borders crossed by pathogens between species, territories, and populations. It can usefully ask what kind of experience and knowledge is produced at these borders, how such knowledge travels, and how it can be translated to speak to everyone. Pandemic preparedness could thus become a new language to think about a disrupted planet and fragile environments.

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Note on contributor

Frédéric Keck is a Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS). After working on the history of social anthropology and contemporary biopolitical questions raised by avian influenza, he was the head of the research department of the musée du quai Branly between 2014 and 2018.

Frédéric Keck, Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, 52 rue Cardinal Lemoine, 75005 Paris. frederic.keck@cnrs.fr

Buddhism

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 18:37:09 +0000

Joanna Cook Hildegard Diemberger

University College London & University of Cambridge

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21buddhism

Abstract:

Buddhism has existed for around two and half millennia, and is practiced by over 500 million people in the world today. The anthropology of Buddhism spans the breadth of the Buddhist world and provides rich ethnographic accounts of the religion as lived in diverse social contexts. Anthropological studies have evolved from early taxonomic work to the study of continuities and reinterpretations of socially embedded Buddhist traditions. Today, they encompass broad considerations of politics, economics, ethics, and belief. This entry considers the biography of the Buddha before examining the tenets, organisation, and spread of Buddhism. It then provides an overview of the development of the anthropology of Buddhism and key areas of focus, paying particular attention to processes of religious reform and reconstruction, political and economic relationships, and transformations in social and ethical life.

Introduction

Buddhism is commonly understood as the set of teachings and practices inspired by the South Asian spiritual master Gautama Siddhartha, who lived during the fifth century BCE. It aims at liberation from the suffering of worldly existence and the cycle of rebirth known as Samsara, and the attainment of Nirvana, a state of ultimate salvation, notably the release from greed (raga), aversion (dvesha), and ignorance (moha). Initiated as a universal and ethical religious path, Buddhism acquired significant popularity by proposing a middle way between extreme asceticism and the rigid household and social status-centred Hindu ritualism of the time. Considered to be one of the ‘world religions’, Buddhism has attracted a great deal of attention not only in the countries where it has been practised for centuries but also across the world, becoming a focus of investigation for many academic disciplines including social and cultural anthropology.

Defining Buddhism, however, has proved to be a challenge. Are diverse local instantiations of religious practice in geographically distant regions all part of a larger religion? Debates on this question highlight the tension between the multiplicity of Buddhist traditions and the belief that these embody a unique spiritual legacy that is recognisable across all geographical, temporal, and cultural boundaries. From one perspective, ‘Buddhism’ may be deconstructed to uncover a multitude of practices in diverse places at different times, revealing a variegated and historically complex phenomenon. From a different point of view, we might identify the continuous historical links that join different branches of Buddhism around the world, pointing to the traits that are shared by those who self-identify as Buddhist (see, for example, Bechert, Lamotte & Gombrich 1984).

The following sections will provide a brief overview of the biography of the Buddha and his connection to sacred relics and places, the tenets of Buddhism, Buddhist social organisation, the spread of Buddhism, and definitions of Buddhism as a ‘world religion’. It then turns to the anthropology of Buddhism.

In some senses, anthropological studies of Buddhism answered the questions of earlier orientalist scholarship, or at least put them to bed. Much early scholarship had portrayed Buddhism as a timeless, textual, rational, ascetic, non-violent, and apolitical religion. In contrast, anthropologists and Buddhist scholars show that Buddhism is better understood as lived and embedded in social practices. They tend to highlight both the continuities and constant reinterpretations of Buddhism as a set of socially located traditions. Early anthropological studies were concerned with understanding Buddhism through taxonomic frameworks. Stanley Tambiah (1970), for example, identified three principal focuses of Thai Buddhism, namely merit-making (kammatic Buddhism), rituals of protection (apotropaic Buddhism) and practices of mental purification (nibbanic Buddhism). Geoffrey Samuel (1983) distinguished ‘clerical’ and ‘shamanic’ orientations in Tibetan Buddhism, reflecting debates about the nature of Buddhism occurring in the Buddhist world. Subsequent work has provided us with rich ethnographic accounts. Some of these show how Buddhism changes over time, by studying reformist Buddhist movements, processes of religious reconstruction, the globalisation of Buddhist lineages, or the deeply political nature of Buddhist history and practice. Others investigate how Buddhist thought is lived concretely, investigating the relationship between Buddhism and violence, the relationship between the living and the dead, practices of power and protection, and the value of wealth creation in religious communities. Recent work has explored lay religious practice as well as the lives of monastic communities, Buddhist gender relations and environmentalism, meditation and self-cultivation, as well as the development of scientific and therapeutic framings of Buddhist practices.

In search of Buddha’s life

The biographies of the Buddha were only written down approximately four centuries after his passing. According to these narratives, the Buddha was born as Gautama Siddharta in the fifth to fourth century BCE in Lumbini, in what is now Nepal, close to the northern Indian border. His father was a local ruler who tried to protect him from everyday reality. However, Gautama experienced dissatisfaction with the suffering of human existence following an encounter with an old, an ill, and a dead human being. He left his royal life, abandoning his wife and child, to devote himself to the pursuit of spiritual liberation. After trying different routes, he achieved enlightenment and liberation from suffering in Bodhgaya (in what is now the state of Bihar in India). He gave his first sermon in the Deer Park in Sarnath, near Banaras, in which he preached the basic tenets of Buddhism known as the Four Noble Truths (see below). He subsequently assembled around him a large number of disciples. In Rajagrha (modern Rajgir), with the support of a local ruler, he is said to have gathered together this congregation of disciples in a more formal way, establishing what is considered to have been the first monastic institution. He eventually died, literally ‘passed into Nirvana’, in Kusinagar, in what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, at the age of eighty-four, leaving behind his bodily relics and his teachings, which became objects of worship for later generations.

The narrative of Buddha’s life eventually became a ‘paradigm’ (Tambiah 1984) that inspired both the actual deeds and the biographical narratives of subsequent Buddhist masters across the Buddhist world. Biographical writing was and continues to be very important in many Buddhist traditions (see e.g. Gyatso 1998). Biographical narratives are also closely connected to relics and sacred places that have continued to be central to Buddhist devotion up to the present day. The Buddha’s relics were divided into eight upon his death and were later widely distributed by the Indian Emperor Asoka. Pilgrimage to pay respect to these relics became the focus of Buddhist religious practices in a multitude of sites across Asia (Strong 2004). The recently much-expanded Famen temple in China, for example, houses the finger bone of the Buddha, while the Fo Guang Shan Memorial Center in Taiwan houses his tooth. The key sites of Buddha’s life in India, abandoned after having been important pilgrimage destinations for many centuries, were rediscovered, and archaeologically investigated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see e.g. Allen 2003 for an overview). The pilgrimage site of Lumbini, the Deer Park in Sarnath, and the re-established cosmopolitan university of Nalanda in the vicinity of the ancient city of Rajagrha, for example, have increasingly become the focus of globalised Buddhist communities and sites of intense international pilgrimage in recent years (see Cook 2018). The Mahabodhi Temple Complex in Bodh Gaya received UNESCO World Heritage status in 2002 and now attracts hundreds of thousands of Buddhist pilgrims each year (Geary 2017).

The Three Jewels of Buddhism

Despite the diversity of Buddhist teachings and practices around the world, some Buddhist concepts are seen as foundational and can be recognised across all traditions. The Buddha, the Dharma (i.e. his teaching), and the Sangha (i.e. the monastic community) are known as the ‘Three Jewels of Buddhism’ (triratna) in which every Buddhist takes refuge not only when first entering the Buddhist Path towards Enlightenment but also at the beginning of Buddhist rituals. The Four Noble Truths, the core of Buddha’s First Sermon in the Deer Park in Sarnath, are also pivotal to any Buddhist tradition: first, life is suffering; second, suffering is rooted in attachment and craving (trsna); third, by uprooting this attachment in all its forms, liberation from suffering can be achieved; fourth, liberation can be obtained in practice by following an eightfold path involving right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. In Buddhist salvation teaching (soteriology), all phenomena are marked by three characteristics: suffering (mentioned above), the fact that there is no ‘self’, and the impermanence and imperfection of all things. In spite of these teachings, people become attached to impermanent things, ignoring the truth that everything is conditioned and subject to change, and as such suffering is perpetuated. Underpinning all this is the idea that all sentient beings are caught up in a cycle of rebirth (Samsara) maintained by their deeds (karma) until they obtain liberation from Samsara and achieve Nirvana – a concept that indicates both ‘emptiness’ and ‘liberation’, exceeds human grasp, and has been the focus of intense doctrinal debates. Through the cultivation of morality, meditation, and wisdom, Buddhists seek to gain experiential insight into the three characteristics of all phenomena, which ultimately leads to the cessation of rebirth and freedom from the cycle of conditioned existence. Debates about the nature of Samsara and Nirvana, the self and the world, the interconnectedness of all phenomena, attachment, the temporality and the scope of liberation, ways of knowing, emptiness, and other soteriological and epistemological issues have marked Buddhist traditions throughout their history.^[1]

Social organisation

In Buddhist teaching, all beings may attain enlightenment, but the ability to do so will be informed by current incarnation, commitment to liberation, and past karma. This is most clearly highlighted in the common distinction between those who have given priority to their spiritual goal (monastics and, in a different way, ascetics) and those who are constrained by their worldly commitments (the laity). For this reason, Buddhist teaching informs both renunciate forms of religion, practised by adepts devoted to complete liberation from worldly concerns, and lay forms of religion appealing to a wide range of people steeped in their worldly existence and participating through patronage and devotional practices to Buddhist spiritual endeavours. Through the accumulation of good actions, both groups improve their reincarnation prospects and those of the people with whom they are or were connected. In the early days of Buddhism, merchants were particularly attracted by a vision that, in contrast to pre-existing religious beliefs and practices, offered a more flexible and merit-oriented approach to spirituality and to all the ritual needs of human life. Buddhism’s universal message had the potential to transcend transmitted and engrained social distinctions. This made it particularly attractive to people who were entrepreneurial and benefitted materially and spiritually from patronage practices (despite the apparent contradictions related to the recommended disengagement from worldly matters). In fact, historians of Buddhism generally link the emergence of Buddhism and other salvific religions addressing liberation from human suffering during the same period to the rise of urban centres and trade networks (Bailey & Mabbett 2003). These provided both the range of human experiences and the material support that enabled the monastic community to thrive (see Schopen 2004). Promoting virtuous behaviour and the acceptance of spiritual hierarchy, Buddhism was also embraced by a wide range of rulers who used it as a moral framework, the foundation for legal systems, and as a tool of governance. The figure of the Buddhist ruler as Dharmaraja (Dharma king) and Cakravartin (Ruler of the World) and the tension between renunciation and worldly power inspired works such as Tambiah’s World conqueror and world renouncer (1976), which explored the relationship between Buddhism and polity in Thailand, arguing that they were and still are profoundly interconnected. The tension between renunciation and worldly life also attracted later anthropologists and historians in different historic and ethnographic settings (see, for example, Ruegg 1995 on India and Tibet).

The spread of Buddhism

Since the time of the Buddha, and the early Buddhist masters that followed him, contrasting views have shaped the way in which Buddhist traditions developed in different places. Buddhists have positioned themselves in relation to each other and negotiated their relationship to pre-existing religious practices and beliefs. Whilst diverse Buddhist traditions developed in very different contexts with distinctive features and modes of transmission, the feeling that Buddha’s message could travel across boundaries and be recognised by human beings of all sorts is certainly very ancient and perceived as being intrinsic to Buddhism by adherents in geographically distant places. Most strikingly, traveling texts and relics as well as pilgrimage routes to Buddhist sites have been central to a web of relations that developed across Asia. Sites of pilgrimage and meditation were nodes within networks that brought together a wide range of people speaking a kaleidoscope of languages, reflected in a rich and multifarious textual production. It is not surprising, therefore, that over the centuries translators and translations played an extremely important role in the way Buddhist traditions evolved, diversified, and were sometimes contested. At the same time, Buddhism had a huge impact on book production and communication technologies, and it is in the Buddhist context of Tang China that printing was first discovered at the turn of the eighth century (Barrett 2008). Translations, editions, and publications of Buddhist texts were (and still are) recognised as some of the greatest deeds enabled by the patronage of devout followers from all walks of life (Diemberger 2014; Diemberger, Ehrhard & Kornicki 2016). Buddhist attitudes also informed the way in which digital technologies were enthusiastically adopted by a wide range of communities (Diemberger & Hugh-Jones 2014). Especially in places where Buddhist scriptures suffered periods of suppression and destruction, the retrieval of surviving manuscripts and prints triggered the mobilisation of communities in this endeavour. As they embraced new tools and skills that facilitated textual reproduction and distribution, people combined the morality and rituality associated with books with the new mediums.

Early ‘international’ scholarship

The English term ‘Buddhism’ (developed in parallel to the French Bouddhisme and the German Buddhismus) emerged as a unifying abstraction relatively recently – in contrast to a range of vernacular terms such as the Sanskrit dharma, the Pali dhamma, and the Tibetan chos, which indicate ‘the law/doctrine’ (see also Lopez 1998). The term ‘Buddhism’ only became fashionable in the nineteenth century (initially in the context of the Royal Asiatic Society and other learned and spiritual associations) and describes, broadly speaking, a body of scriptures, religious practices, and communities of adepts that were originally inspired by the teaching of Gautama Siddhartha. The formulation of this term reflected the growing fascination of colonial civil servants, explorers, and scholars with this ancient religion. This interest led archaeologists, art historians, philologists, and linguists to embark on a huge enterprise of rediscovering Buddhist civilization in India and its ramifications across Asia. In the late nineteenth century, Buddhism began to be identified and assembled as a ‘world religion’ by European philologists. Scholars identified various strands of religious practice in Central, South, South East, and East Asia as part of a religion that was comparable with the Abrahamic ‘world religions’ of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity (Masuzawa 2005), with each world religion categorised as a roughly comparable kind of social phenomenon that related to a corresponding ‘civilisation’ in a similar way. But Buddhism did not emerge solely as a result of philological pursuit. Reform movements of the time were central to an on-going process of ‘intercultural mimesis’ (Hallisey 2014: 94) in which international representations of Buddhism and modernist Buddhist movements echoed and informed each other (Masuzawa 2005: 308), reflecting parallel debates about moral propriety and religious validity. What these developments highlight is that non-Buddhist scholars and practising Buddhists shared a concern to delineate ‘true’ or ‘pure’ Buddhism, and that their very different agendas informed each other.

Until the 1960s, studies of Buddhism tended to focus on a distant past. Philologists, art historians, and archaeologists brought together fragments from a remote Buddhist era in the reconstruction of ancient Buddhist civilizations (see e.g. Frauwallner 2010 [1956]). Scholars sometimes saw contemporary Buddhist societies at best as a source of subsidiary information on what used to be, and at worst as corruptions of what Buddhism should be.^[2] Languages of living Buddhist societies, such as Tibetan ones, were initially considered worthy of scholarly attention more because of the value of the Tibetan translations of Buddhist texts lost in their land of origin than for what they expressed in terms of Tibetan culture. Even when scholars started to look more carefully at living Buddhist societies and cultures, they combined dominant assumptions from their own culture with the Buddhist sense of authoritativeness of texts and tended to give priority to the written word handed down over generations. This is reflected, for example, in the emphasis given to textual research in international scholarship in Buddhist Studies. This approach often implied an idealised past set in contrast to a necessarily deficient present; erudite elites as a source of information were set in contrast to the wider seemingly ignorant population; wise elders were set in contrast to unknowing younger generations, etc. The understanding of Buddhism formed by European scholars and that of Buddhist scholastic elites coincided and combined in privileging a rationalistic approach that seemed to contrast sharply with local popular practices (a point that was critically discussed by Southwold [1983] in his study of Buddhism in a Sinhalese village).

Whilst international scholars of Buddhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century had developed their interest in Buddhist civilisations against the background of competing colonial powers, after WWII the geopolitical stage transformed radically with the process of decolonisation and the emergence of new nation-states. Gradually, new voices and new approaches emerged. By the 1970s new, more globalised scholarly networks became established, such as the International Association for Buddhist Studies and the International Association for Tibetan Studies, alongside earlier learned societies. Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978), which argued for a critical engagement with implicit cultural biases and colonial legacies, promoted a profound rethinking of Oriental Studies over the following decades. At the same time, the diaspora that originated from the suppression of Buddhism in communist countries as well as the revival that followed the transformation or collapse of communist regimes in Asia brought to the fore a wide range of new materials and new perspectives as well as the voices of scholars coming from the relevant regions. The increasing international access to countries where Buddhism was practised (Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Japan, Korea), or had been practised in the recent past and was being revived after a period of suppression (Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Buryatia), offered new opportunities for investigation and engagement. Anthropologists (largely from ‘Western’ countries but joined by an increasing numbers of scholars from Asia) began to analyse transformations in Buddhism within and in response to a colonially-structured modernity through an explicit engagement with contemporary postcolonial modernities.

The anthropology of Buddhism: early approaches

The relationship between precept and practice was a central focus for early anthropologists, who identified significant differences between local practices and liberation from Samsara according to Buddha’s teaching. In contrast to the Orientalist representation of Buddhism as rational, ascetic, renunciatory, and apolitical, anthropological studies revealed the complex ways in which Buddhism intersected with local political, economic, and social realities. Early anthropologists proposed idealised taxonomies to account for the diversity of practice that they witnessed. According to David Gellner (1990), early anthropological taxonomies fell into three broad camps: a ‘modernist’ approach in which true Buddhism is the ‘normative’ religion of elites, but most popular religion is informed by degraded elements of Buddhist teachings and practices (e.g. Terwiel 1975); an ‘anthropological’ approach that recognised elite and popular religion as being inseparable but distinct elements of a whole (Tambiah 1970; Spiro 1970), which, though apparently contradictory, must be understood in relation to each other; and a ‘populist’ approach that privileges the perspective of village Buddhism whilst being deeply critical of elite urbanite Buddhism and its claim to represent true Buddhism (Southwold 1983). Making sense of the diversity of practices and the seeming contradictions between them led anthropologists and scholars of Buddhism to variously interpret Buddhism as ‘syncretistic’, implying the amalgamation of different traditions (Terwiel 1975), as an accretive tradition that sits alongside other traditions (Gombrich 1971), as a total system containing different ‘modes’ of religion (Spiro 1982 [1970]), and as a holistic system that contained contrastive focuses (Tambiah 1970).

In the 1980s anthropologists, working in collaboration with scholars of other disciplines, began to argue that ‘Buddhism’ itself was not a stable category. Rich ethnographies, some of which came from areas that had only recently become accessible to outsiders, highlighted the great variety of Buddhist experiences. Critical approaches to the study of Buddhism opened up new avenues for investigation and scholarly engagement. The focus of attention shifted towards understanding reform movements, the proliferation of hybrid practices, and processes of reconstruction after suppression by secularist regimes. For example, Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere’s important work (1988) on Sri Lanka revealed how modernist and reformist forms of Buddhism emphasised subjective religious experience, formulated a new set of values for Sri Lanka’s Sinhala bourgeoisie, and expressed an ethno-national political struggle in Buddhist terms. In this time, significant anthropological works examined the relationship between one of the two main branches of Buddhism, called Mahayana Buddhism, and shamanism (Mumford 1989; Samuel 1993; Ortner 1978). For example, Stan Royal Mumford (1989) drew on Mikhail Bakhtin to argue that Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions mutually shape one another without relying on any overarching single system. In the 1990s, ritual complexity in Mahayana contexts became the focus of sustained anthropological attention. For instance, David Gellner’s (1992) ethnography of Newar Buddhism in Nepal examined the complexity of Newar ritual practice and Hindu-Buddhist relations, revealing the contested socio-religious hierarchies and identities of the Kathmandu Valley. This work shows how the Newar caste system has been shaped by Buddhist and Hindus religious hierarchies, and how this has created the grounds for negotiation and contestation.

Over time, an increasing number of anthropologists have engaged with Buddhist settings, bringing to bear wider epistemological and methodological debates within and across disciplinary boundaries. The focus of attention, often informed by wider cultural and geo-political processes, has produced a wide range of ethnographic engagements too diverse to cover in this entry, which will give just a few examples.

Religious change, contestation, and propagation

The debate about what counts as ‘Buddhist’ and how best to understand religious diversity has not just raged in international academia. Debates about the correct Buddhist path, for whom it is appropriate, and questions of authenticity and moral efficacy were pressing concerns for many Buddhists themselves. For example, since the 1990s Thailand has witnessed an efflorescence of competing forms of religiosity. Reformist Buddhists have argued that Buddhism and Buddhist practices are compatible with scientific empiricism and provide an alternative method for inquiring into and understanding the nature of suffering. During the same period, a proliferation of alternative practices has occurred, such as an unprecedented interest in protective tattoos and amulets, an increasing commitment to charismatic monks and merit-making activities, and an increase in popular spirit-medium cults informed by mass media and religious commodification (McDaniel 2011; Pattana 2005a; Tanabe 1991). Reformist Buddhists interpret such practices as ‘non-Buddhist’ while other Buddhists engage constructively with them as they multiply at an extraordinary rate.

Interactions across the Buddhist world and beyond have long been the focus of anthropological studies. In addition to significant work on Buddhist missionary and social welfare work in an era of globalisation (see Learman 2005; Queen and King 1996), anthropologists have charted the spread of globalised Buddhist movements and exchanges (see Chandler 2004). For example, Sarah Levine and David Gellner (2005) show that the recent introduction of Theravada Buddhism to Nepal has led to a revivalism that has invigorated Newar ethnic identity. These changes have influenced nationalist politics, expanded feminist Buddhist movements, and reformed lay expectations of religious organisation through an emphasis on the universal accessibility of teachings. International influence and globalisation are reflected in the worldwide spread of Tibetan Buddhism. They reveal how a particular Buddhist tradition adapts to new contexts. Thus Tibetan Buddhist practices and organisational structures are resignified in the diaspora (Lopes 2015), as seen, for example, in the Buddhist consecration of sacred sites in California.

Politics, violence, illness, and death

Tensions and paradoxes between the religious and the secular have attracted significant anthropological attention for some time (Bubandt & van Beek 2011). Anthropologists have examined the relationship between Buddhism and politics in countries in Asia (see Frydenlund 2016; Kawanami 2016) and the links between Buddhism, politics, nationalism, and the state (Frydenlund 2017; Madsen 2007; Raghavan 2016; Seneviratne 1999; Walton 2016).

Buddhists have revived their traditions after suppression in communist states and they have re-invented and re-purposed their ritual practices in new settings, often negotiating a difficult tension between secular state structures and religious authority. For example, historical political upheaval has led to significant connections between politics and religion for contemporary monks in Mongolia (Humphrey & Hürelbaatar 2013). In post-Maoist China, former communist comrades have taken up Buddhism (Fisher 2014), and monks in Southwest China negotiate transnational influences, the indifference of the state, and local revival efforts (Borchert 2017). In northeast Tibet, Geluk monastic revival and development are embedded in localised relationships, priorities, and values, beyond either resistance to or accommodation of state policies (Caple 2019). Jane Caple argues that relationships here are shaped in terms of virtue, rather than power and influence, revealing that people’s actions are not fully explained by state pressure.

The link between Buddhism and politics has extended into an anthropological consideration of violence in Buddhist contexts. A conflict between the Buddhist norms of non-violence and Buddhist support for state violence, monastic involvement in civil violence and Buddhist intersectarian violence, reflect the complicated relationship between religious nationalism and violence in diverse Buddhist contexts (Jerryson & Juergensmeyer 2010). For example, Iselin Freydunlund (2017) shows that a ‘positive Orientalist’ stereotype of peaceful Buddhists is incorporated into militant nationalist movements in Sri Lanka (see also Tikhonov & Brekke 2013). More broadly, anthropologists have traced the links between Buddhism, politics, and social movements. The cult of sacred mountains in Mongolia, for example, has been sponsored and reframed by the country’s president to support a nationalist agenda, one that can be considered ‘cosmopolitical’ for the way that it engages non-human actors in the political arena (Sneath 2014: 458-72). Furthermore, sacred landscapes and the rituals associated with them have been instrumental in the development of various forms of ‘green’ Buddhism intersecting with modernist environmentalism (see, for example, Miller, Smyer Yu & van Veer 2014). The relationship between social issues and Buddhism also plays out with respect to intense air pollution in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. Here, Buddhist environmentalists engage critically with toxic air and its effects on all sentient beings, effectively incorporating concerns around air pollution into Mongolian religious and ritual life (Abrahms-Kavunenko 2019). Such works reveal how Buddhist ideas about purification, revitalisation, and enlightenment interact with pressing issues such as climate change, urban development, and nationalism.

Such ideas are linked to the theme of the impermanence of human life, which has been at the heart of Buddhism since its inception and significantly informs its healing practices and death rituals. In addition to engaging with a wide range of healing traditions across the Buddhist world (for example, the Tibetan sowa rigpa), attention has been given to the deployment of Buddhist concepts and re-purposing of rituals in light of new individual and public health challenges, as reflected in emerging scholarship in the COVID-19 pandemic (see Kuyakanon in press). Anthropological work has highlighted the particular focus on death, funerals, and the relationship between the living and the dead in Buddhist reflection and rituality. For example, highly complex funeral cultures in Southeast Asia and China mediate the relationship between the living and the dead, enabling ritual participants to cultivate religious merit and transforming the status of the dead (Ladwig & Williams 2012). Concerns with death are also reflected in public debates about the status and location of the dead in Japan, where new Buddhist funerary practices have developed in response to political and economic change (Rowe 2011). The politics of memory and representations of violence informed Thailand’s pro-democracy movement in the 1990s and its aftermath, as reflected in Alan Klima’s (2002) ethnography of funeral gambling and Buddhist meditation on death. Comparatively, the enduring relevance of a nineteenth-century monk and a ghost and the protective media associated with them in contemporary Thailand are described by Justin McDaniel (2011) as ‘cultural repertoires’, engagement with which supports Thai Buddhists as they navigate their lives.

Buddhist economics, monastic life, and gender

Anthropologists have analysed Buddhist historical and ethnographic materials through careful attention to economic practice. For example, they have shown that wearing protective amulets is intended to ensure educational success, protection from disease, and business prosperity. Many Buddhist practitioners in Japan engage with Buddhism in order to receive practical benefits, as highlighted by Ian Reader and George Tanabe’s (1998) examination of the economic and commercial aspects of religious practice. In Thailand, the Dhammakaya temple’s wealth and fundraising practices sparked extensive debate about the nature of authentic Buddhism and religious authority (Scott 2009). Rachelle Scott situates these debates in the context of the re-evaluations of wealth, global capitalism, and Asian values spurred by the Asian economic crisis. She shows that merit-making and meditation have been coupled with personal and social prosperity. Buddhist values of gifting and charity are central to renumeration for religious services, creating links between economics, death, and ritual (Sihlé et al. 2015). Are Buddhist alms donations best understood as attempting to avoid the debts of reciprocity (Strenski 1983)? Or does alms-giving create relationships of positive reciprocity between the monastic community and laity (Carrithers 1984)? These longstanding anthropological debates take on new significance in contemporary contexts. For example, the Buddhist values of gifting and charity inform the donation of human tissue in Sri Lanka, which Bob Simpson (2004) analyses to critique Euro-American framings of bioethics.

Anthropologists have provided detailed accounts of monastic life and the relationship between monastics and laity. For example, religious authority and truth in Tibetan monasticism are informed by the relationship between diverse traditions and communities (Mills 2003), and life within Himalayan Buddhist nunneries is informed by gendered hierarchies and concerns over subsistence (Gutschow 2004; Grimshaw 1992). In different ways, Kim Gutschow and Anna Grimshaw reveal that gender and sexuality inform ritual and social power. Lay-monastic relations also have powerful affective dimensions, as seen in Jeffrey Samuels’ (2010) rich ethnographic account of the constitutive role that emotions play in Sri Lankan social life and religious practice. Comparatively, contemporary debates about the role of temple Buddhism in Japanese society are informed by the ways in which Buddhism is approached by both laity and clerics and the economic realities that shape ritual practices, as explored by Stephen Covell (2005) in his study of the rhetoric of renunciation and the practices of clerical marriage and householding in contemporary Japanese Buddhism. Relationships between monastics and laity are also a central theme in anthropological research on gender. Anthropologists (along with historians and scholars of Buddhism) have devoted increasing attention to debates about gender and Buddhism, exploring the tension between a Buddhist ‘soteriological inclusiveness’ (Sponberg 1992), by which gender distinctions are inconsequential for enlightenment, and the apparent female exclusion and subordination that is often encountered in texts and living practices across Buddhist societies (Gyatso & Havnevik 2005; Soucy 2015). An increasing body of literature shows that women have engaged with Buddhist spiritual projects in a variety of ways (often misrecognised by historical sources), sometimes becoming spiritual masters in their own right, more often through patronage structures and merit-making activities. Through examinations of gendered sacred spaces (Makeley 1999: 343-66; Huber 1994: 350-71), the lives of female spiritual masters (Diemberger 2007; Seeger 2018) and the current Bhikkhuni/Bhikshuni debate (the bid to introduce full-ordination for women; Levine & Gellner 2005; Lekshe Tsomo 2008; Jampa Tsedroen 2008), anthropologists have shown that women participate in a wide range of Buddhist enterprises: not only the construction of temples and reproduction of scriptures projects, but also various forms of engaged Buddhism and charity work.

Transforming spiritual technologies

Anthropologists have mapped an increasing lay interest in morally transformative technologies, such as dharma study, ascetic discipline, and pilgrimage. Of these, lay meditation may be the greatest single change to have occurred in Theravada Buddhism since the Second World War (Gombrich & Obeyesekere 1988: 237). Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, an unprecedented lay meditation movement grew rapidly in Theravada Buddhist countries. Whereas previously, very few monastics practiced meditation and it was considered to be an inappropriate practice for laity, reformist meditation monks propagated vipassana meditation to monastics and laity alike. Early anthropological work in Thailand showed that meditation was promoted as a ‘rational’ and ‘authentic’ practice, informed by ideas about scientific rationality and personal responsibility (Van Esterik 1977). More recently, Joanna Cook’s (2010) ethnography of a meditation monastery in Thailand reveals that meditation impacts community organisation, social relationships, and gender hierarchy. She shows that, through meditative discipline, monastics gain experiential insight into the Buddhist truths of impermanence, suffering, and non-self. Comparatively, in Myanmar, the meditation movement transformed lay people’s responses to the totalitarian regime and posed a challenge to the military dictatorship (Jordt 2007). Distinctive practices of self-cultivation and their relationship to new Buddhist organisations are also reflected in the Taiwanese Fo Guang Shan, who hold short-term monastic retreats for lay people who want to commit themselves to periods of intensive cultivation (Laidlaw & Mair 2019). In Europe and America, Buddhism has increasingly been framed in a universal and psychological register, and meditation is increasingly interpreted as a method for psychological development. For example, mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism, has become the basis for psychological interventions in non-Buddhist contexts, verified through rigorous scientific testing. Participants in mindfulness-based therapeutic interventions cultivate metacognitive awareness in order to support their mental health (Cook 2015). Comparatively, understandings of mindfulness in Asia are linked to local constructions of emotion and selfhood (Cassaniti 2018).

Conclusion

This entry has identified some key themes that have attracted anthropological attention in the study of Buddhism. On the one hand, anthropological exploration has challenged the idea that Buddhism constitutes a somewhat homogenous ‘world religion’. Since the 1960s, there has been significant scholarship on the different forms that Buddhism takes and its place in social life. And, since the 1990s, anthropological works have been characterised by a multiplicity of approaches and themes to reflect the diversity, transformation, and debate that marks the Buddhist world. As part of this work, anthropologists have challenged the tenet that Buddhism is best studied by focusing on texts alone. Instead, they have highlighted the importance of living settings and an engagement with Buddhist texts in context. At the same time, anthropology’s ethnographic and comparative approach to the religion has shown that Buddhist practices are being brought together in a world increasingly shaped by digital communication – at times creating feelings of a global monastic community, not too dissimilar to feelings of a global community (ummah) in Islamic contexts.

Buddhist ethnographic and historical materials have also enriched wider anthropological debates. Most importantly, non-Buddhist anthropologists have increasingly collaborated with scholars from Buddhist contexts and from other disciplines. Anthropological work has thus increasingly been produced in dialogue and collaboration with a polyphony of voices, political movements, and religious communities in Buddhist countries. As such, enriched and re-shaped by multiple vantage points, scholarly engagement has scrutinised the assumptions that have underpinned the very idea of an anthropology of Buddhism as a project – reflecting a critical shift from an ‘anthropology of’ to an ‘anthropology with’ as a collaborative endeavour.

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Note on contributors

Joanna Cook is a Reader in Anthropology at University College London. Her current research focuses on mindfulness, mental health, and governance in the UK. She is the author of Meditation in modern Buddhism: renunciation and change in Thai monastic life (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the co-editor of Unsettling anthropologies of care (Anthropology and Humanism, 2020), The state we’re in: reflecting on democracy’s troubles (Berghan Books, 2016), Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking (Manchester University Press, 2015) and Southeast Asian perspectives on power (Routledge, 2012).

Dr Joanna Cook, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom. joanna.cook@ucl.ac.uk

Hildegard Diemberger is Research Director of Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU) at University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Trained as a social anthropologist and Tibetologist at Vienna University, she has published numerous books and articles on the anthropology and the history of Tibet and the Himalaya as well as on the Tibetan-Mongolian interface, including the monograph When a woman becomes a religious dynasty: the Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet (Columbia University Press, 2007), the edited volume Tibetan printing – comparisons, continuities and change (Brill, 2016), the exhibition catalogue Buddha’s word – the life of books in Tibet and beyond, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge (2013-2014), and the English translation of two manuscripts on the Buddhist history of Tibet, the dBa’ bzhed and the Shel dkar chos ‘byung (Austrian Academy of Science 1996, 2000).

Dr Hildegard Diemberger, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. hgmd2@cam.ac.uk

[1] See, for example, Keown 2013 for a brief overview; Schopen 2014 for discussions related to practical issues of early Buddhist monastic life; Gombrich 2009 on the development of early teachings; and Frauwallner 2010 [1956] for an overview of the classical philosophical debates.

[2] See, for example, the work of Austine Waddell, Giuseppe Tucci, and other prominent orientalists.

Climate change

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 01:36:22 +0000

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

University of Oslo

Initially published 26 Apr 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21climatechange

Abstract:

Climate change, largely a product of human activities, is arguably the most comprehensive and dramatic challenge facing humanity. In the first decades of this century, its implications have become a major concern in anthropology. The first part of this entry shows why the contribution of anthropology is important to the interdisciplinary study of, and engagement with, climate change. Anthropology teaches us that climate change has to be related to global inequality and local diversity, and must be understood as a multi-scalar phenomenon embedded in local life, but with global ramifications. Anthropology can also show why political action to mitigate or halt climate change is sluggish and often inefficient. Tracing the origins and development of the anthropology of climate change in the late twentieth century, this entry then shows how the field has become more diverse, to include studies of resilience and adaptation, renewable energy, climate activism, as well as knowledge and discourses about climate change. While these studies are truly global by relating to a worldwide event, they retain an emphasis on local realities through ethnographic methods indicating variations in impact of and responses to climate change. They foreground that the issues having to do with climate change differ vastly across the world, from Australia to Peru, from Greenland to Mongolia. The entry ends by arguing that the anthropology of climate change represents a new approach to globalisation, one that shifts the focus from economics, culture, and politics to the ecological embeddedness of human life.

Introduction

Even if massive human impact on the climate is a recent phenomenon, the awareness that climate has an impact on human life is not new. One of the founders of medical science, Hippocrates (b. 460 BCE), wrote a treatise called Airs, waters, places which argued for a connection between the climate, the environment, and the human condition (Dove 2004). He held that temperament was related to climate, and that droughts, rains, heat waves, and seasonal changes in general had significant effects on health. Much later, during the Enlightenment, the social theorist Montesquieu (1689-1755) saw a close relationship between climate and social life. Notably, Montesquieu believed that cold air made people vigorous, while heat made them lethargic, with what he deemed to be important implications for cultural development. Dismissed by later social theorists as simplistic environmental determinism, similar ideas have never quite disappeared. What is new in the current age is the almost universal recognition of humanity's impact on climate and its potentially catastrophic consequences for life on the planet in the future. In this field, anthropologists are making important contributions to knowledge and policy. Before considering these contributions, however, it is necessary to provide a short review of the wider context in which contemporary concerns with climate change is placed.

Never before has humanity made its mark on the planet in ways even remotely comparable to the situation now. One-fifth of the way into the twenty-first century, human domination of the earth is such that the term ‘Anthropocene’ has become widespread as a label for the present time, not least because of the impact that humans have on global climate. This is a term which would, if widely adopted, make the Holocene – which began with the end of the last Ice Age about 11,500 years ago, and which had followed the two and a half million year old Pleistocene period – but a brief interlude in the long history of the planet. We live in an era which, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, is marked by human activity and expansion in unprecedented ways. Socio-ecological change, including temperature rise due to the human emission of greenhouse gases, continues to accelerate; one could even speak of an acceleration of acceleration since the early 1990s, or simply of global overheating (Eriksen 2016). This situation represents a major challenge for all of us, whether we identify with kin groups, nations, religions, humanity, or the entire planetary ecosystem.

It is difficult to think of a more urgently relevant research topic in the world today than climate change, as it threatens to undermine the conditions of human societies as we know them. The literature proliferates inside and outside of the academic world and numerous climate change research centres, academic faculty sections and task forces have been established, often with a mixed basic and applied research mission (see, for example, Fiske et al. 2014). Important transnational institutions, such as the United Nations, have produced authoritative examinations, appraisals, and increasingly insistent policy recommendations, notably including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). At the time of this writing (2021), five IPCC reports have been published, the first in 1990, the most recent in 2014, with a sixth report due in 2022. Climate change has not just driven scholars to coin the term Anthropocene, but also the more recent and more controversial concept of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2016). The latter, a term created by the environmental historian Jason Moore, explicitly blames capitalism for the global predicament, suggesting that the overuse of resources, the relentless search for profitability, the translation of nature into quantifiable ‘resources’, and the commitment to endless growth are not characteristics of humanity as such, but of a particular phase in our recent history. The influential multidisciplinary theorist Donna Haraway concurs with Moore in preferring the term Capitalocene to Anthropocene (Haraway 2016), but goes further by coining the concept of the ‘Chthulucene’, which refers to the entanglements of, ultimately, all living species in a web of life. She argues that the new planetary awareness of impending ecological catastrophe may nudge humanity towards a recognition of the fundamental mutual dependency of all life. In a contribution of comparable ambition and scope, the collective volume Arts of living on a damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017) explores options for human and non-human life in an era tainted and transformed by reckless human activities. Neither Haraway, nor Anna Tsing and her collaborators, call for a return to a pure and uncontaminated world, but explore ways of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016).

The contemporary world of climate change has not evaded the attention of the social sciences. In general social theory, climate change has been discussed as a consequence of the growth paradigm and uncertainties produced by modernity. While Anthony Giddens (2002) wrote about ‘a runaway world’ where rapid changes were out of control, and Zygmunt Bauman (2000) argued that modernity by default produces uncertainties and instability, Ulrich Beck (2009) increasingly considered climate change the defining global risk of modernity, one that an overly successful industrialisation had inflicted on itself, and that would not be solvable through single-state solutions. Focusing on speed, rather than risk, Hartmut Rosa (2015) has argued that social life increasingly accelerates as human beings produce, communicate, and transport more and more. Thereby, global capitalism creates a situation where resources are being depleted and the environment suffers. Discussions of climate change and the Anthropocene go hand in hand, as both are partially defined and measured by the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, linked to the use of fossil fuels (Steffen, Crutzen & McNeill 2007). Some scholars go so far as to fear societal collapse in which climate change plays a fundamental role. The archaeologist Brian Fagan (1999) has argued that El Niño events, which disrupt precipitation patterns and temperature, have shaped South American societies for centuries (Fagan 1999). In a major work, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) compares our present to the collapse of the Roman and Maya empires, citing climate change as one factor in accounting for the decline of complex societies. However, the decisive cause, as Tainter sees it, is likely to consist of decreased marginal returns on investments in energy (also referred to as EROI), owing to population growth and subsequent intensification of food production with decreasing returns, coupled with growth in bureaucratic, logistic, and transport costs. According to him, resource shortages, a direct result of human dominance of the planet, may be a more acute problem than climate change (for a similar analysis intended for a broad readership, see Diamond 2005).

The issue of climate change thus inevitably raises questions of human energy consumption. Since the late eighteenth century, we have been able to exploit unprecedented amounts of energy; at first in the shape of abundant surface-near coal deposits, and subsequently through the extraction of oil and gas for the sake of economic growth, profits for capitalists, and the general improvement of the human condition (Mitchell 2011). The fossil fuel revolution has enabled humanity to support a fast-growing global population – it has increased eightfold since its beginning. Yet the cost of exploiting fossil fuels grows as this easily accessible resource is being used up. Production relying on fossil fuels also bears within it an inevitable element of destruction (Hornborg 2019) in a dual sense, since we are simultaneously exhausting resources which it has taken the planet millions of years to produce, and undermining the conditions for our own civilisation by altering the climate and ruining the environment on which we rely.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary in order to understand the full implications of climate change. While climate scientists adopt a birds-eye perspective on the planet, and archaeologists move their gaze back in time, anthropologists enter deeply into local realities in order to understand perceptions of and responses to climate change. The last couple of decades have produced a fast-growing body of anthropological knowledge about climate change, much of which performs a double task in that it improves our understanding of society and may also be relevant for policy and action.

The unique contribution of anthropology

The strengths of anthropology in explaining the connections between the local and the global in the human-influenced global climate system have been demonstrated in a number of recent monographs and edited volumes. Taking on anthropogenic climate change explicitly, some emphasise the importance of studying local responses, from the Arctic to Mongolia (Crate & Nuttall 2009). Others describe lessons that can be learnt from indigenous people and their engagement with the environment, such as Amazonian or Melanesian peoples who leave a minimal ecological footprint by not altering their ecosystem through their harvesting and production (Hendry 2014). Since anthropologists focus predominantly on local realities, their gaze and methodology inevitably produces diversity rather than uniformity, displaying locally-tailored solutions to the problems facing actual human beings rather than standardised options of the one-size-fits-all kind. For example, Amelia Moore's research in the Bahamas (2015) shows how the archipelago's dependence on airborne and resource-intensive tourism contributes to the climate change that may ultimately lead these low-lying coral islands to vanish. Herta Nöbauer (2018), carrying out research in Austrian ski resorts, studies how artificial ski slopes are being built in anticipation of snowless winters. She highlights how the Austrian winter tourism industry anticipates mild winters and invests in new infrastructure to mitigate the effects of the melting snow. Harold Wilhite and Cecilia Salinas (2019) have shown how forest peoples, many of them indigenous, are victims both to resource extraction on their territory and global climate change. Climate change threatens their livelihood through changes in precipitation and temperature, and the problem is compounded by logging, further marginalising people on the peripheries of global modernity.

There is broad agreement that interdisciplinarity must be part and parcel of an anthropology of climate change, since climate change is a physical process, handled through political processes at the national and supranational levels, yet responded to at the level of local communities. Werner Krauss (2015), for example, has shown the need for understanding various disciplines in his work on fishermen and conservationists on the German North Sea coast. Krauss collaborates with natural scientists who search for a balance between objectivity and engagement, and has a dialogue with the political authorities by arguing the need to move beyond natural science and involve the human dimension in producing policy on climate change. Noah Walker-Crawford (2021) has followed a Peruvian activist to Germany in a litigation case against an energy company, engaging with political theory, legal scholarship, and NGO activism in his anthropological explorations. David Rojas's and Noor Johnson's (2013) work on climate summit meetings draws on knowledge from various academic disciplines, ranging from international law to climatology. This enables them to show why climate policy needs to move up and down different scales, and not assume that signed international agreements will necessarily lead to the desired changes in the physical world.

A position paper written by a group of American anthropologists lists three kinds of knowledge that anthropology can contribute to the climate change. It provides ethnographic insight, a historical perspective, and a holistic view of the problem at hand, meaning that the entirety of people's lived experience needs to be taken seriously; in other words, that no technical solutions work unless they are integrated with the world in which people live subjectively (Barnes et al. 2013). Anthropologists are well-positioned to make a difference as interpreters, translators, and experts on specific local lifeworlds, and can sometimes help mitigate effects or even propose deeper systemic change to combat climate change.

The growth of climate anthropology

The study of climate change has important precursors in environmental anthropology and the anthropology of energy. This theoretical approach was mainly developed in the United States, going back all the way to the nineteenth century and early studies of material culture, technology, and ecological adaptation. In fact, the pathbreaking anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) already had an interest in the ways Arctic peoples survived under extreme climatic conditions. After the Second World War, Julian Steward (1955) championed the study of ‘human ecology’, focusing on social and political systems from a materialist perspective which encompassed both technology and ecology. Writing about ‘levels of sociocultural integration’, Steward saw a direct connection between the potential of ecological conditions to produce a surplus and social complexity. His contemporary, Leslie White (1949), studied technology and energy use from a social evolutionist perspective, arguing that cultural evolution could be measured as the amount of energy a given society was capable of making use of. The most culturally advanced group of people would thus be the one that uses the most energy per capita. White’s theories soon went out of fashion in academic circles due to the decline of evolutionary thinking. However, his early emphasis on energy and ecology as foundational to socio-cultural life remains relevant for the current anthropology of climate change.

As early as the 1970s, discussions shifted to the study of ecological crises, which at the time was associated with resource exhaustion and pollution rather than global climate change. Gregory Bateson (1972) identified three factors that were driving these crises. Firstly, the destructive side-effects of technological progress, such as the production of pesticides; secondly, population increase leading to resource depletion; and thirdly, a set of entrenched Western cultural values and ideas that place humanity in an unhealthy relation to the environment (what he calls a flawed epistemology based on Cartesian dualism and individualism). Bateson criticised the idea that humans should strive to control the environment rather than seeing themselves as part of a larger ecological system. He also condemned the strong focus on the individual, the belief in endless economic growth (which he considered logically impossible), the assumption that we live within an infinitely expanding frontier, and the conviction that technology will solve any problem facing us. What Bateson calls a ‘healthy ecology’ amounts to ‘a single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, flexible and amenable to ongoing adjustments (Bateson 1972: 502). In this vision lies a quest for an equilibrium where humanity does not undermine the conditions for its own thriving.

Whereas Bateson identified ecological crisis as a central contradiction of contemporary civilisation, he did not address climate change explicitly. Margaret Mead, his ex-wife, may in fact have been the first anthropologist to do so (Kellogg & Mead 1980), as she convened a conference about the atmosphere as early as 1975. Whereas climate change was not yet on the agenda — in fact, many scientists at the time believed that we were heading towards a new Ice Age rather than an overheated world — the conference took on smoke, smog, and other forms of atmospheric pollution as genuinely global challenges that needed to be dealt with politically.

By the 1990s, climate change was still spoken of as ‘global warming’, and entered the political and research agenda. The term ‘global warming’ has since fallen out of fashion, as it does not emphasise the violent and erratic weather events, such as frequent hurricanes, that climate change brings with it. In anthropology, an early important contribution is that of Steve Rayner and Elizabeth Malone (1998). This interdisciplinary work, with contributors from around the world, intended to complement the natural science of the IPCC with knowledge about local livelihoods, political decision-making, and inequality. Another pioneering work was Ben Orlove's ethno-climatological research in the Andes, showing how farmers predicted interannual rainfall and temperature change, based on the visibility of the Pleiades star cluster, which in turn depended on El Niño weather events (Orlove et al. 2000). This work indicated that locally embedded knowledge about climate could be of great scientific and political relevance. In the 1990s, the concern with climate change was nevertheless still marginal and peripheral in anthropology.

A decade later, this was about to change. Coming from the anthropology of health, Hans Baer and Merrill Singer published Global warming and the political ecology of health (2009). The book investigates the impact of climate change on water, nutrition, and the spread of disease. It strongly emphasised that climate change affects different communities unequally, owing to an economic system which produces inequality. Thus it affects people in different ways, often corroborating pre-existing global inequalities. Like Hippocrates two and a half thousand years earlier, Baer and Singer showed how the proliferation of diseases, especially in tropical countries, could sometimes be attributed to climatic conditions, in their case anthropogenic climate change.

In the same year, Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall edited the widely-cited and read Anthropology and climate change (2009), which was a groundbreaking volume when it was published, with chapter authors working in different parts of the world. The main perspective is interpretive, and explores local responses to, and perceptions of, climate change, in a wide range of societies, many of them indigenous, from Siberia to Papua New Guinea. Many of the contributors emphasise local interpretations of change and strategies developed to adjust and adapt. It should nevertheless be pointed out that the societies which are the main contributors to climate change – the rich OECD countries, as well as China – are sparsely represented. This shortcoming is addressed in the second edition of the book (Crate & Nuttall 2016), as well as in the edited volume Cultures of energy (Strauss, Rupp & Love 2013), which relates ethnographic research to analyses of the global system, showing how the affluent are the main contributors to climate change, while poorer people tend to be the main victims. A perspective from the Global North is developed in Kari Norgaard's Living in denial (Norgaard 2011). Based on fieldwork in a rural Norwegian community where erratic winters interfere with winter tourism, the author asks how it can be that people who are aware of, and experience the effects of, climate change continue to lead unsustainable lives. Norgaard's analysis, which draws on psychology as well as sociology and anthropology, argues that people tend to rationalise their unsustainable lives (‘My driving and flying makes no difference’) and to compartmentalise their actions (‘After all, I do compost and take my bike to work’).

A few years later, a very substantial body of anthropological literature dealing with different aspects of climate change had appeared, and professional interest in the field had skyrocketed. Whereas there was just a single panel at the Society for Applied Anthropology (SAA) devoted to climate change in 2006, that number had increased to twenty a decade later. Crate and Nuttall sum up the growth and diversification of the field by stating that anthropologists today are engaging research that has a concern with resilience, vulnerability, adaptation, mitigation, anticipation, risk and uncertainty, consumption, gender, migration, and displacement. Anthropologists have developed significant work on the politics of climate change, inequality, health, carbon markets and carbon sequestration, and water and energy (2016: 11).

Global diversity

The body of knowledge that anthropologists have so far accumulated is far-ranging: from critical studies of the discourses and practices of carbon offsets (Dalsgaard 2013) to comparative studies of retreating glaciers^[1] in addition to a fast-growing number of ethnographies describing how communities deal with the local effects of climate change, in projects that look, in Kirsten Hastrup's evocative terms, at the ‘drying lands, the rising seas and the melting ice’ (Hastrup & Hastrup 2015). A political economy approach, informed by anthropological reflexivity, is provided, inter alia, in works by Hal Wilhite (2016) and Alf Hornborg (2019). Local responses to climate change are explored in a work I co-edited with my colleague Astrid Stensrud (2019), and anthropologists have also contributed some significant ethnographic monographs on climate issues, ranging from Jessica Barnes’ research on water in the Nile delta (2014) to Linda Connor’s work on mining in Australia (2016). What these studies have in common is the recognition of global-local linkages, where local lives and communities cannot be understood independently of the large-scale processes producing changed circumstances for future options and constraints. Climate anthropology is inherently multi-scalar, moving from the locality via government and corporations to supranational politics.

Not all environmental anthropology has a focus on climate. Important research on topics such as deforestation, mining, waste, and toxins may be only tangentially related to climate. However, it is fair to say that the broader field of environmental anthropology is being renewed and reformulated owing to the intensified attention to climate; as witnessed, for example, in the edited volume The angry earth: disasters in anthropological perspective (Oliver-Smith & Hoffman 2000, 2019) where, in the second, revised and updated edition of the book, nearly all contributors mention the atmospheric changes that have begun to affect the sites of their prior studies. It also deserves mentioning that the most famous living anthropologist without an anthropology degree, Bruno Latour, shifted his attention years ago to the causes and politics of climate change (Latour 2017). Building on his previous work on the production of scientific knowledge, Latour criticises the techno-scientific ideology of control and the sharp boundary, in his view misguidedly, between culture and nature, which can be traced back to Descartes's philosophy. Anthropogenic climate change is everywhere, and it is now. It is comprehensive, it brims with methodological implications, it buzzes with theoretical possibilities, and indeed, it may well be said to redefine not only the specialty of anthropological (or other) research, but raises the question of what it entails to be a human being within a new existential and conceptual framework, which will inevitably cause a reckoning with our ecological identity in a new way. Volatility and flexibility are key concepts in this exploration, which reveal inequality and an ultimately catastrophic separation of culture and nature. Climate change may retrospectively be seen as a major game-changer in intellectual and political life in general, and also in anthropological research. It is no coincidence that the increased interest in multispecies fieldwork, and the rise to prominence of the Deleuzian term ‘assemblage’ (which transcends the human-nonhuman and material-symbolic barriers), have shaped the work of many anthropologists in the present century. An assemblage, in this usage, consists in the connections that make up a particular social, cultural, and ecological configuration; it may include, for example, people, tools, soil, rain and sunshine, power relations, wild and domesticated animals, crops, weeds and discourses. The concept thereby transcends formerly rigid boundaries between things and ideas, as well as nature and culture.

As opposed to attempts to create top-down solutions through international agreements, some of which have a perceptible element of magical thinking (Rayner 2016), the anthropological view from below and within provides a number of useful insights, owing to its reliance on patient fieldwork.

First, an awareness of variation is essential to all anthropological research. The clunky distinction between developing and developed countries, for example, which produces a simple contrast where there is really a great deal of diversity and indeed the very category of the country, does not always fit the territory. The Seychelles is not ‘a place’ in the same sense as China is ‘a place’, although both are states. The former has 90,000 residents, most of them engaged in fishing or tourism, and is uniformly affected by rising sea temperatures and erratic rainfall. The latter has 1.2 billion inhabitants and spans many climatic zones with challenges ranging from desertification to flooding, which means that climate change in China cannot be described in the same way as in the Seychelles. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that actions that have been proved successful in Namibia would work in Nepal. The challenges faced by Greenlanders facing melting ice differ from those in Bangladesh, confronted with intensified flooding, salination of the soil and mudslides, or of Sahelian nomads who witness their pastures turn to dust.

Second, any successful social change has to begin with an appreciation of local lifeworlds and has to be developed not for, but with, the people affected. In the anthropology of development, this point has been made many times (Gardner & Lewis 2015). This insight, a matter of common sense to any working anthropologist, is rarely reflected in the abstract, large-scale worlds of international climate summits or global reports on climate change. In other words, a reasonable conclusion is that climate change policy must be scaled down and informed by the situation at the bottom, and not built exclusively managed from the top. The insistence on the primacy of the local is nevertheless both a strength and a weakness of anthropology, sometimes leading to myopia and a failure to see global connections, another reason that interdisciplinarity is necessary in this domain.

Comparison is a third asset. As one of anthropology's main methods for generating knowledge and opening new theoretical horizons, as well as stimulating the political imagination, comparison generates new ideas about human worlds. For example, anthropologists have often shown that land is not necessarily subject to personal ownership, and that ‘resource management’ and ‘sustainability’ are often integrated in the taken-for-granted knowledge, not least in indigenous groups. The economic historian Karl Polanyi (1944) described land as a ‘fictitious commodity’, showing – as economic anthropologists have later done – that in pre-capitalist societies it could usually not be sold and purchased. It goes without saying, because it comes without saying, that in societies where ‘the economy’ has not been disembedded from everyday life, making people accountable to their surroundings consists of ways that are unknown and perhaps unknowable to those who own and profit from property elsewhere.

The methodological and analytical holism on which anthropologists insist, which means that any social whole needs to be understood as a web of interconnections, has often made anthropological knowledge unwieldy and unmanageable for governments and development agencies, since it goes against the segmentation of worlds into separately manageable sectors and precise measurements that bureaucratic planning requires. Yet at this point in history, more holism may be precisely what is needed. The knowledge, often contested, enabling people to navigate, interpret, and act upon the world, must form an integral part of any project, whether academic or applied, concerning the human implications of climate change.

Forms of engagement

As indicated, the professional interest in climate change has grown massively in anthropology in the present century. Many anthropologists working on the topic are determined to use their knowledge to make a difference – not just in academia, but in the wider world of policy and practice. There are nevertheless significant variations in the ways different anthropologists approach the applied implications of their research.

The cultural ecological perspective, which looks at objective, measurable aspects of humanity's engagement with, and exploitation of, the environment, is less widespread in anthropological research today than in other fields. A main focus of recent anthropological research has rather been on cultural perceptions and responses to climate change. Crate is a spokesperson for this perspective, in that she recommends a cultural interpretive approach to climate change, arguing that anthropologists need to ‘listen, share, and accommodate our research partners’ way of knowing and observing and construct cultural models of how they perceive the local effects of global climate change on their world and worldview’ (2008: 574). In order to avoid being met with resistance and resentment, social change must engage with resources already in place where change is to be implemented, including knowledge and skills possessed locally. This is as true of the Global South as it is of the Global North, as nobody likes outsiders who come in and tell them what to do and how to think. Many policymakers, NGOs, and donor agencies hold that they already do so, which is doubtless the case. However, the quality of ethnographic knowledge collected over a sustained period of time is superior to that obtained through focus groups and interviews, and can be revealing of hidden and unexpected dimensions.

After the Great Acceleration of economic, technological and communicational change that has taken place since the Second World War (McNeill & Engelke 2016), and which has accelerated further since the early 1990s, our collective ecological footprint seems to have gone beyond the point of no return. According to the IPCC 2014, continued emissions of greenhouse gases will increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.^[2] Even if anthropogenic emissions should be stopped, climate change will impact life on the planet for centuries, according to the panel. On this background, some anthropologists connect insights into local effects on climate change to a systemic critique of the global economy.

Among the most consistent critics of the global economy from a climate perspective is Alf Hornborg (2019), who argues that in a world of limited resources, standard economic models presupposing growth are not viable. He argues that the capitalist fossil fuel economy is inherently destructive in that it consumes nonrenewable energy. Also invoking natural science, Hornborg refers to the second law of thermodynamics in order to show that the fossil fuel-based energy dissipates into heat, which is useless for further production and contributes to climate change.

The anthropological relevance of this analysis lies in Hornborg's emphasis on inequality and the exploitation of human labour as being inherent to the capitalist economy. He argues that capitalism is parasitical on both human and natural resources owing to the growth imperative, which relentlessly searches for resources and labour to turn them into profitable commodities. Hornborg's critique is thus dual, derived both from a Marxist analysis of surplus value production and from an ecological analysis, showing that we live in a world of limited resources.

Related to Hornborg's perspective is Baer and Singer's Anthropology of climate change (2nd edition, 2018). They provide an overview of extant research, while also developing a vision for climate anthropology which is fundamentally critical of global capitalism, seeing climate change as one of its major contradictions since the search for profits in their view neglects ecological limitations. Their alternative is a downscaled economy where economic activities aim to satisfy human needs rather than generating profits.

Also premised on political economy, but drawing on local ethnographies, the late Harold Wilhite (2016) focuses on consumption. Having previously worked in Kerala, India, he wrote extensively about the relationship between the fossil fuel society and consumption habits. Wilhite argues that deep reductions in energy use and carbon emissions will not be possible within our current political economies, which are driven by the capitalist imperatives of growth, commodification, and individualisation. In order to deal with climate change at the most basic level, he argues that it is necessary to understand the relationship between capitalism and the emergence of high energy habits at the level of family and household that are formed in a material world designed and built for high energy use, e.g. by replacing wooden houses with airtight concrete dwellings dependent on air-conditioning, or by marketing huge refrigerators where a smaller ‘icebox’ would do (Wilhite 2016). This view is shared by Richard Wilk (2016), whose anthropology of consumption is engaged in that it explores the deeper meaning of consumption and questions its feasibility, both ecologically and as a source of well-being.

Other research, which refrains from addressing the entire global economic order, explores the possibilities of changing the energy system in a renewable, sustainable direction. In a creative and productive juxtaposition of two complementary perspectives on climate change, Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have published a duograph (as opposed to a monograph) based on fieldwork in a huge, but ultimately failed, Mexican windpower park. In their twin volumes, they focus, respectively, on the political economy of wind power (Boyer 2019) and on the destabilisation and reshaping of human/non-human relations (Howe 2019). Boyer coins the word ‘energopower’ to capture the complex relationships between energy, economics, politics, and local communities. The term calls attention to a dimension of social life which had fallen out of favour generations earlier following the tendencies to energy determinism in Leslie White's aforementioned work; namely, the ‘power of power’, the fundamental necessity of energy for human life, and indeed the high energy consumption necessary for the global system as we know it. Howe, in her part of the duograph, looks beyond the human world, investigating the impact of wind turbines on nonhuman life in the region.

This dual approach expresses clearly what is a main division in contemporary anthropology, including that of climate change: the contrast between a political economy perspective, where power, inequality, and global economics are at the forefront, and a localised perspective, which insists on the primacy of the local and rejects epistemologies which tend to render everything comparable with everything else. The duograph shows how these perspectives can be complementary and shed light on different dimensions of climate change. Boyer and Howe show that a shift towards renewables is not a straightforward exercise. In their joint preface, they state that ‘renewable energy can be installed in ways that do little to challenge the extractive logics that have undergirded the mining and fossil fuel industries (Boyer & Howe 2020: xii) Yet, they also suggest that renewables may in fact be part of the solution if implemented in the right way.

As these examples indicate, the anthropology of climate change is both multi-scalar (it shifts between a global and a local perspective), interdisciplinary (relying on natural science for some of its facts) and methodologically diverse (ethnographic and comparative). It is also clear that different climate anthropologists, by virtue of their differences in empirical focus and analyses, and also owing to different political views, advocate different solutions, whether implicitly or explicitly.

Climate anthropology as a new departure

What is new about the anthropology of climate change is not its global purview, but the recognition that climate change has enormous consequences for humanity and, in a slightly longer term, for life on the planet. As Moore (2015: 35) says, ‘Anthropogenic climate change has possibly surpassed biodiversity loss as the most widely recognized form of global transformation'.

The global dimension of climate change is indisputable, but it is also necessary to show in what ways climate change is always local in its implications and has to be understood as such: ecologically, socially, politically, culturally. Whereas politicians until recently might write off concerns of urgency by calling for more research, it is by now abundantly clear that the natural science knowledge needed to act has been available for many years. Yet, while the natural sciences have long documented the facts and global perils of climate change, it is by no means evident that the human dimension of climate change is understood sufficiently well. A simple question may be why so little is happening, since nearly all countries are signatories to a series of climate agreements, beginning with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which specifies the steps that need to be taken to mitigate the impact of changes that are already taking place. Later reports from the IPCC have been increasingly insistent about the need to take action immediately. Yet, global emissions continue to rise and are nowhere near to reaching the targets agreed initially in Kyoto and affirmed in later summit meetings.

Coal, and its close relatives oil and gas, the salvation of humanity for two centuries, are now becoming our damnation, and there is no easy way out. The lesson from cultural history may be that lean societies, decentralised and flexible, with less bureaucracy than farming, fewer PR people than fishermen, are the most sustainable in the long term. As Tainter puts it in his book about the collapse of complex societies: ‘Complex societies … are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity’ (1988: 198). This insight, taken from an archaeologist, may serve as a reminder of the potential importance of climate anthropology. Providing a view from within and from below, anthropologists can not only report from and produce analyses of the multi-scalar linkages of climate and society, but they are also in a position to stimulate the kind of intellectual imagination needed not only to understand and explain, but also to deal with the challenges from anthropogenic climate change. This does not mean that anthropologists ought to advocate a return to pre-industrial life, but that they are in a unique position to strengthen the intellectual and political imagination by showing, as the discipline has always been prone to doing, that there are indeed many alternatives.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the three anonymous referees and, in particular, Felix Stein, for very detailed and useful comments on earlier versions.

References

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Gardner, K. & D. Lewis 2015. The anthropology of development. London: Pluto.

Giddens, A. 2002. Runaway world: how globalisation is reshaping our lives. London: Routledge.

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Hornborg, A. 2019. Nature, society, and justice in the Anthropocene: unraveling the money–technology–energy complex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Howe, C. 2019. Ecologics: wind and power in the Anthropocene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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Note on contributor

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and carries out research on social and cultural implications of globalisation. Among his books are Small places, large issues (1995/2014, Pluto Press), Engaging anthropology: the case for a public presence (2006, Berg), Overheating: an anthropology of accelerated change (2016, Pluto Press) and Boomtown: runaway globalisation on the Queensland coast (2018, Pluto Press).

[1] See Ben Orlove’s website, https://glacierhub.org

[2] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2014. Climate change 2014: synthesis report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: IPCC (available on-line: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/).

Political ecology

Rebecca Tishler — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 15:28:18 +0000

Jason Roberts

Columbia University

Initially published 6 Sep 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20polieco

Abstract:

Political ecology is a critical research field within anthropology and related disciplines that examines how and why economic structures and power relations drive environmental change in an increasingly interconnected world. Initially it was most well-known for investigating the practices and impacts of large-scale resource development projects in subsistence-oriented communities in the Global South. Over time, political ecology has expanded its research trajectory to include analyses of environmental politics and socio-ecological degradation in urban, industrialised settings as well. This entry outlines the historical development of political ecology in order to understand the bases for its common theoretical assumptions, research themes, methodological approaches, and sources of critique. In doing so, it provides particular insight into the important ways that anthropologists have influenced, and been influenced by, political ecology. Though individual research interests and emphases have expanded since the early days of political ecology, the field continues to provide a valuable means for tracing the broader structural forces of socio-ecological change to a thorough understanding of the impacts and responses to that change at the local level. Yet, as an inherently interdisciplinary field, the challenge for political ecology continues to revolve around properly integrating its various disciplinary interests and influences into a consistent framework capable of analysing political, cultural, and ecological matters with sufficient rigor. Political ecologists’ on-going efforts to meet this challenge have never been more important than they are today, as the world increasingly struggles with interrelated issues such as global climate change, industrial pollution, resource degradation, economic dispossession, and changing patterns of environmental health.

Introduction

Political ecology is a critical research field within anthropology, geography, and related disciplines that has become well known for its analyses of how and why structural forces, such as capitalist economic processes and power relations, drive environmental change in an increasingly interconnected world (see Biersack & Greenberg 2006; Blaikie & Brookfield 1987; Paulson & Gezon 2005; Peet et al. 2011; Perrault et al. 2015; Robbins 2019). Emerging in the context of global neoliberalisation in the 1970s and 1980s, political ecology emphasised the key role of outside forces like international development and economic modernisation schemes in the restructuring of local lives and environments in the Global South. As such, the field has often been associated with interdisciplinary studies of environmental change and livelihood loss in the context of transnational mining, logging, agricultural conversion, and nature conservation projects in developing countries. Political Ecology tends to foreground the role of capitalist markets and state forces in such processes of local dispossession and environmental disruption. Hence, it provides an important counter to earlier Malthusian arguments that centred the blame for environmental degradation and food insecurity on growing human populations outstripping the sustainable use of resources (e.g. Ehrlich 1968; Hardin 1968). Since the 1970s, the research trajectory of political ecology has evolved from its initial focus on rural lives and landscapes, to include concerns with issues of environmental politics and socio-ecological relationships in urban, industrialised settings as well. In all these contexts, political ecologists have commonly asked: whose use of, claims to, and/or perceptions of the environment prevail, and why? (Karlsson 2015: 350). Thereby, they attempt to understand the central relationships between environmental degradation and social marginalization, the causes of environmental conflicts over changing patterns of access to and control of resources, and the fundamental connections between place, identity, and social movements (Robbins 2019).

This entry traces the historical development of political ecology in order to understand the bases for its common theoretical assumptions, research themes, methodological approaches, and sources of critique. In doing so, it provides particular insight into the important ways that anthropologists have influenced, and been influenced by, political ecology. Though research interests and emphases have expanded since the early days of political ecology, the field continues to provide a valuable means for tracing the broader structural forces of socio-ecological change to a thorough understanding of the impacts and responses to that change at the local level. Yet, as an inherently interdisciplinary field, the challenge for political ecology continues to revolve around properly integrating its various disciplinary interests and influences into a consistent framework capable of analysing matters of both the political and the ecological with sufficient rigor (Paulson et al. 2003; Walker 2005; Bridge et al. 2015). On-going scholarly efforts to meet this challenge have never been more important than they are today, as the world increasingly struggles with interrelated issues such as global climate change, industrial pollution, resource degradation, economic dispossession, and changing patterns of environmental health.

Historical antecedents to political ecology

Many scholars locate the foundation of both environmental anthropology and political ecology in the research of Julian Steward (Gezon & Paulson 2005; Jacka 2015; Robbins 2004). From the 1920s through the 1950s, Steward worked within the subfields of cultural anthropology and archaeology, developing a research framework that he called ‘cultural ecology’. Cultural ecology sought to explain human social organisation as a functional adaptation to local environments and requisite subsistence practices (e.g. Steward 1937, 1955). For example, Steward argued that in the context of the harsh environment of the American Southwest, regular bouts of food and water shortage had forced smaller bands of Desert Cahuilla hunter-gatherers to separate from larger groups in order to find necessary resources (1937). Over time, some of these divisions became stable and ceremonially important. Such data formed the basis for Steward’s assertion that the human relationship to the environment was more important and more logical in structuring cultural patterns of kinship descent and residence than diffusion of these patterns from other, independent societies (1937).

Accordingly, Steward argued ‘those features which are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements’ constitute the ‘culture core’ of any particular society (1955: 37). It was this culture core that combined with the contingencies of historical circumstance to structure the largely symbolic ‘secondary features’ of a culture like ideology and religion. In this way, cultural ecologists argued that human interaction with nature through different forms of subsistence labour provided a directing influence on the social order (Robbins 2004: 30). Overall, like the work of geographer Carl Sauer (1965), Steward’s assertion that cultural groups should be studied as forces that both shape, and are shaped by, their environment represented a significant theoretical contribution for the environmental social sciences. Likewise, the effort to understand adaptation toward functional stability within bounded groups would remain a key theoretical conviction for years to come (see Walker 2005; Watts 2015).

Cultural ecology was also significant because it reflected the growing influence of Marxist thought within anthropology, which would subsequently become more elaborated in the work of political ecologists. Steward’s ‘culture core’ was roughly analogous to the Marxist idea of the ‘material base’, and his ‘secondary features’ approximated the Marxist concept of an ‘ideological superstructure’. Like Steward (1955), Karl Marx (see also Foster 2000) had previously argued that human labour processes were key to understanding the relationship between nature and culture:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man [sic] and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and nature. He opposes himself to nature as one of her [sic] own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature (1889: 156-7).

Marxist theory influenced cultural ecology’s materialist emphasis in the examination of human-ecological systems. However, cultural ecologists tended not to expand these insights to analyse the ways in which broader social and economic relationships between human groups might influence environmental and economic change. Cultural ecology’s emphasis remained on subsistence as a creative process of local cultural adaptation and evolution (see Orlove 1980; Walker 2005; Watts 2015). Within anthropology, individual cultures continued to be viewed as largely homogenous and relatively bounded entities, in a way that precluded sustained investigation of intergroup relationships and patterns of change. Therefore, cultural ecology and related predecessors of political ecology eventually faltered on their inability to account for and understand human-ecological change in a complex, global economy (Robbins 2004). Future research would also emphasise the need to provide more holistic accounts of the symbolic and material dimensions of human-ecological relationships. Even so, much of this work continued to pay insufficient attention to the broader, structural relationships of political economic influence that were becoming increasingly important at the time – particularly within developing economies (Bridge et al. 2015). Anthropology, overall, had not yet developed a sophisticated means for accounting for the types of social interactions that were often on display in processes of political transformation and transnational development.

From cultures to ecosystems

One important anthropological research effort that aimed to better integrate the symbolic and material aspects of the human relationship to the environment was a body of work developed by Roy Rappaport, which came to be known as ‘new ecology’ (1967, 1968, 1971, 1984). Rappaport’s early work among the Tsembaga Maring, a group of horticulturists living in Highlands Papua New Guinea, was more interdisciplinary than previous efforts within environmental anthropology. It was strongly influenced by ideas from ecology, biology, nutritional science, and systems theory^[1] (Biersack 1999; Dove 2006; Kottak 1999). Over time, this penchant for borrowing from other disciplines would provide a key basis for the development of political ecology as a whole (Walker 2005). Rappaport was inspired by emerging work in ecology (e.g. Odum 1969) to use new units of analysis in his anthropological research. Against Stewardian cultural ecology that took cultures as the proper unit of analysis, Rappaport’s ‘new ecology’ would focus on populations in the ecological sense, as one of the many components within a bounded, interdependent system of energy transfer and nutrient cycling (Biersack 1999: 5). Rappaport argued that this approach allowed him to analyse numerous human, plant, and non-human animal populations as commensurable units within the same research framework (Rappaport 1990). Human populations, like populations of plants and animals, were just material sub-components of a larger regional ecosystem. Culture was the symbolic tool that allowed these human populations to adapt to that ecosystem (Rappaport 1990). The key to understanding the overall functioning of such an ecosystem was to properly examine the structures and relationships between its various material and symbolic sub-components (Rappaport 1968; also Biersack 2006).

Accordingly, one of the most influential and lasting contributions of Rappaport’s work was his argument that ritual could serve a principal role in the regulation of human-ecological systems (Biersack 2006; Jacka 2015). Specifically, Rappaport acknowledged (1967, 1968, 1984) that the Tsembaga Maring viewed their ‘kaiko’ pig killing ritual as a way to maintain social relationships of reciprocity with ancestral spirits and allies who had previously assisted them in times of war. However, he argued that the ultimate function of the ritual was to maintain the sustainability of the regional ecosystem by regulating population sizes of humans and pigs, conserving wild game, mitigating warfare, and regularly redistributing agricultural lands and other goods between human groups.

In many ways, the interdisciplinary influences that inspired Rappaport to make this argument about the functional role of ritual simultaneously constituted the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of his work (Biersack 2006; Jacka 2015; Watts 2015). These influences allowed him to introduce a more explicitly ecological framework, methodology, and focus within environmental anthropology. However, they also opened Rappaport to critiques of overcorrection. In the years following the publication of Rappaport’s (1968; republished in 1984) book Pigs for the ancestors, he was charged with accusations of ‘vulgar materialism’ (Friedman 1974) and ‘ecology fetishism’ (Sahlins 1976). Critics suggested that his analysis of cultures as functional tools of human populations within bounded, self-regulated ecosystems may have blinded him to alternative explanations (Rappaport 1984; also Biersack 1999; Kottak 1999). Rappaport, like Steward, was also critiqued for paying insufficient attention to the broader historical and political economic relationships that were also influencing human-ecological processes among the Tsembaga Maring at the time (Rappaport 1984; also Biersack 2006). His critics held that environmental anthropology was focused ‘too narrowly on the local to the exclusion of the dynamics of colonialism and the encroachment of a global capitalist economy’ (Paulson et al. 2003: 207). Indeed, such increased attention to structural inequalities and the possibilities and processes of maladaptation that such inequalities necessitated was one of the defining features of the rise of political ecology (see Walker 2005; Watts 2015). Heavily influenced by Marxist theory and critical development studies, political ecology would come to emphasise the role of political economy as a force of socio-ecological change in an increasingly neoliberal world (Greenberg & Park 1994). The historical significance of colonialism, continuing reduction of global trade barriers, and the impact of broad, free-market economic restructurings of social and environmental policies within developing countries, could no longer be downplayed.

Political ecology comes of age: expanding the scales of analysis

The anthropologist Eric Wolf (1972) is generally recognised as the first scholar to coin the term ‘political ecology’, having done so in an article about the dynamics of land and resource ownership in the Swiss Alps. As Lisa Gezon and Susan Paulson note, it makes sense that a former student of Julian Steward’s would go on to ‘develop a powerful analytic framework linking ecological with political-economic phenomena across diverse scales of action and analysis’ (2005: 8). Significantly, Wolf argues:

Capitalism progresses through the employment of jural rules of ownership to strip the laborer of his means of production and to deny him access to the product of his labor. The local rules of ownership and inheritance are thus not simply norms for the allocation of rights and obligations among a given population, but mechanisms which mediate between the pressures emanating from larger society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem (1972: 202).

Yet, it may be more appropriate to argue that Wolf suggested this powerful analytic framework without fully developing it or specifically defining what it might become. The term ‘political ecology’ only appears in the title of Wolf’s 1972 article, and not within the body of the text. Wolf’s subsequent work in books, such as Europe and the people without history (1982), however, proved to be a seminal force in highlighting the significance of global capitalist processes to local human cultures and environments. In it, he illustrated how historical processes of European colonisation and expansion into the Global South in pursuit of valuable raw materials had resulted in the creation of a world economic system that impacted even the most remote people and places (Karlsson 2015). Along with the efforts of other anthropologists like Sidney Mintz (1985), William Roseberry (1983), and June Nash (1993), such work emphasised the importance of intergroup connections within the overall structure of a world economy tied together by the pursuit of valuable, limited resources. These insights would become central theoretical tenets within the mature ‘structural political ecology’ of the 1980s, which solidified around studies of socioeconomic ‘modernization’ efforts in supposedly underdeveloped countries (Walker 2005). Within structural political ecology:

[q]uestions about the social relations of [economic] production and about access and control over resources – the basic toolkit of political economy – were applied in efforts to understand forms of environmental disturbance and degradation and to develop models for environmental rehabilitation, conservation, and environmentally sustainable alternatives (Paulson et al. 2003: 206).

This first generation of political ecology was heavily influenced by the Marxist principles of dependency theory/world system theory (Frank 1989; Wallerstein 1974). Here, critical development scholars like Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein argued that underdevelopment did not actually represent an earlier stage in a country’s evolution towards high consumer capitalism and representative democracy, but rather a continuing process that was in fact required by the contradictions inherent in the modern capitalist world system. Underdeveloped regions were essential to the maintenance of global capitalism because they served as ‘sources of cheap or strategic raw materials, markets for manufactured goods, outlets for excess capital, and/or places where super-profits could be derived from super-exploitation of poorly paid workers’ (Edelman & Haugerud 2005: 11). Developing countries, therefore, were integrated into this world economy as ‘satellites’, performing limited and/or unsustainable economic activities for the developed, ‘metropole’ countries (Frank 1989). It was this role within the world economy that kept these satellites underdeveloped, as they were structurally dependent upon foreign capital and external markets for economic viability (Frank 1989).

The implication for political ecology was that ‘the local was subordinated to a global system of power relations and must be understood entirely with respect to that subjection, in terms of what is commonly referred to as capitalist penetration and its effects’ (Biersack 2006: 9). Such studies often focused on the effects of colonialism and development policies in the Global South. They centred on the ways in which unequal power relations created conflicts in access to, and control of, land and resources in times of intense economic change (e.g. Blaikie 1985; Little et al. 1987; Peluso 1992). Works such as Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield’s (1987) edited volume Land degradation and society, linked the marginalisation of farmers, shifting cultivators, and hunter-gatherers to state enclosures of commons resources for the purposes of market production. Such research highlighted how Indigenous and other politically marginal groups tended to be disproportionately disadvantaged by the large-scale environmental changes often associated with capitalist development processes. In these contexts, it no longer made sense to conceive of local cultures and environments as bounded, or humans’ relationship with nature as intrinsically adaptive. Environmental degradation was a problem grounded in social inequalities among and between groups (Harvey 1974). As the anthropologist Michael Dove would learn from his long-term studies among Indonesian shifting cultivators:

[t]he nature of the relationship between forest degradation and underdevelopment of forest peoples is the reverse of that which is commonly claimed: forests are not degraded because forest peoples are impoverished; rather, forest peoples are impoverished by the degradation of their forests and other resources by external forces (1993: 21).

Political ecology, therefore, would strive to productively combine insights and methods from the social and environmental sciences to show how environmental degradation was ‘both a result of and a cause of social marginalization’ (Blaikie & Brookfield 1987: 23).

To better explain the specific processes and outcomes of such environmental change, Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), recommended a regionally focused methodology that would connect multiple scales of analysis. They argued that political ecologists should start their research by studying local-level land users and their relation with the land, before branching out to examine their relationships with each other and groups within the wider society. Eventually, the last links in this chain of analysis required integrating an understanding of how state policies and global economic processes were affecting local environmental conditions and resource use practices (Blaikie & Brookfield 1987: 1-37). Along with historical contextualisation, this commitment to connecting the local, regional, and global scales of analysis has become one of the key methodological principles of political ecology that ties it together as a field (Neumann 1992). Significantly, this methodological improvement also separates political ecology from earlier traditions within environmental anthropology (Biersack & Greenberg 2006; Gezon & Paulson 2005).

In the 1990s, however, this initial form of structural political ecology would be critiqued for the ways in which it conceptualised global capitalism, the state, and related multinational development processes as relatively unchecked forces that seemed to have intentionality (e.g. Moore 1993). Thinking of capitalism as a monolithic structure bore a striking resemblance to earlier anthropological models of culture as fundamentally homogenous, coherent, and purposeful. As such, it was suggested that many early political ecologists had not truly been following all the methodological principles outlined by Blaikie and Brookfield (1987). They had not given sufficient weight to the local level of analysis, potentially ignoring the fact that local groups were made up of individuals with often-divergent beliefs and interests regarding processes of economic development and accompanying socio-ecological change. Such change was not only initiated from the outside. Local people could also change their environments and economies through their own actions and political struggles (Bryant 1998; Moore 1993, 2005; Li 2007, 2014). For example, as Michael Dove illustrates, generations of Bornean shifting cultivators have willingly engaged in commercial rubber production as an effective means to strengthen their customary land claims while simultaneously supplementing and maintaining their subsistence livelihoods (2011). Such practices demonstrate the ways in which capitalism and the state are not all-powerful structures. Global market forces are often subject to both resistance and facilitation from local actors who try to engage with them according to their own values and agendas (Tsing 2005).

Critiques and changing directions within political ecology

In 1993, the anthropologist Donald Moore echoed the critiques of other scholars when he argued for the need to move beyond the ‘structural legacy’ of early political ecology. As Moore noted, early political ecology too often relied upon a rather uncomplicated opposition between seemingly virtuous local land users and vicious states and corporations (also Bernstein 1990). Yet, real life is much more complicated. In Moore’s (1993) article about a state-administered peasant resettlement scheme along the border of a Zimbabwean national park, we see the importance of paying closer attention to the possibilities of local agency in daily struggles over resource control. These struggles took place within and between groups of farmers, pastoralists, tourists, agricultural extension agents, national park staff, and rural development administrators all vying for control over their own particular vision of the border zone. Accordingly, Moore (1993, 2005) argues that local resource users and state governments are always made up of a complexity of different divisions and individuals that often do not share the same goals and values. Such complexities contradict earlier theoretical models within political ecology.

Work such as Moore’s inspired a second phase of ‘poststructuralist political ecology’, which emerged in the 1990s. Poststructuralist political ecology tried to move political analysis beyond the determinisms of Marxist-inspired dependency and world system theory, while also recognising that multiple voices and interpretations exist in situations of environmental and economic change. This second phase of political ecology integrated a broader range of theoretical influence, such as: household studies (Berry 1989; Netting 1993); feminist and gender studies (see Agarwal 1992; Harcourt & Nelson 2015; Merchant 1980; Rocheleau et al. 1996); studies of race, environmental justice, and social movements (Escobar 2008; Harvey 1996; Martinez-Alier 2002; Moore et al. 2003; Peet & Watts 2004; Sawyer 2004; West 2016); and postructuralism and discourse theory (Escobar 1999; Li 2007; Moore 2005; Tsing 2005; West 2006). Together, they brought greater attention and analytical precision to the different ways in which environmental change and conflicts over that change were experienced according to variables such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, ability, sexuality, and/or socioeconomic status. For example, in a key article about gender and resource tenure, Dianne Rocheleau and David Edmunds (1997) argued that development schemes designed to promote formal titling and privatisation of land could have the unfortunate effect of increasing power differentials between men and women in many parts of Africa. These practices often removed women’s previous customary claims to use-rights on communally owned lands, as formal land titling invested greater powers of exclusion and decision-making in men, who were much more likely to gain such titles. Accordingly, Rocheleau and Edmunds suggested that policymakers should not simply make a better effort to ‘bring women in’ to these titling schemes. Instead, they should start such development processes by understanding and working within previously existing cultural models of overlapping land and resource tenure rights.

Yet, in the late 1990s, this continuing movement toward a more sophisticated conceptualisation and analysis of all things political prompted a different critique of the field. In an article entitled ‘Against political ecology’, anthropologist Andrew Vayda and geographer Bradley Walters (1999) criticised political ecology for what they saw as its unexamined, apriori focus upon issues of politics and power. This focus, they argued, prevented political ecologists from engaging in sustained ecological analysis that might explain how environmental phenomena and processes of socio-ecological change actually worked. Unlike the earlier environmental anthropology traditions of Steward and Rappaport, political ecology was now suffering from a dearth of ecology. Here, the environment had essentially become a stage where political struggles over resource control took place, but in-depth ecological analysis of the environmental impacts of such struggles was often not provided (Zimmerer & Bassett 2003). While the extent of Vayda and Walter’s (1999) criticism may result from a somewhat selective reading of an increasingly expansive field (Robbins 2004; Walker 2005), the effort to achieve an appropriate balance between the concerns of political economy, cultural analysis, and ecological science remains an important issue that political ecologists are still contending with today. The challenge for political ecologists is to continue improving their methods of analysing the processes and effects of socio-ecological change across a variety of scales and actors. Determining ways to productively apply such methods and findings to alleviate our current socio-ecological problems like global climate change and resource depletion has never been more important.

The future for political ecology in a rapidly changing world

In 2020, the world finds itself confronted with cumulative social and ecological challenges of a degree that many of us have not seen before in our lifetimes. The 'Anthropocene' has become an academic buzzword for emphasising the fact we are now living in a geological time period in which humans are the absolute dominant force shaping the Earth’s ecological processes (Chua & Fair 2019; Ogden et al. 2013; Moore 2016). Generations of increasing fossil fuel use, industrial development, population growth, and related processes of pollution and resource degradation have led to broad scale ecological and climatic changes that are no longer easy to deny. As Will Steffen and colleagues (2007: 614) note, ‘[t]he Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state’. The implication is that we are approaching a global ecological tipping point from which we may never recover. Accordingly, recent years have seen anthropologists cover an expansive list of topics related to this issue, such as: the rising frequency and toll of environmental disasters like hurricanes, droughts, forest fires, and industrial pollution (Oliver-Smith & Hoffman 1999; Jones & Murphy 2009); the impact of polar ice cap melt and climate change among Artic societies (Crate 2009; Cruikshank 2007); and rising sea levels and the mounting likelihood of environmental refugees being forced to leave small islands and coastal regions (Lazrus 2012; Rudiak-Gould 2013). Entire ecosystems and cultural ways of life are increasingly threatened with rapid and full-scale transformation. And yet, such challenges of the Anthropocene are far from the only challenges the world is facing right now.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has also thrown into stark relief the many key relationships between environment, economy, and a broadly defined public health. An entire global economy based upon the extraction of the surplus value embodied in natural resources and the exploitation of individual wage labour has quickly been thrown into recession by the necessity of social distancing. Similarly, the socioeconomic distinctions between mostly low-paid ‘essential’ workers and often well-paid ‘non-essential’ workers have highlighted the magnitude of economic inequality, social marginalisation, and despondency that the world has been experiencing for decades. Such issues are taking place within a global political context of rising nationalism, authoritarianism, and general social conflict about the responsibilities of states and the rights of social minorities within them. The many potential complications associated with these issues highlight the importance of the holistic and interdisciplinary perspective that anthropologists and political ecologists have long tried to bring to their analyses of the complex relationships between culture, nature, and economy.

The question for political ecology as a field is what is the best way to help moving forward? How might political ecologists work to ensure that often-abstract theory and impersonal scientific data becomes more relevant to state policymakers and the people with whom we work? Some anthropologists have suggested that we need to do more work in and with the state and corporate institutions that are so directly responsible for the direction of our futures (Fiske 2009; Rajak 2014; Welker 2014). Others argue that we need to pay much closer attention to the work of Indigenous scholars, and local frameworks of environmental explanation (e.g. Kirsch 2006; Smith 1999; Tallbear 2014; Whyte 2018). Still others have suggested that political ecology and medical anthropology would both benefit from a greater correspondence between the two fields (Baer 1996; King 2010), particularly during a global pandemic that has highlighted the social nature of illness in political and economic circumstances that restrict many peoples’ access to medical care. Such a collaboration might also gain key insights from the work of disaster anthropologists on social patterns of vulnerability and resilience (Hoffman & Oliver-Smith 2002). The second phase of political ecology has already done the important work of opening the field to such multi-faceted collaborations. There is a place and a need for all of these efforts right now. The key for political ecology seems to be to continue working, collaborating, and improving its mechanisms of socioecological analysis and intervention accordingly – so that we might come to recognize more sustainable and equitable pathways for living together in the future (Rappaport 1993).

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Note on contributor

Jason Roberts is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at San Antonio, where his research was supported by the United States’ National Science Foundation. This research examined the historical motivations and socio-ecological changes occurring in the context of industrial agroforestry development and climate change on New Hanover Island (Lavongai), Papua New Guinea. He is currently working on projects that examine the relationships between resource development, climate change, and public health in the Pacific.

Jason Roberts, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, New York, 10027, United States of America. jsr2197@columbia.edu

[1] Systems theory is an approach to studying social life and environmental interaction that assumes that integrated systems exist, which consist of human and non-human elements. It tends to explain human actions, beliefs, and their interactions with the non-human environment by showing how all elements of the system function interdependently to preserve a stable whole.

Hunting and gathering

Felix Stein — Mon, 18 May 2020 20:59:23 +0000

Thomas Widlok

University of Cologne

Initially published 18 May 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20hunt

Abstract:

Hunting and gathering constitute the oldest human mode of making a living, and the only one for which there is an uninterrupted record from human origins to the present. Correspondingly, there has been a lot of anthropological attention devoted to hunting and gathering with an initial confidence that one could directly observe human nature by studying hunter-gatherers. More recently, however, anthropologists have grown cautious not to draw analogies between present-day hunter-gatherers and those of the distant past too quickly. They also do not focus on hunting and gathering as isolated activities, but rather on the socio-cultural formations that have been found to be associated with them. Despite considerable regional diversity, there are recurrent themes in hunter-gatherer ethnography that show shared patterns beyond the ecology of foraging. Prominent is the notion of hunter-gatherers being ‘originally affluent’ with a relatively low workload. Hunter-gatherers have also been associated with a high incidence of gender and age equality, due to levelling practices such as sharing. Most hunter-gatherers live in very small groups, characterised by multirelational kinship ties. They often have distinct forms of environmental perception, and it has been suggested that they display a high degree of playfulness in ritual affairs. They therefore provide comparative insights in a wide-range of domains far beyond the activities of hunting and gathering.

Introduction: Not everyone who hunts or gathers is a hunter-gatherer

Hunting and gathering as activities have been with humans for all of human evolution up to today. For more than 99% of their time on earth, humans have gained their sustenance through animal and plant food that they hunted and gathered (Lee & DeVore 1968: 3). Even so-called ‘herders’ and ‘farmers’ (or ‘pastoralists’ and ‘agriculturalists’ as they are often called) have historically tended to spend some of their time hunting and gathering. Especially in harsh times, for instance when drought threatens domesticated animals or harvests, herders and farmers include hunted game and undomesticated plant foods in their diet.

At the same time, many herders and farmers all over the world tend to look down on people who live almost exclusively on hunting and gathering, because this way of life often differs not only in how food is gained, but in many other ways, too. The rituals and beliefs of people who specialise in hunting and gathering are often distinct from those of herders and farmers, as are their social rules and norms. They frequently have their own views about leadership, about whom one should marry, how one should bring up children, what a settlement should look like, which rules one should follow with regard to holding and inheriting property, with regard to sharing and pooling resources, and so forth. Therefore, despite the fact that hunting and gathering activities are often combined with other economic pursuits, anthropologists refer collectively to people who rely exclusively (or largely) on hunted game and on gathered plant food as ‘hunter-gatherers’ to acknowledge that there is ‘a distinct hunter-gatherer way of life’ that distinguishes them from their neighbours (see Kelly 2013). Often that way of life is not recognised, and hunter-gatherers are stigmatised because of it. This entry outlines some of the social practices that constitute this way of life and some of the cultural variety to be found across continents. It does not cover all instances of hunting and gathering activities at all times and places around the world, but it will focus on key case studies with only some comparative reference to more outlying examples such as the hunting practiced amongst the European nobility or the collecting of food amongst urban dumpster-divers. In short, this entry is not so much about ‘hunter-gatherers’ as a category of people than about ‘hunter-gatherer situations’ (Widlok 2016) that we find repeatedly across space and time.

The ecology of foraging and the history of hunting and gathering

The term ‘foraging’ is occasionally also used when referring to people who hunt and gather (Lee 1979). It directly, or at least implicitly, emphasises the continuity between human hunter-gatherers and foraging as it is practiced by animals or was practiced by humans other than Homo sapiens (for instance by the Neanderthals). For this reason, the term is rejected by some scholars and explicitly embraced by others. As activities, hunting and gathering pre-date modern humans because all their predecessors have exclusively lived on various types of hunting, gathering, and fishing. How similar or dissimilar these predecessors were from the human hunter-gatherers that live today is a major point of scientific debate. For those studying the remote past, any human living by hunting and gathering today (or in the recent, scientifically-documented past) provides a chance to learn more about what life might have been like in a deep past. Conversely, hunter-gatherer studies can help to construct models that attempt to understand the links between various natural environments and the spectrum of human lifeways. This can, in turn, help us understand current or recent hunter-gatherer situations.

That said, over the last decades there have been growing doubts as to whether what is known about hunter-gatherers through ethnography – that is, through reports by those who have gone to live with them – is a reliable model for reconstructing the ecology of foraging in the remote past, and the other way round. There is growing consensus that the lives of hunter-gatherers are not strictly determined by ecology or by factors detached from human cultural agency while ecological dependencies continue to be underrated with regard to non-hunter-gatherers. In any case, anthropologists have grown much more cautious when claiming analogies with the remote past or with animal behaviour, not least because such analogies have often been used in efforts of colonial domination (Gordon 1992). Moreover, considerable variation and flexibility exist in hunter-gatherer lifeways not only across environments but even within the same type of environment (see Kent 2002, Lee & Daly 1999). Despite striking similarities, life in the Australian deserts is not the same as life in deserts in Africa and elsewhere. The same holds for hunter-gatherers living in savannas, tropical forests, or tundras. An elaborate mythical and ritual attachment to land, for instance, has its very specific history in Australia, not matched in Africa but with regional continuities beyond indigenous Australia (see Swain 1993). At the same time, a high degree of mobility and small but flexible group size is found across the forager spectrum (Kelly 1995). It is important to point out that every ethnographic case documents a collective cultural achievement that has grown historically across many generations. Moreover, every environment inhabited by humans (foraging or not) has been altered by human impact so that hunter-gatherers, too, live in a cultural environment as much as in a natural one. The use of fire by hunter-gatherers, for example, is likely to have been a major transformative power in many natural environments (see Jones 1969).

Reducing hunter-gatherer life to ecology is as problematic as excluding ecology as irrelevant from other modes of life. Take mobility as an example: hunter-gatherers often move regularly within a certain territory. This mobility is a major strategy for dealing effectively with changes in the environment and with seasonal shortages of resources. However, mobility patterns are not only governed by ecological reasons alone. In many instances, they are also social. People resolve or avoid conflicts and social tension by splitting up and moving away from one another. Conversely, they create and maintain social bonds by visiting one another and by staying together. Moreover, hunter-gatherers often move before resources are depleted, in the search for food variety but also because they long to revisit places they have not been to for a while (see Widlok 2015). The movement is different – in its ecological impact and in terms of social relevance – from those of farmers and herders who may constantly be on the lookout for new pastures in unknown territory (see Brody 2000). Among hunter-gatherers, one can typically observe a fission and fusion pattern as people aggregate into larger groups and split up again periodically or seasonally. This pattern is often influenced by fluctuations in the availability of resources (migrating herds, fruit seasons, rainfall variability) but also by social needs, such as visiting known places. It is different from the pattern of outmigration in expanding farming or industrial societies. Mobility practices are therefore not only governed by ecology but they are also a matter of longing for others, of teaming up for rituals, but also for enjoying the personal autonomy of deciding whether one wants to stay or to leave. Much of the contemporary literature in social anthropology therefore concentrates on the social practices of living hunter-gatherers, while in archaeology and evolutionary studies the emphasis is on long-term ecological pressures and adaptations. It is important to note, however, that what is shared among hunter-gatherer groups in comparison with non-foragers and what is locally specific to them has both an ecological and a cultural dimension.

The original affluent society?

Early ideas about hunter-gatherers were hampered by the fact that, by the time that professional ethnographers arrived on the scene in the twentieth century, most hunter-gatherers had been decimated and relegated to remote places. Moreover, many early accounts by European explorers were not based on first-hand observation but on second-hand information provided by dominant farmers and herders that was strongly coloured by their negative attitudes towards foragers, whom they considered to lead a harsh and undesirable life. When ethnographers were able to show that this was not the case (see Altman 1987), this realization – that hunter-gatherers often did not lead the miserable life of desperate poverty that farmers and herders (and early scholars) imagined – became one of the first major insights and intriguing findings of hunter-gatherer studies that continues to inform social thought. The discussion became widely known under the notion of ‘the original affluent society’, coined by Marshall Sahlins (1988). Sahlins relied on time-allocation studies suggesting that hunter-gatherers spend less time on work than people practicing agriculture. This made modern working-hours look less like a unique achievement of Western civilization than a return to what we had before the so-called Neolithic revolution. These findings flagged the drudgery and labour-intensive economic regimes that industrialization had introduced into (most) people’s lives. A rich discussion followed (see Gowdy 1998), highlighting that the affluence of hunter-gatherers is in most cases not to be confused with abundance. Instead of continuously increasing production and maximising output, the main strategy of hunter-gatherers is to accept low production goals and optimise the distribution and use of resources. Instead of seeking to maximise individual material gains, many hunter-gatherers seemed to focus on allowing for plenty of time for leisure, ritual, social relations, and entertainment. Social practices such as sharing (discussed below) and mobility allowed greater access to resources than amongst sedentary people with exclusive property regimes. Not surprisingly, many alternative and post-materialist circles today are attracted to such a way of life.

However, it is important to note that the degree of affluence and its socio-cultural repercussions vary considerably. In drier climates, occasional hardships and food shortages occur more often than in rainforests. In lower latitudes, there is a strong seasonal element, resulting in shifts between more concentrated (and arguably more hierarchical) settlements in the summer months and more dispersed (and arguably more precarious) living during the winter (Mauss 2004 [1904-5]). More importantly, in some places like America’s northwest coast, economies based on hunting, gathering, and fishing provided enough sustenance to allow for permanent settlements. As Brian Hayden (1984) argues, in some places enough surplus food could be converted into more hierarchical social structures through exchange and redistribution feasts to eventually lead to ranks, leaders, and clans, which were effectively avoided by most hunter-gatherers elsewhere. While sharing is a main strategy to facilitate resource access and enable equality, large-scale exchange networks and ceremonial, competitive exchange systems (like the potlatch feasts among northwest coast Indians) enabled hierarchy. In other words, major transformations in socio-political life, including the introduction of inequality and strong leadership positions, of inheritance and succession via descent, etc., may not have taken place as a consequence of the introduction of agriculture. They may have been already taking place within the hunter-gatherer spectrum.

This observation has led to a number of attempts to create sub-categories within the hunter-gatherer spectrum and to emphasise the diversity among foraging groups. Amongst the various attempts to distinguish ‘simple’ from ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers, the distinction between ‘immediate-return’ and ‘delayed-return’ foragers (Woodburn 1998) has been most productive. While ‘immediate-return’ groups tend to consume the fruits of their labour more or less right away, ‘delayed-return’ groups may invest in land, infrastructure, and people that provide returns at a later stage. The point of departure of this distinction is that hunter-gatherer societies are integrated systems, so that an economic transformation may involve a number of socio-political transformations. Transitioning from immediate-return to delayed-return thus involves creating a strong sense of personal property and of social institutions (corporate groups and leadership positions) that protect property between the moment of investment and the moment of return. More recently, other aspects of this integrated system have been studied in greater detail, above all the ideational (or ontological) confidence that immediate-return hunter-gatherers have in their ‘giving environment’ (Bird-David 1990), and the corresponding notions of distributed creativity and performative sociality (see Lewis 2015). Immediate-return systems, it is argued, do not just allow for confidence in being able to make a living tomorrow, but they also free up time and energy that is then spent on art, music, and on engaging intimately with children and with one another. All of these studies underline that the seemingly ‘simple’ systems are in fact, in many ways, rather complex and intrinsically subject to historical and geographical variation. The following paragraphs will briefly outline key aspects of this complexity by dealing with equality, kinship, and ritual.

Hunter-gatherers and (in)equality

Biased views towards hunter-gatherers typically point out that they ‘lack’ several features that dominate the lives of observers, e.g. strong leaders, religious specialists, large edifices, codified laws, written literature, and formal institutions. The counter-movement has been to emphasise what hunter-gatherers have preserved (and which got lost in other contexts), for instance: equality, personal autonomy, freedom of movement, ecological harmony - with a danger of romanticising forager society as the inverse image of conditions found elsewhere. Much of the task of the anthropology of hunter-gatherers has been to debunk false assumptions leading into either of these directions. With regard to the question of equality, ethnographers have pointed out that it is not a given state of affairs amongst hunter-gatherers (and anyone else). The primate heritage seems to be characterised by widespread hierarchy (see Boehm 1993) from which human foragers managed to break away. Having few material possessions or moving places frequently is not a guarantee for equality. Whatever the material conditions, particular cultural lifeways have to develop for egalitarianism to be transmitted across generations. In other words, equality among humans is not a default that does not require any historically grown socio-cultural practices (see Widlok & Tadesse 2005).

Quite to the contrary, any successful form of equality is typically achieved by a host of practices that are generally known as ‘levelling practices’, techniques that prevent individuals from becoming dominant; from converting, for instance, hunting success into lasting asymmetric dependencies and more generally from creating and accumulating capital in the hands of particular individuals or groups. Sharing, and specifically ‘demand sharing’, is a common strategy that regularly diffuses any inequalities between those who happen to have more than others (Peterson 1993, see also Widlok 2017). ‘Demand sharing’, closely related to ‘tolerated scrounging’, allows those in need to take initiative in the (re-) distribution of goods. Instead of waiting for an alm that may (or may not) be given according to the discretion of the giver, forms of demand sharing are a morally accepted and socially expected behaviour among many hunter-gatherers. It typically requires the owner to justify why something may be kept. It also makes hoarding difficult and often asking can be done implicitly, via a silent demand of a gesture or simple taking. Another example of levelling practices is gambling, such as the gambling of arrows among the Hadza, a group of a few hundred hunter-gatherers in Tanzania (Wooburn 1988). Here, arrows are the stakes in gambling games, which result in any hunter carrying arrows of other men in his quiver, which in turn has implications for meat distribution. Since the maker of an arrow can make claims on game shot with his arrow, this means that the more successful hunters regularly have to give up meat to others. Gambling is also widespread in Aboriginal Australia and those who gain are expected to play until inequalities even out. Another levelling practice is known as ‘insulting the meat’ and has been documented for the !Kung, the largest and best-known group of southern African hunter-gatherers (Lee 2003). Here, the meat provided by a hunter is systematically and rigorously talked about in negative terms (‘insulted’) which prevents hunters from boasting and exploiting their hunting luck for the domination of others, and for creating personal dependencies and obligations to them. A model known as ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’ (Boehm 1993) suggests that these egalitarian systems are actually not free of attempts to dominate, but that equality is maintained through strategies of the many who are dominating those few who otherwise would rise to positions of domination. There are, therefore, a number of informal social institutions that, when taken together, nudge people towards more equal relations and away from more hierarchical ones: mobility patterns allow people to ‘vote with their feet’ by avoiding lasting dependencies, as people cannot be forced to stay. Rituals strengthen communal bonds rather than individual specialists. And systems of universal and performative kinship avoid strong lineages emerging. Not all of these strategies are found in all hunter-gatherer societies. However, hunter-gatherers are characterised by bundles of levelling practices, and the resilience and reappearance of hunter-gatherer societies relies to a large extent on these levelling practices being kept in place across generations. Conversely, we are now in a better position to explain why there are (sub)cultures in which some hunting and gathering are practiced, but which on the whole look very different from the majority of what we call hunter-gatherer societies.

Hunting outside the context of hunter-gatherer societies has both continuities and discontinuities with what we find in the hunter-gatherer contexts. Hunting involves the taking of a life; it invokes the unintelligibility of death, of killing, and of having to kill in order to live. Therefore, the relationship to the animal killed and the hunting practices are universally marked and hedged by ritual acts and special uses of language – including in ‘modern’ hunting. Nevertheless, two instances of hunting, however similar they may be in outward appearance, can involve rather different political institutions and different spiritual connotations. In the more recent history of Europe and its colonial satellites, hunting is closely associated with privilege and hierarchy. The landholding gentry held hunting rights over its large stretches of land which turned hunting into a symbol for (over-)lordship and domination. It also created the poacher as someone who not only illegally hunts but who also defies the sovereignty of kings, clergy, and lordships and who is consequently threatened with extremely harsh penalties (see Thompson 1975). The connection between hunting and ruling has been intimate across a large spectrum of modern political systems including fascist, communist, and colonial rulers, and it continues to be a strong marker of social distinction and power. In many ex-colonies, the nation-state and its representatives consider themselves to be the owners of wild animals (and sometimes of wild plants, too). This often automatically criminalises indigenous hunter-gatherers and has frequently led to the expulsion of local people from wildlife reserves based on an ideology of categorically separating people from wildlife.

Since hunting in European nation-states and in the colonies is associated with power-holders and domination, it is very different from the socio-political embedding found amongst hunter-gatherers. This is not only true in economic and political terms, but also with regard to the relationship between hunters and environment, particularly their prey. In his study Grateful prey, Robert Brightman (1993) gives a detailed account of the religious ideas and hunting strategies of subarctic indigenous hunters, in this case of the Cree Indians of the Hudson Bay. Here, the notion of the game animal as offering itself to the hunter, who in turn has a responsibility for that animal, is widespread. Animals are considered to be, in some respects, like humans, and in other respects seen as unlike humans, as depending on them but also as a potential spiritual threat. The personalization of the prey is deeply ambivalent. Rane Willerslev, in his ethnography of indigenous people of northeastern Siberia (2007) also underlines the point that hunting in these instances is never straightforwardly utilitarian, since there is an important spiritual dimension to it, stemming from the giving and taking of life. As in personal relationships, the exchange between humans and their environment is often conditional. It depends on performative skills and mutual atunement, including a degree of tricking, deception, and retribution, as well as gratefulness and respect (see Breyer & Widlok 2018). These ambivalent tendencies tend to culminate as part of hunting, which elevates this practice for hunter-gatherers to more than just a way of getting meat or of passing their time.

Gatherers, gender and comparisons

A broadly parallel picture emerges with regard to gathering and collecting wild foodstuff. There are two aspects to this: firstly, it has been pointed out that in terms of food quantity, nutrition, and food security, gathering undomesticated plant food is much more important to hunter-gatherers than the hunt, even though ideologically there is commonly an emphasis on game meat. Scholarly preoccupation with the hunting aspect of the hunter-gatherer way of life may therefore be biased, since at least in terms of quantity, gathering is in many settings the main means of survival. Since it is mostly women who concentrate on gathering, the old picture of ‘man the hunter’ (Lee & DeVore 1986) began to be complemented by that of ‘woman the gatherer’ (Dahlberg 1981). This is an oversimplification, since even men who go out hunting often return with gathered fruits (rather than meat) while women’s gathering may include capturing small animals such as lizards and birds. The line between what constitutes ‘hunting’, and who is involved in it, thereby becomes more blurred than anticipated (Kästner 2012). Without the keen observations of women reading animal tracks and movements, many hunts would not be successful. Moreover, collective hunts in forest areas often involve the whole camp, regardless of gender. Despite cases in which some of the meat may be reserved for men (or to particular relatives of the hunter), women in many hunter-gatherer societies enjoy equality that compares favourably with most other societies (see Leacock 1998). This includes their access to resources, but also their social standing and status, their autonomy in making decisions (for instance, in cases of infanticide) and their room for agency. Men, on the other hand, often engage in what may be considered ‘female’ activities, not just gathering but also looking after children (see Hewlett 1991). Despite a frequently observed division of labour, women and men are often equally involved in relevant practices, including economic decisions, politics, healing, and ritual affairs. This point has been particularly intensively debated with regard to the case of Aboriginal Australia where senior initiated men tend to be seen as the guardians of secret-sacred knowledge. Here, more recent studies have shown how women influence rituals from which they are formally excluded, so that kinship relations may override gender in ritual (Dussard 2000). More generally, ritual among hunter-gatherers is considered to be an integral part of making a living off the land (see below).

Although in comparison to hunting, gathering has been somewhat under-theorised in anthropology, the term ‘collector’ is occasionally also used synonymously with hunter-gatherers (and sometimes is restricted to more sedentary foragers). Yet in most instances, the goal of gathering items is not accumulation – in contrast to the case of art collectors, hobby collectors, or ‘hoarders’ in industrial societies. Although there is a sense of ownership in what individuals gather, gathered food items are prime objects of sharing (Widlok 2017). Sometimes, items get stored – for instance, fruit may be left to ripen in underground sand borrows – but as soon as they are brought back into the open, they are subject to intense (demand) sharing. Moreover, the attitude that informs the integration of hunter-gatherers into market and labour economies seems to be informed more by their gathering than by their hunting habitus. In my own field research with ≠Akhoe Hai//om in Namibia, I have observed people who basically forage in their small gardens, checking on small quantities of ripe fruit on a daily basis rather than waiting for a day of harvest. Similarly, their taking on day-labour seems to follow very much the logic of gathering: foraging on day-labour opportunities, as it were. Several authors have therefore pointed at similarities between hunter-gatherer ways of life and those occupying niches in large-scale societies, for instance travelling artisans or so-called peripatetics who live as mobile blacksmiths or other specialists at the margins of sedentary societies (Rao 1987). One may also be inclined to include other ‘labour minorities’, such as deposit bottle collectors, dumpster-divers, day labourers, prostitutes, and others who in one way or another ‘live for the moment’ (see Day et al. 1999). It has been suggested that what connects these disparate cases is not so much the technique of generating an income, but the ‘anarchic solidarity’ (Gibson & Sillander 2011) that comes with it. This refers to a strong sense of mutual support and equality that is paired with the ability to share conventions of appropriate behaviour without a centralised authority figure or the codified rules policed by the state.

That said, there continue to be considerable differences between modern subcultures and hunter-gatherers. The former are typically integral (even though marginalised) parts of larger polities, while the latter usually enjoy a much larger degree of autonomy. While many subcultures of urban foragers are forced into their precarious positions (for an example see Rakowski 2016), most hunter-gatherers consider their way of life not to be ‘second-best’ and a matter of desperation, but rather one of considerable social and personal value that has proven its adaptability and resilience over many generations. While some subcultures may incorporate features that are also found in hunter-gatherer societies, they are in many ways only able to do so as a minority living among a majority that leads a different life. By contrast, within hunter-gatherer societies, their values and practices are practiced by all. They are the mainstream and ‘normal’, even though the size of these groups is very small indeed as they often only count a few hundred individuals. Thus, it is not only true that not everyone who hunts and gathers is living in a hunter-gatherer society, but also that hunter-gatherers share features with non-hunter-gatherers, in particular with some modern subcultures, without necessarily being as integrated into larger encompassing socio-economic systems.

The importance of extreme small-size of hunter-gatherer groups has recently been emphasised by Nurit Bird-David (2017) and it points, again, to the question of how one might compare instances of hunting and gathering across enormous stretches of scale (as well as across time and place). Interestingly, there are two major opposing positions within anthropology that, at their extreme, both discourage comparison, if for very different reasons. Those who consider hunter-gatherers to be closer to ‘human nature’ are disinclined to compare them to any other societies, since the latter are said to follow rules that are a product of a complex cultural history which are assumed to be largely absent in the case of hunter-gatherers. Those who consider today’s hunter-gatherers to be merely the impoverished product of encapsulation by dominant neighbours dispute their capacity to create and maintain foraging as a cultural system from within, and therefore also do not grant them the status of ‘independent’ cases for comparison. However, it is likely that at the heart of the matter is not an intrinsic problem of hunter-gatherer societies, but rather difficulties in the discipline of anthropology of determining what counts as ‘a case’ and of understanding what comparative method(s) entail (see Candea 2019) – and ultimately, what counts as ‘a society’, ‘a community’, or ‘an individual’. None of these terms are neutral as they are filled with assumptions – usually generated from non-hunter-gatherer situations. If the subordination of individuals to a ruling authority or structures of domination defines a society, then we may either conclude that hunter-gatherers do not live in societies or that our notion of society is not universal and broad enough to capture human relationships that bind people together across all cases. The ethnography of hunter-gatherers therefore continues to generate critical reassessments of key notions in social theory. Hunting and gathering, as Tim Ingold (2000: 313) pointed out, is not just a ‘technological regime’ independent of the social relations of those who happen to neither domesticate crops or herds. Consequently, if these groups have more in common than their subsistence techniques, this should also show in domains of life that may at first appear to be less directly connected to hunting and gathering (less, say, than sharing and human-animal interaction), such as the domains of kinship and ritual, for example.

The social relations of hunter-gatherers

Hunter-gatherers across the globe differ in their kinship systems, even though statistically bilateral kinship is encountered most frequently among them (that is, kinship as a broad network that does not strictly follow a ‘pedigree’, a line of descent). Amongst pastoralists and horticulturalists, patrilineal descent (reckoning kinship through the male line) dominates, but it also occurs among hunter-gatherers (Keesing 1975: 134). The ≠Akhoe Hai//om are a case in point insofar as they practice cross-sex naming, which means that daughters receive their father’s family name and sons receive their mother’s family name, which effectively prevents the emergence of strong descent groups, lineages, and clans as corporate agents. Moreover, like many other hunter-gatherers, ≠Akhoe Hai//om may be said to have a universal kinship system; that is to say, they readily incorporate everyone with whom they are co-resident into the kinship network so that their family formation is not fully predicated on blood-ties, unlike the American kinship system (see Schneider 1980). They disregard a strong separation between ‘matrilines’ and ‘patrilines’, and between linear and non-linear kin, for that matter. Given the overall small number of persons in this group, links between people are ‘multirelational’ (Bird-David 2017), insofar as everyone is in many overlapping relations to everyone else. The notion of being a ‘member’ in a single abstract kinship category is not common in hunter-gatherer systems. Rather, kinship may be said to be performance-based, i.e. you achieve a certain kin relation through actions that comply with the expectations for that kin relation. Practices of care can create ‘parental’ kin; practices of friendship and mutual assistance can performatively bring about ‘siblingship’. Thereby, you can become kin to someone who behaves appropriately but who may be distant from you (in terms of genetics or descent). Correspondingly, cases are reported in which those who do not share their lives anymore in a particular way can also lose their status as kin (Bird-David 2017). As mentioned earlier, this does not apply to all hunter-gatherers, but it occurs much more often in hunter-gatherer settings than it does elsewhere. Again, the Australian cases have been critical in many of these debates. This is partly because foundational texts in social thought (e.g. by Emile Durkheim or Marcel Mauss) at the beginning of the twentieth century were informed by early ethnography that came out of Australia, and to some extent North America. Another reason is the extraordinarily complex and varied structure of many Australian kinship systems. Moreover, in a very recent contribution, Doug Bird et al. (2019) have analysed Australian forager ethnography to argue that despite small residential groups, the Martu of the Western Desert of Australia are actually part of large social networks that typically involve social relationships beyond kin relatives. This undermines the widespread assumption that human sociality was conditioned exclusively in tight, small groups of ‘bands’ in human evolution. Rather, even apparently isolated foragers took part in large and complex societies linked through ritual and an expansive social network. These debates illustrate two recurrent challenges in hunter-gatherer studies and in social thought more generally: images of hunter-gatherers (and of humanity more generally) are often wrongly coloured by the assumption that their social relations are simply small-scale versions of present-day modern state societies with clear-cut social roles and individuals occupying these roles (Bird-David 2017). At the same time, images of hunter-gatherers (and of humanity more generally) are also wrongly coloured by the assumption that they are extreme cases of the closely-knit farming communities found in the immediate past of modern state societies with its villages and corporate descent groups, instead of being part of open and expansive networks (Bird et al. 2019).

The fact that some of the arrangements that characterise hunter-gatherer relationships (for instance performativity, or integration of distant people as kin) are also found in the patchwork families of modern urban societies is not, it seems, a coincidence. In both instances kinship ties are not ‘burdened’ with issues of political power, with the control of women by men and of juniors by seniors, with succession to office, or with an indispensable reliance of inherited property for living one’s life. And in both cases we find a high premium given to personal autonomy and open networks paired with an intrinsic interest in other people as particular beings rather than as representatives of social categories. Hunter-gatherer ethnography therefore provides important lessons for understanding social and cultural life, not because it is closer to an assumed natural condition but because it departs in many ways from the dominant ways of farmers and herders – while not being exceptional to the extent that a comparison would not be possible.

Rituals of hunter-gatherers

A similar summary can be made with regard to the domain of hunter-gatherer ritual. Again, some patterns emerge, but without there being a single set of religious ideas and practices associated with hunting and gathering. In fact, it has been repeatedly questioned whether the dominant idea of a religion (defined as a sacred sphere separate from the secular) holds for hunter-gatherer contexts at all. Their rituals seem to be conspicuously disconnected from any direct interaction with a distant creator-god. Rituals are typically not considered to be sacrifices or other forms of ‘striking a deal’ with deities, ancestors, or other spiritual beings. Consequently, many rituals lack the sense of devoutness and dogma. Often rituals are transacted through intergroup exchange, as in Aboriginal Australia, where a whole category of ritual activities is known as ‘travelling business’ in which ritual songs, dances, objects, and emblems have been transferred across the whole continent (Widlok 1992). Among hunter-gatherers of the central African forest, rituals are regularly paid for in such transactions. This is not seen as curtailing their power but rather amplifies their playful and emotional value (Lewis 2015). Ethnographers like Mathias Guenther (1999) have long been pointing at the degree of playfulness and flexibility that characterises hunter-gatherer life, and in particular the domains that are usually called ‘religious’. At least, this is true for many so-called ‘immediate-return systems’. In other contexts, in particular in Aboriginal Australia, transgressing or disclosing what is secret and sacred can have deadly serious consequences. The excitement of new ritual songs, dances, and objects travelling between places is part of this playfulness, but also the fact that ritual activities are often a blend between skilful art performances, entertaining group gatherings, and matters of concern such as healing and caring for the social and natural environment. This is true for ritual actions like the San trance dance, which combines healing with play entertainment and dance performance (Widlok 1999: 249). Dances that may begin as ‘just play’ can involve sincere healing, and most stories and ritual actions have an open, entertaining ‘reading’ as well as a serious, at times secluded, and powerful one. Combining serious issues with elements of ‘serious play’ is also apparent in the ‘mythical’ trickster figures that are prevalent among hunter-gatherers (and beyond). Tricksters are ambivalent not only as superhuman shape-shifters or messengers of superhuman forces, but also as tricking others and as being tricked - and as being laughed about. Where trickster stories and trance dances occur, we find parallel social and political relations of hunter-gatherer groups predicated along similar lines. Peter Gray (2009: 484) speaks of the prolonged social play in these societies as characterised by ‘voluntary participation, autonomy, equality, sharing, and consensual decision making’. At the same time, ritual has been identified as one possible entry-point for emerging inequalities (see Woodburn 2005 and other contributions in Widlok & Tadesse 2005).

Jerome Lewis has recently suggested that attraction, enjoyment, excitement, and entertainment are the main driving forces in the economy of ‘spirit play rituals’ among Mbendjele, central African forest hunter-gatherers (2015: 18). Thus, the playfulness and the role of being attracted to engaging with one another in ritual performance, which was previously considered to be little more than a side-effect, has now entered central analytical stage. Playfulness appears to be a key motivation for engaging in these rituals and for regulating the seemingly ‘anarchic’ social life of hunter-gatherers. The same pattern of play seems to inform not only what one may want to call the religious sphere but also other aspects of human life, such as sharing and ultimately even hunting itself. There seems to be a fairly close match, at least in some of the cases, between hunting practices and ritual ones: hunter-gatherers can be highly tolerant with regard to alternative opinions and interpretations, for instance when interpreting the tracks of game animals, keeping options open long into the hunt (see Liebenberg 1990). A similar acceptance of heterodoxy and flexibility with regard to contextual, situational factors is also found in the religious domain and in the domain of ethical judgements of some hunter-gatherer groups. However, a strong sense of ‘Law’ may prevail in others, above all in Aboriginal Australia and in the case of the northwest coast of America. The argument here is therefore not that there is a causal relation between hunting and religion (or vice versa) but rather that hunter-gatherers in many instances train and cultivate similar ways of going about things across these domains. The playfulness and flexibility of African hunter-gatherers is found across domains, and so are the harshness and rigidity found in both religious and kinship affairs of hunter-gatherers in Australia and the northwest coast.

Conclusions: hunting and gathering in past, present, and future

In the early stages of anthropology, the fact that hunting and gathering predates other human economic practices led to the assumption that they somehow constitute the simplest building blocks of human social life and therefore held the key for understanding humans in general or ‘human nature’. This was the view, for instance, put forward in Emile Durkheim’s book The elementary forms of religious life (Durkheim 2015 [1912]) which relies heavily on what was then known about hunter-gatherers in order to develop a general sociological theory of religion. It also applies to the early work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Many assumptions entertained by Durkheim and other early theorists about hunter-gatherer ethnography turned out to be wrong, even though – arguably – they have been able to draw interesting conclusions from them. Durkheim was wrong, for instance, to think of Australian hunter-gatherers as featuring a particularly simple religion (or society for that matter). Their mythology and their kinship systems are among the most complicated on this planet.

At the same time, studying hunter-gatherers may still lead us towards an improved understanding of religion and other aspects of cultural life. Rather than seeing religion primarily as a system of codified beliefs that lends itself to particular forms of political domination, we may conceive of it more broadly in terms of ‘serious play’. What has been pointed out for hunter-gatherer religion is also true for their economic and social practices: they are not entirely exceptional. Hunter-gatherer ways of practicing religion are reminiscent of sub-strands in other religious traditions (see Turner 1999). Hunter-gatherer ways of organising access to shared resources may inspire changes in urban or digital settings (Widlok 2017). What makes the hunter-gatherer ethnography so relevant for anthropological thought is not that it was entirely different from all other ways of life, nor that it often seems particularly attractive to post-industrial urbanites today. Rather, it is the fact that it enriches the spectrum of possible lifeways that humans have been able to bring about – and it enriches our attempts to better understand how humans create any particular socio-cultural environment in the first place.

Contemporary hunter-gatherers and their descendants face enormous difficulties when trying to maintain their way of life in an economic and political environment that is hostile to them. Their number is decreasing as dominating neighbours have forced them to give up their ways of life. Correspondingly, it becomes ever more difficult to live a hunter-gatherer life and to share that life as an ethnographer. Much anthropological work with hunter-gatherers and their descendants is therefore dealing with issues of land rights, health and education, political mobilization and participation, of maintaining local languages and culture as heritage. Hunter-gatherers themselves are increasingly involved in determining the direction of anthropological research in ways that is relevant and beneficial to them.

At the same time, hunter-gatherer studies continues to be a burgeoning field. Even seemingly abstract and ‘old-fashioned’ anthropological pursuits, such as the collection of genealogies, mapping hunting sites and trails, documenting stories and everyday language, can gain applied relevance in court cases on land rights, in revitalization programmes, and in political conflicts with states and majority populations. Moreover, existing ethnography proves to be a fertile ground from which innovative anthropological explanations continue to emerge. They may teach us about hunter-gatherer culture and what makes it intrinsically valuable, and they may enable us to look differently at other cultural traditions. Once we learn that some people perceive the cosmos as capricious and populated with whimsical powers, we find this perception not just among foragers but also elsewhere. When hunter-gatherers teach us that for some people indulgence is a value, but achieving status through distinction is not, we may not only notice this stance in the documented past before farming or in the utopias of distant futures. Rather, we may be able to better trace practices and cultural repertoires seen and realised among hunter-gatherers in a variety of contemporary contexts elsewhere. After all, the ethnography of hunting and gathering was never only about a group of strange ‘others’, it has always been about them and us as fellow humans.

References

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Note on contributor

Thomas Widlok is Professor for Cultural Anthropology of Africa at the University of Cologne. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and is author of Living on Mangetti (1999, Oxford University Press) and of Anthropology and the economy of sharing (2017, Routledge). He has co-edited Property and equality (2005, Berghahn) and The situationality of human-animal relations (2019, Transcript-Verlag).

Prof. Dr. Thomas Widlok, African Studies, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany. thomas.widlok@uni-koeln.de

Farming

Felix Stein — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 11:23:31 +0000

Andrew Ofstehage

Cornell University

Initially published 23 Jan 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20farming

Abstract:

Farming has become increasingly visible in recent years, following a growing public interest in how food is produced. Anthropologists have been studying farming since the founding of the discipline. This entry summarises the origins of farming and agricultural intensification before analysing three themes of the social anthropology of farming. First, farming is dependent on relations of power and capital. Second, farming is deeply engaged with social relations of value, race, and gender. Third, farming has a deep engagement with the physical environment in ways that are generative and relational. New themes in the anthropology of farming include a focus on farm workers and the question of how farming fits into three theories of epochal planetary change in which the dominant influences on the environment and climate are human activity, capital, and plantation agriculture.

Introduction

Food and agriculture are a central and sustaining element of human life both physiologically and socially. Agriculture has also had a major environmental impact. It has transformed much of the U.S. Great Plains and Brazilian Cerrado into fields of grain, and is at least partially to blame for wildfires that threaten the Amazon rainforest and West Papuan forests. It follows that farming has maintained a place of focus within socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology. The root of the term ‘farmer’ is ‘one who collects taxes’ and other duties, and ‘farm’ originally referred to a total rent payment (Donald 1867), but farming is broadly defined as the process of doing agriculture and animal husbandry. It includes the cultivation of plants and the raising of livestock for food, feed, fibre, and sometimes fuel. Academics make sense of farming in different ways. Agronomists often study conservation and how to maximise food production. Economists frequently ask themselves how farmers respond to markets, incentives, and costs. Rural sociologists and anthropologists tend to focus on the meanings and relationships of farming. Historically, anthropologists have focused on non-Western, pre-industrial societies, and sociologists on Western, industrial settings, though scholars from both disciplines have blurred these lines. Anthropologists continue to centre on meaning and relationships, but also ask holistically how markets and capital, the physical environment, and social meaning all come together.

Agricultural cultivation is a co-dependent process that involves humans, plants, soils, and animals. It drives and complements systems of exchange, whether through market exchange at farmers markets, large-scale commodity sales and barter, or reciprocal gift exchange between neighbours and within communities. It depends on social relationships with business partners, kin, farm workers, and neighbours. Even seemingly anonymous global soy markets, involving large-scale farmers and multinational agribusinesses, often depend on the trust-based exchange of commodities for agricultural inputs (Wesz Jr. 2014). Farming also modifies plants and animals through domestication and transforms landscapes and soils. It is done both at the scale of local ecologies and communities and at the scale of national agricultural policies and global markets. For reasons of simplicity, this entry divides this multiplicity of the anthropology of farming into three categories of study – the politics and economics of farming (including questions around power, work, and capital), its meaning and social values, and the socio-biological and socio-environmental aspects of farming and food.

Anthropology has always engaged with agrarian people. Proponents of agricultural anthropology, i.e. the comparative, holistic, and cross-temporal study of human interactions with technology, ecologies, and society through agriculture, write that ‘[v]irtually every manifestation of agriculture ranging from shifting cultivation to modern industrial farming has been subject to anthropological study’ (Rhoades & Rhoades 1980: 10). Anthropologists tend not to study agriculture in isolation. Even the most technologically-advanced and capital-intensive farming systems are situated in environments of soil, water, and light as well as in social relationships. Thus, anthropologists tend to build on a holistic view of farming, which allows them to understand farmers and farm communities in a way that highlights their relations with plants and soil, markets and reciprocal exchange networks, and society and state.

Today, fewer and fewer people are directly involved in agriculture. In the United States, economic output from agriculture as a sector leads only educational services and arts, entertainment, and recreation.^[1]lThe global economic transition from farm work to industrial wage labour is driven by the global integration of markets and migration networks (Nash 1994) as well as rising agricultural productivity and mechanization that increase labour productivity and reduce labour demand for farming (Janssen 2018). Yet we still see references to farming everywhere we look today. Talk show hosts and journalists tell us which ‘superfoods’ to eat and which kinds of food are exacerbating hunger in peasant communities (McDonell 2015); trips to the grocery store may include biographies and portraits of the farmers who grew the kumquats on display; popular television programs embed critiques of capitalist and industrial agriculture in their plots (Specht 2013); and we are invited to ‘vote with our money’ to transform broken food systems (Pollan 2006). As the author and activist Michael Pollan brought to the attention of many Western consumers, the foods we eat are increasingly abstracted from place, people, and even plants. A disconnect between consumers and farmers and a growing interest in how food is grown may thus go hand in hand. This distance has brought distrust, and thus consumers want to know if animals were mistreated, crops were genetically modified, or if their shopping list will threaten Indigenous communities or distant rainforests. This growing awareness and concern for food and farming have drawn renewed interest in the anthropological study of food and agriculture. Fortunately, the origins, expansion, and impacts of agriculture have been hotly debated by anthropologists since the founding of the discipline.

Origins of agriculture

With the first agricultural revolution around 12,000 years ago, humans began cultivating and raising their food. This period was also associated with sedentary lifestyles, an increasingly complex division of labour, and the development of art. Early studies of the origins and expansion of agriculture focused on the factors that led humans to shift livelihood strategies, in particular from a nomadic to more sedentary life. These studies focused on environmental factors, population pressure, and co-dependent plant, animal, and human interactions. Marginal Zone theory, for example, proposes that humans turned to agriculture when optimal zones for hunting and gathering could no longer support growing human populations (Binford 1968). Groups of people may have migrated to less abundant zones, where hunting and gathering were insufficient for their survival, and adopted agricultural production. Early animal husbandry may have begun when communities enclosed and fed animals that foraged in gardens (Linares 1976). Marginal Zone theory also suggests a mutual process of domestication that rendered humans and animals interdependent. Evolutionary models of agriculture similarly describe the co-dependency and co-evolution of people and plants as a relationship in which people gain a source of food and plants (Rindos 1984). Critics of Marginal Zone theory claim that it is environmentally deterministic and does not account for cultural and social factors such as power, leadership, or social institutions (Bender 1978; Hayden 1990). A ‘feasting model’ of domestication credits technological advancement (i.e. new fishing technologies, mass seed-collecting techniques, and practices of food processing and storage) for the origins of agriculture. These techniques may have enabled individuals to create a food surplus and then distribute the food strategically through feasts to gain prestige and power (Hayden 1990).

Anthropologists also ask how agriculture became intensive. Intensive agriculture tends to involve shorter fallow periods between crops, an increased use of labour (by humans or machines), and a more intensive use of other inputs such as seeds, fertilisers, or irrigation (Netting 1993). Some writers relate the intensification of agricultural production and animal domestication to a social evolutionary frame of human history. They may, for example, argue that the intensification of human-managed ecologies is a sign of cultural and technological progress (Childe & Daniel 1951). However, a more common approach in anthropology today is to ask how and why agriculture became intensive, without necessarily relating this to normative notions of societal progress. Agricultural communities may, for example, adapt intensive agricultural production strategies to feed growing populations, avoid famines, or respond to ecological constrains (Bruno 2014). Moreover, markets and state coercion have often induced farmers to intensify production, obliging them to shift towards cash crop production to improve household wellbeing (Finnis 2008) or to meet coercive state tribute or tax demands (Godoy 1984). Farmers’ capacity to increase production yields means that anthropologists have been sceptical of Malthusian theories postulating that overpopulation leads to famine (Boserup 1965).

Later work showed that agricultural intensification also depended on certain agro-ecological conditions (Stone & Downum 1999). For example, a region with low or highly variable precipitation or infertile soils may not merit intensification or agricultural production at all. Communities do not necessarily respond to food shortages by intensifying production when the local ecology cannot support intensive agriculture. Instead, they may respond through political action, such as limiting land access to specific ethnic or kin groups (Stone & Downum 1999). Neither is intensification of farming directly correlated with yield increases. In the late 1970s, Clifford Geertz developed the term ‘agricultural involution’ to describe the growing social complexity and intensification of human agricultural labour that comes under outside pressure. The term places social change at the intersection of agricultural change and political and economic environments (Geertz 1970). Geertz showed that, along with population growth, it was three centuries of Dutch colonialism (from the seventeenth century) and the introduction of new crops and technologies (i.e. transplanting, land preparation, and double cropping) which increased overall agricultural production in Indonesia. Yet, production continued to be labour-intensive and labour productivity remained stagnant. The notion of agricultural involution considers population density, colonialism, and technology together. Thereby it holistically describes the social and physical causes of agricultural intensification.

Regardless of the relative merits and pitfalls of intensification, farming communities may decline to pursue agricultural intensification. Swidden farmers in Indonesia, for example, carefully balance land, labour, and time as they apply their ‘unique knowledge of their environment and how to exploit it’ (Dove 1985: 384). Similarly, British colonial farming practices were not rejected by West African farmers out of ignorance, but out of a preference for their own agronomically-derived and tested practices (Richards 1985). Risk management, market incentives or lack thereof, and political and social structures all co-determine if families will pursue agricultural intensification (Stone 2001). State and colonial governments, for example, have pushed intensification through both the violent enforcement of colonial demands and semi-voluntary enrolment in green revolution agriculture, which began worldwide in the 1960s and consolidated in the 1970s (Franke 1974).

Relatedly, agriculture may seem to sit at the end of an evolution from hunting and gathering to pastoralism to farming, but people may choose to avoid agriculture and sedentism in favour of mobility and flexibility. Hunting and gathering communities can enjoy greater amounts of leisure time than farming communities (Sahlins 1972). Marshall Sahlins’ theory of the ‘original affluent society’ proposes that hunter-gatherers can satisfy their everyday needs without agriculture. They may eschew the benefits of intensive farming in favour of the lower labour demands that come with hunting and gathering. While the caloric output per person tends to be greater in farming communities, this involves trade-offs. Agricultural production requires more work, necessitates sedentary lifestyles, and often reduces nutritional diversity. Life without agriculture can demand less work per person and it can provide access to a diverse and nutritious diet (Lee 2017). Alternatives to sedentary agriculture also provide political benefits. Populations of farmers in the Highlands of Southeast Asia pursue mobile forms of farming to avoid state control (Scott 2010). The members of these mobile communities plant crops that require little care and can be left in the ground for long periods of time. They cultivate land that is difficult to access, but easy to find cover in. Using this style of ‘escape agriculture’, farmers may adapt their crops, labour, and fields to escape the state surveillance and control that settled, sedentary agricultural farming communities cannot avoid.

Agriculture is closely linked to the development of states and societies. In the Southern Moche State in the arid Moche Valley of Peru, agriculture depended heavily on irrigation systems – the control of which afforded a centralised, expansive state (Billman 2002). Extensification (or, the expansion of farmland area under cultivation) and intensification of agriculture in the Alps of Europe in 1000 AD required clearing forest to extend arable land and reducing the fallow period to intensify production. Both processes were directed by land-controlling elites who used the profits of increased production to consolidate their control of territory and people (Wolf 2010). Sociologists have similarly argued that agriculture reflects and guides the power of state systems in the present day (Friedman & McMichael 1989). Agriculture can increase the amount of calories produced per person and make sedentary life more viable, yet it also enables the control of society by states (Scott 2017).

The origins of agriculture, causes of intensification, and the relation between the rise of agriculture and the rise of states and societies are important milestones in human history. They tell us how we as a human race became who we are today. The way anthropologists debate and find evidence for these milestones also says a lot about the discipline as a whole. Anthropologists trace the comparative origins of agriculture to human processes of population growth and migration in industrial and agrarian societies, but also to non-human processes in which plants and animals developed co-dependence with humans. Agricultural intensification is a response to population pressure but also to political pressure, and it always remains dependent on political developments as well as considerations of risk, value, and agro-ecologies. The following sections discuss three ways in which anthropologists engage with agriculture today: political economy, meaning-making in agriculture, and engagements with natural environments.

Political economy: power and capital

A key anthropological contribution to the study of farming is placing that activity within relations of power and capital. We see the importance of power in the origins and implications of agricultural intensification as well as in the everyday realities of farming today. Debates on the nature of agrarian change under capitalism, or the ‘agrarian question’, begin with Marx’s Capital (Marx & Engels 1967) and continue through the development of Marxist thought (see Kautsky 1988; Lenin 1964; Chayanov 1966). The agrarian question asks what happens to peasants and farmers in a capitalist economy. Karl Marx proposed two pathways for the peasantry: that they will eventually become wage labourers, or that they will become a collective political unit (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). The first pathway is largely a transition from peasantry into wage labour with a few landowners rising to a new ‘rural middle class’ and ‘completing the transition to a fully capitalist mode of production’ (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). The second pathway would be a gradual coalescence of peasants into a collective political unit of agricultural production on a national scale (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). Today the agrarian question tackles similar questions of how peasants and small farmers engage with and resist capital, but with greater attention to how these struggles intersect with other criteria such as gender and ecology (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010b).

Power and capital operate on different scales, from local communities to global commodity flows. Farming communities, for example, are shaped by the scale and type of agriculture practiced nearby. Large-scale, industrial farming has at times been associated with less vibrant forms of community life, centralised economic activity, and greater dependency on large capital providers and the political power of the state. Communities associated with small-scale, less capital-intensive farming tend to attract more diverse small businesses and may develop a richer community life (Goldschmidt 1978). That said, farming communities can also reinforce capitalist values of farming. During the 1980s US farm crisis, in which falling commodity prices and farm debt led to widespread farm foreclosures, neighbours blamed each other for falling into debt and losing their farms (Dudley 2002). Elsewhere during the same crisis, farmers often eschewed ‘traditional’ values of farming, such as land stewardship, deeply-held religious beliefs, and family-centred decision making, in favour of individualism and profitmaking (Barlett 1993). At a global scale, sugar creates relations of power and capital, linking Caribbean sugar plantations and the rise of industrial work in Europe. The early use of slave labour on sugar plantations and later exploitation of Caribbean farmworkers created cheap sugar, which in turn sustained a growing industrial working class in Great Britain (Mintz 1985). Importantly, while this entry focuses on farming, Sidney Mintz’ work shows the importance of considering food consumption and farming together.

We also see the impact and power of capital in terms of the essential means of agricultural production: seeds, labour, soil, and other inputs. Plant breeding in the Americas has culminated in a mostly undemocratic seed economy. Traditions of local plant breeding, seed saving, and seed exchange have here become dominated by state-supported breeding centres which focused on productivity and market demands. The seed economy has subsequently become governed by multinational seed companies that restrict seed saving or exchange, selling seeds as technological packages along with pesticides and other agro-chemicals (Kloppenburg 2005). Multi-national agribusinesses have often privatised seeds and plant genetics, restricting not only access to seeds but also the ability for farmers to replant them. Further, technological innovations such as genetically engineered seeds and pesticides tend to create treadmills of dependency in which farmers become increasingly reliant on agribusinesses for inputs and expertise (Stone & Flachs 2018). Alternatively, rural communities have reversed this trend by creating seed saver networks to develop, preserve, and share seeds that are suitable to local agro-ecoystems and diets. These networks often support garden landscapes over monocultures, reciprocal exchange over market exchange, and low-input agriculture over high-input agriculture (Nazarea 2005).

While the corporate control of seeds shows the imposition of corporate power, anthropologists also consider how such power is resisted by activists and farmers (Fitting 2010). Participatory, democratic seed exchanges may have the potential to slow and even reverse the active dispossession of farmers and create new forms of ‘seed sovereignty’ (Kloppenburg 2010). At the same time, participatory plant breeding programs may harbour the potential to not only create access to seeds, but to also breed seeds specifically suited for farmers’ agro-ecologies (Almekinders, Thiele & Danial 2007). Seed saving among Tharaka farmers in Kenya, for example, contributes to crop diversity, but depends on strong social organisation for seed exchange (Laberyrie et al. 2014).

Agrochemicals such as soil fertilisers or products that kill plant weeds (herbicides), insect pests (insecticides), and fungal diseases (fungicides), have become a seemingly unavoidable part of the farming landscape. Yet the impacts of their production and use are longstanding and far-reaching, as shown by the pesticide plant disaster in Bhopal, India in 1984. The plant’s explosion, which resulted from lax safety design, poisoned the air of Bhopal and killed thousands, while leaving long-term health risks for the survivors (Fortun 2001).

Alternative markets (e.g. fair trade, organic, and bird-friendly farming) break the binary distinction between corporate vs. non-corporate agriculture. Here, commercial production practices may replace pesticides and synthetic fertilisers with integrated pest management and soil conservation practices. Anthropologists have filled a critical role in understanding these markets by asking who benefits from them, what effect they have on environmental health and economic sustainability, and whether these markets tame or deepen market forces. Farmers markets in the United States have expanded as farmers seek out reliable local markets and consumers hope to support local farming and know where their food comes from. However, like conventional markets, direct trade often involves a host of middlemen, such as processers and inspectors, and coalitions of busy farmers and distracted consumers face a difficult task in challenging conventional food systems (Janssen 2017). Some anthropologists warn that if alternative markets do not create new political possibilities, then they may only be another way of commodifying social and environmental life (Guthman 2007). The ethnographic study of fair trade thus challenges the potential of labelling initiatives for empowering farmers. Labelling tends to come with strict standards for farmers and little oversight for food companies who sell fair trade goods (Lyon & Moberg 2010). Origin labels for such goods as tequila and mezcal (Bowen 2015) or Darjeeling tea (Besky 2013) distinguish products from generic commodities, but fail to address many of the underlying historical and sociopolitical structures that affect farmers and farmworkers. Lastly, organic farming can today be part of industrialised farming, with only some minor differences from conventional agriculture (Guthman 2004). Ethnographic studies thus demonstrate the challenges of disrupting commodified flows of capital. Thinking holistically about how alternative markets work in the context of government policies, historical trajectories, and on-the-ground farming practices lends nuance and depth to how we understand them.

In recent years, land has come into focus for academics, as the threat of a global ‘land grab’ grows (Borras et al. 2012; White et al. 2012). The term ‘land grab’ refers to the large-scale purchase of land, often by foreign corporations, in countries of the Global South. This is a concern for land accessibility as well as national sovereignty. The land grab often dispossesses farming communities of land, sometimes through violent means, and it frequently leads to deforestation, as tracts of forest are converted to agricultural land. Anthropologists may themselves be financially entangled in these processes. For example, TIAA, a pension fund that manages retirement accounts for most U.S.-affiliated anthropologists, has become a major landowner in Brazil, whilst being denounced for environmental destruction and human rights violations (Farthing 2017).^[2]Even here, resistance is possible. Groups such as the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement foment both civil society political action and direct land transfers to support local farming and resist land dispossession (Wolford 2010).

Finally, farming knowledge has come into focus as a form of power as well. Agricultural extension agents have long used money and political influence as tools of imposing industrialised and modern farming practices (Arce & Long 1992). They continue to frame scientific Western agricultural knowledge as expertise and Indigenous knowledge as a form of ignorance (Mitchell 2002). State agencies for agricultural research and extension, and private corporations’ research and development departments, invest in knowledge production and dissemination and tend to focus on cash crops and exportable goods. Anthropologists often work to de-centre this knowledge by studying alternative ways of doing and knowing agriculture. They frequently advocate for the incorporation of and respect for Indigenous knowledge in rural development (Sillitoe 2006) and on many occasions they work to recognise non-industrial farming practices and knowledge as legitimate (e.g. González 2001).

Culture: meaning and identity

Farming is always imbued with cultural and social connections, a fact that is increasingly recognised in the study of food production. Agronomists can explain how much nitrogen is necessary to grow a high yield of corn, but anthropologists show that, for example, farmers may use ideas of hot and cold to inform their use of manure (González 2001). Economists can show that cultivating crops without using any kind of tillage saves farmers time and money, but anthropologists may find that, for farmers, tillage practices demonstrate their hard work, skill, and masculinity. In agriculture, as in other industries, meaning and collective identities are connected to work and practice (Holland et al. 2001). Gender, race, and class also structure how farmers perform agriculture and how they access land, credit, and agricultural knowledge. Anthropologists thus often foreground the importance of meaning-making, identity, and the value of agriculture to people.

For example, notions of what constitutes ‘good farming’ connect farm work to a farmer’s reputation and standing in a community. Being considered a good farmer can be used to control in-group colleagues and also assert authority and legitimacy against other groups. Industrial farmers attribute social value to industrial practices and landscapes – claiming a certain rationality and cultural value as well as a concrete benefit of ‘feeding the world’ (Burton 2004). White farmers in Zimbabwe may claim to be good farmers to legitimise their calls for land access. They argue that their stewardship of the land and farming skills (expressed in technical know-how and yield maximization) give them more legitimate claims to the land and to the identity of being farmers than Indigenous or Black farmers may have (Suzuki 2018). Holdeman Mennonites in Brazil also connect moral frames of being good farmers, good family members, and good community members by limiting land holdings within their communities to better distribute land and by limiting the use of GPS-guided precision farming technology and large machinery (Ofstehage 2019).

Racism, sexism, and nationalism also affect farming life. They may exclude people from farming by limiting land access, access to credit, and land extension. For example, Black farmers in the United States still fight for land and basic inclusion (Grim 1995) while Black farmers’ cooperatives and unions have in the past struggled for the rights of southern tenant farmers and supported alternative agricultural visions and practices (White 2017). Black farmers thereby not only fight for the right to farm: they also work for recognition of their farming expertise and experience, paralleling and contributing to the struggle for civil rights (McCutcheon 2019). American Indian farmers equally fight for the right to farm on their own terms while often facing condescension and pressure to adopt white farmer attitudes and practices (Biolsi 2018). In Latin America, farmer-to-farmer exchanges support and enrich alternative ways of farming, resisting dominant trends of modernising agriculture and supporting collective identities of campesino (peasant) agriculture (Holt-Giménez 2006).

Gender, masculinity, and femininity equally structure farming and are structured by it. Farming masculinities may be moulded to fit concepts of modern agriculture. For example, in the United States farm labour has become increasingly centred on men as family farms have transformed from dispersed family labour and decision-making to production dominated by single individuals (Barlett 1993). Peggy Barlett argues that as agriculture has become more of a business-centred activity focused on profit, men in heterosexual farm families have excluded women from both farm work and decision-making. More recently, the image of farming masculinity has shifted away from productivist markers like straight crop rows, weed-free fields, and high yields, to financial markers such as profitability, total acreage, and media presence (Bell et al. 2015; Ofstehage 2018a). Farmers who do not conform to this vision of agriculture can be subject to ridicule or dismissed as hobby farmers. Women farmers are particularly under pressure to demonstrate their business savvy, leading them to understate concerns for the environment, community, and family (Ofstehage 2018a). An alternative to agrarian and industrial masculinities, driven by the sustainable agriculture movement, values cooperation, avoids discourses of ‘toughness’, and readily experiments with new farming technology and practices (Barlett & Conger 2004).

Conceptions of gender linked to agriculture change over time. For example, historically in Andean agriculture, men were often tasked with field-based agriculture and women with pastoral work. As Andean agriculture became more intensive and commercial, soil degradation increased and crop fields cultivated by men encroached upon pastures and common spaces tended by women (Paulson 2003). The changes in Andean agriculture show how economic, ecological, and gender changes are connected and shape each other. Women farmers in the United States face significant institutional, interactional, and symbolic barriers to becoming independent (Keller 2014). US women dairy farmers, for example, have faced barriers when applying for farm credit, in everyday interactions with other (often male) farmers, and even in claiming an identity as a farmer and not as someone’s wife, as a gardener, nor as a hobby farmer. They work to deconstruct the heteronormative figures of the farmer as man and farm-wife as woman in a family unit of gendered labour. They also build new femininities around alternative agricultures of stewardship, community, and work (Shisler & Sbicca 2019). Since concepts such as ‘farmer’, ‘good farmer’ or ‘farming masculinity’ are collectively defined, they remain open to the creation and defense of alternative understandings of gender.

More recent studies suggest that, beyond agricultural practices and attitudes, different ontologies of agriculture may exist. Oil palm cultivation in West Papua is commonly framed in Western worldviews as a conflict between local Indigenous groups and agribusiness. However, to local Marind people the palm itself is a malevolent, anti-social person that haunts dreams (Chao 2018). To take a second example, settler colonialism can be rightly viewed as a conflict over land, belonging, and property. Yet this interpretation may betray fundamental differences in how white settlers and Indigenous communities relate to land (Burow, Brock & Dove 2018). Indigenous communities simultaneously fight for the right to access land and against anyone owning land as property. Thus, conflicts and differences in land use, land ownership, conservation, and degradation can extend beyond struggles over resources or values. Ontological struggles over land ownership and resource use question whether land can be owned at all, or if life can be defined through resources. They speak to broader conflicts between different ways of being in the world, speculative futures, and on-going experiences.

Environment: animals, climate, and soil

The anthropological study of farming has roots in human ecology: that is, in the study of the relationships between people’s political and economic lives and their natural environment. In earlier years, this meant the study of relatively closed agricultural systems and a focus on how culture impacted ecologies. A classic environmental ethnography about the Tsembaga Maring of New Guinea, for example, described a complex socio-ecological system of swidden (or slash and burn) agriculture which balanced fallow periods, pig population, acreage, and food calorie production. This complex system was managed by an intricate ritual cycle that connected spirits to the physical realities of the environment (Rappaport 1967).

Recent trends in anthropology emphasise plant and animal relationships, relationships with a changing climate, the idea that there is a two-way connection between ecologies and humans, and the possibility that their interplay may be generative of altogether new realities. In general, this can be seen as a shift from understanding linear relationships of action and ‘feedback’ to describing more complex relationships. It may also be a shift from the impact of humans on humans in food and agriculture to the impact of humans on non-human actors, worthy of study in their own right.

Taking such a more-than-human approach to ecologies that foregrounds non-human agency decentres people in order to better understand how humans and non-humans affect each other and change together. The Carolina Piedmont pig, for example, is a breed of pig that fetches a high market value, and is considered much more than a mere economic or natural resource. They are descended from hogs native to the Canary Islands and brought to North America by Spanish explorers, later to be abandoned on Ossabaw Island off the coast of the state of Georgia, where they became feral. Later, these pigs were driven from this island for threatening loggerhead turtles, and some ended up in farms in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Today they are prized for their flavour, ‘authenticity’, and ability to thrive on marginal land (Weiss 2016). These pigs are the product of the Spanish conquest, their own biological adaptations to living in a marginal environment, government policies enacted to protect an endangered species, and the work of small farmers in North Carolina. This raises a methodological issue: while participant observation and ethnographic interviews with human subjects are incredibly valuable tools, an adequate description of the ecological complexities of agriculture may require ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Ogden, Hall, & Tanita 2013). Seeking to understand how humans and non-humans act collectively may entail studying the lifecycle of farm animals that co-exist with human populations, or studying the interaction of fungi and plants that make crops grow well. This focus on change, emergence, and multispecies agency has inspired anthropologists to consider plants and animals as agents within production systems rather than as resources. They are changed by human action, but also change human action and thought.

Climate change is an unavoidable component of understanding how farmers engage in plant and animal production. Comparative and social studies of human adaptation and mitigation of climate change takes into account human adaptability to climate changes, but also humans’ attempts to reverse or slow them (Orlove 2005). Anthropologists document agricultural adaptations to climate change (such as seeking cooler fields at higher elevations, changing planting dates, or planting different crops) as well as cultural impacts of climate change. In Peru, for example, highland farmers are cultivating fields at higher elevations and selecting different seeds to adapt. Cultural institutions like the reciprocal work arrangements known as ayni, as well as seed sharing, support this transition (Sayre, Stenner & Argumedo 2019). Anthropologists may be positioned to facilitate adaptation to climate change, but their interventions are limited by local crop preferences, power dynamics, and ecological conditions other than climate change (Siregar & Crane 2011). In any case, they must understand the importance of sociocultural systems in climate change engagement, tensions between normative positions and adaptation, and how climate modeling interacts with everyday aspects of livelihoods (Crane 2010).

In moving toward an understanding of agriculture as a generative and relational process, anthropologists focus on more than just animals. Take the example of soil. Soil structures farmers’ lives and is structured by them (Kawa 2016). It is also subject to care or lack thereof, and soil care has material consequences, such as degradation or conservation (de la Bellacasa 2015). Soils are, in a very real way, generated by human activity, not just degraded or affected. For example, the soils of the Brazilian Cerrado are some of the oldest in the world, and humans played at least a partial role in creating them through repeated wildfires. Today, industrial farmers in the region fertilise these soils intensively. Large-scale farmers describe the land as wasteland and consider themselves experts who can convert a barren desert to a fertile breadbasket (Ofstehage 2018b). Yet the soil also induces farmers to change farming practices. In the Cerrado case, large-scale farmers adopt conservation tillage to reduce soil moisture loss in arid areas and learn to apply calcium carbonate to increase the soil pH. The farmers in this case use this encounter with the soil to create narratives of progress and expertise, claiming a role in improving the land and becoming expert farmers themselves. Land is generated out of biological and material ecosystems as well as forces of the state and capital in ways that shape how well-capitalised and technologically-advanced famers engage with it (Li 2014). Such relational aspects are reflected in studies that ask how alternatives to industrial agriculture can promote new interactions with soil, plants, and animals.

Looking forward

Two important trends in the literature on farming are studies of migrant farm workers and the situation of agriculture in times of epochal planetary change. Anthropologists have a rich history of studying farm labour on which recent scholarship builds. Seth Holmes followed migrant workers who fled Oaxaca due to violence and lack of jobs to labour camps on a Washington berry farm (Holmes 2013). His work connects the everyday lives of farmworkers to health, commodity markets, racism, and work. Similarly, in Brazil’s Northeast, landless farmers are recruited by intermediaries with kin and community relations to work on sugar cane plantations under dangerous conditions for little pay (de Menezes, da Silva & Cover 2012). Migrant sheepherders in Wyoming also work in a precarious and dangerous position as often undocumented workers. On top of that, they need to re-learn to shepherd under capitalist, business-oriented conditions and in a new natural environment (Krögel 2010). In India, the privatization of former commons has pushed landless farmers to migrate within the country and become farmworkers; their internal migration places greater pressure on local landless farmers (Breman 1985). In each of these cases, landlessness and market conditions drive migrants out of rural farming communities and into wage labour. They may at times own land or support communal ties in their original rural communities. Migrant farmworkers in the United States, for example, may work to support coffee farms in Veracruz (Núñez‐Madrazo 2007).

Anthropologists working with agricultural labourers increasingly decentre the farm site as they follow the flow and lives of mobile workers. Rural Indian farm workers are not only living in the countryside, but in moving in and out of agrarian and industrial work, they often get fired and hired with little notice (Breman 1996). The movement of farmworkers from Mexico to the United States is more of a circuit than a migration. Migrants from small agricultural communities of Veracruz, Mexico choose to migrate North in response to worsening coffee incomes back home and a scarcity of workers to harvest the coffee in the US (Griffith et al. 2017). Their incomes from precarious work in the United States then subsidise coffee farms in their home of Veracruz and, having few long-term permanent contracts and facing unfriendly immigration policies, their work in the United States remains temporary.

Studies of farming and agriculture in anthropology are also placing farming within the context of epochal planetary change characterised differently as the ‘Plantationocene’, ‘Capitalocene’, and ‘Anthropocene’. Donna Haraway (2015) suggests that world agriculture is becoming abstracted from place as plants, workers, and land are abstracted from local contexts and brought together again in contemporary plantations. She and other feminist political ecologists call our era the ‘Plantationocene’, to describe this abstraction and mobility of people and plants as well as the racialised work on plantations and farms (Haraway et al. 2016). Similar work shows that plantation farms are characterised by relationships of fixity in which labourers create enduring relationships with each other and the land (Besky 2017) and flexibility in which farm owners commodify land, work, and plants (Ofstehage 2018b). Jason Moore characterises the current era as the ‘Capitalocene’, as he finds it’s driven not by human activity in general, but capitalist human activity. Building on the theory that capitalism may lead to environmental collapse (also known as ‘metabolic rift’), he suggests that the on-going destruction of land and other means of production is not critical for capital, but rather increases the commodification of life and expands capital further (Moore 2012). Socio-ecological crisis in the Capitalocene may expand commodity frontiers as farmers look for cheaper land and labour. The ‘Anthropocene’, or the global era defined by human activity, is also made manifest in farming. This happens differently across distinctive farming landscapes as farmers everywhere have specific encounters and interactions with landscapes. Everywhere, they leave the land and themselves changed (Mathews 2018). As this recent work demonstrates, studies of farming can be informative of far more than food production – we learn about markets, work, environment, value, race, and gender in the way farming is and is not done.

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Note on contributor

Dr. Andrew Ofstehage grew up on a small corn and soybean farm in South Dakota. He earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his work on land, labour, and value among transnational soy farmers in Brazil. He holds a Master of Science from Wageningen University for his ethnographic work with quinoa famers and middlewomen in Bolivia and a Bachelor of Science in Agronomy from South Dakota State University. He is now a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University.

Andrew Ofstehage, 240D Warren Hall, Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States. alo52@cornell.edu.alofstehage@gmail.com.

[1]News release (19 April 2019). United States Bureau of Economic Analysis(available online: https://www.bea.gov/system/files/2019-04/gdpind418_0.pdf, accessed 31 October 2019).

[2]Farthing, L. How TIAA funds environmental disaster in Latin America (6 Jan 2017). NACLA (available online: https://nacla.org/news/2017/01/06/how-tiaa-funds-environmental-disaster-latin-america).

Water

Felix Stein — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 14:42:27 +0000

Veronica Strang

Durham University

Initially published 9 Dec 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19water

Abstract:

Because water permeates every aspect of human existence, ethnographic accounts describe many forms of engagement with it: for example, its centrality to modes of production; its influence on how societies organise themselves socially and spatially; its role in leisure activities and the enjoyment of its aesthetic qualities. Human relationships with water, though culturally and historically specific, share common themes of meaning, recognising water’s essentiality to life, health and well-being at every scale. This often translates into the use of ‘living water‘ in religious rituals, such as baptism or mortuary ceremonies, in which water expresses important ideas about social identity and spiritual movement between material and non-material domains.

The material control of water has long been recognised as vital to gaining and maintaining political power. In recent decades anthropology has focused increasingly on debates about water ownership and rights of access to water, and considered how the control of water reflects social, economic and political relations. There is growing interest in water infrastructures, and how they have often enabled unsustainable practices in water use and management. Today, as the world faces an anthropogenically-created ecological crisis, water issues are central to concerns about climate change, global warming, and increasing volatility and uncertainty in water flows. This has encouraged a new area of anthropological focus on non-human as well as human rights in relation to water. Thus the anthropology of water extends from its multiple uses in everyday life to the major issues that all societies urgently need to address.

Introduction

As the element essential to life and to all processes of production and reproduction, water permeates every domain of human existence. It has always had a background presence in anthropology’s ethnographic literature, where it appears in religious rituals; shapes human spatial organization around water sources; and structures people’s lifeways and modes of production, as well as their ecological knowledge and environmental engagement. However, water itself has not been the focus of anthropological studies until relatively recently. It came to the fore with growing interest in the relationship between the control of water and political power and, more strongly, when environmental anthropology emerged as a lively subfield in response to increasing concerns about sustainability. As societies have begun to realise that the world is facing a human-made ecological crisis, water has become the focus of intense research in multiple disciplinary areas. Anthropology brings to this a vitally important capacity to illuminate its diverse social and cultural dimensions (Hastrup 2011, Hastrup & Hastrup 2015, de Wolff et al. 2019, Wagner 2013).

Human engagements with water take place on every scale, beginning with the most basic physical needs for clean water to maintain health and to ensure bodily and domestic hygiene. Recognition that water is literally essential to all biological organisms means that it has cross-cultural meaning as the ‘substance of life’. This understanding supports important concepts of water as a common good, to which everyone must have rights of access and use, and this fundamental principle permeates many discussions about water ownership and governance. Yet many people lack access to clean water and sanitation for a variety of reasons, including the overuse of limited local resources; disruption of rural lifeways; economic imperatives to migrate to marginal and poorly served urban areas; and insufficient fiscal or technical capacities to create infrastructures for water supply. Such a lack of access to clean water is a key indicator of governmental capacities to provide for people’s most basic needs, and of the deep inequalities existing both within and between societies.

Religion, health and wealth

Anxieties about meeting basic human rights of access to sufficient clean water tend to obscure other aspects of people’s immediate engagement with it, but these are also powerful influences on how people respond to a range of water issues. Water’s essentiality to life means that it has a central place in multiple religious belief systems. In many place-based societies, where what are often described as ‘nature religions’ pertain, its elemental powers are frequently manifested in deities responsible for rain, fertility, and the creation of life. For example, in Africa, Mami Wata, a water goddess valorised in many parts of the continent’s west coast, provides all of these things (Drewal 2008). In Aboriginal Australia, water is the source of cosmogenesis in the creative era known as Dreamtime, in which the world was formed, while the Rainbow Serpent, which is a manifestation of the powers of water, continues to generate life from within the land (Merlan 1998, Strang 2009). In the monotheisms of larger societies, water features as a vital manifestation of a humanised deity’s divine beneficence or, in the form of floods or drought, as an expression of god’s wrath. Thus for many people, access to sufficient and timely water carries an important moral and religious dimension.

Whatever the form of the providing deities, many religious schema also conflate ideas about water and the human spirit, generating visions of ‘living water’, vital to physical and spiritual well-being (Krause & Strang 2013). Such beliefs are central to a host of rituals in which water cleanses, heals, and blesses, and metaphorically carries the spirit between material and non-material domains. The notion of living water is also a response to people’s phenomenological engagement with it as an animated and animating element that is always in motion: shimmering, flowing, appearing, and disappearing. Physical and immediate interactions with water – bathing, drinking, swimming, and observing – provide a range of compelling sensory experiences, which lend emotive weight to people’s thinking about water and what it means (Krause 2016, Strang 2005). Thus, an understanding that water flows through, enlivens, and connects people and places supports important ideas about common substance and identity. These are neatly expressed, for example, in the use of water for rituals of baptism that welcome individuals into particular groups or congregations, or which conjoin them in marriage (Mallery 2011). The inevitable dark side of this understanding is that a vision of identity as literally ‘substantial’ also allows for many anxieties about social and/or physical pollution, and invasions of ‘otherness’ that might compromise individual or collective health and well-being (Strang 2004).

Concepts of holiness, health, and wealth are both etymologically and conceptually related. They express capacities for maintaining (spiritual, bodily, or fiscal) wholeness and flourishing. As well as being seen as fundamental to physical health, the relationship between health and water has seen a transition from assumptions about water’s intrinsic healing qualities (as assumed, for example, in the thousands of holy and healing wells in many parts of the world) to more material notions about the healing properties of water’s mineral content, which led to a major fashion in Europe for spas and baths (Anderson & Tabb 2002). Water’s centrality to processes of production leads to cross-cultural acknowledgement of its essential role in enabling human agency and generating wealth. What constitutes wealth is culturally diverse, but in many societies the relationship between water and wealth is often demonstrated in the ways that the ownership of water, displayed in landscaped gardens, fountains, and pools, provides a key signifier of wealth and social status.

Power and control

As the above implies, the control of water is intrinsically related to economic and political power, and historical and ethnographic research has demonstrated that how water is controlled and distributed provides a precise mirror of social, political, and environmental relations. A classic study of Balinese water temples, for instance, describes the carefully balanced social and hydrological relations mediated by local priests acting as both religious leaders and water managers (Lansing 1991). On a larger scale, it has famously been argued that major infrastructures such as irrigation schemes, requiring the centralisation and coordination of labour, were foundational to the creation of nation states (Hocart 1970). The importance of water in political organization is particularly clear in the historical emergence of ‘hydraulic societies’ dependent upon major irrigation schemes, such as those in Mesopotamia, and in the Indus Valley (Butzer 1976, Giosan et al. 2012, Tvedt & Jakobsson 2006). Karl Wittfogel’s historical analysis of water in China suggested that state capacities to control a vast network of canals was vital for the establishment of powerful imperial dynasties (1957). However, subsequent writers have rejected the argument that the control of water necessarily leads to ‘despotic regimes’, observing that relationships between water and power can take many different forms (Krause & Ley forthcoming).

However, Wittfogel’s more fundamental point, that power and the control of water are inextricably related, remains influential, and contemporary ethnographers have continued to explore how the control of water mediates relations between states and citizens, with access to water often demonstrating persistent social inequalities. For example, the manipulation of weirs, sluices, and water flows in a South Indian irrigation scheme has been shown to reinforce the advantages of village elites (Mosse 2003). In multiple development contexts, gender inequality influences women’s access to and control over water (Coles & Wallace 2005, see also Lahiri-Dutt 2006). The provision of water in Mumbai turns out to be linked to social identity and recognition of ‘hydraulic citizenship’, and leads to the exclusion of marginal groups lacking such recognition (Anand 2017). Shifts in ideology are similarly reflected in water. A strong focus on instrumentalism – a determination to act directively on the material environment – in industrialised societies has been exported, via literal and economic colonialism, to many parts of the world under the guise of development (Lewis & Mosse 2006).

Focusing on the history of the American West, the commodification of water into an asset may mean that ‘capitalism has created over the last 100 years a new distinctive type of hydraulic society, one that demonstrates once more how the domination of nature can lead to the domination of some people over others’ (Worster 2006: 50, see also Escobar 2005, Josephson 2002, Reisner 2001).

Water has its own material powers, of course, in the force provided by water flows. Many societies have harnessed these powers, via channels, water wheels, and mills, to do ‘work’ to support their processes of production, and to direct irrigation to their crops. But water is not always amenable: it also has its own agentive effects in making and unmaking environments and impacting upon human lives. In a world dominated by dualistic ideas of nature as the ‘other’ to culture, water is commonly seen to represent the capacities of the non-human world to reject the authority of human instrumentality. Water’s material forces highlight that such efforts often involve an intrinsic tension – a wrestling for control (Edgeworth 2011). This brings to the fore the reality that every cultural landscape is also a cultural waterscape. Control over water flows is achieved via the imposition of dams, canals, drainage, reservoirs, pipes, and other directive infrastructure that materialises societal ideas, values, and practices in relation to water. As with other forms of infrastructure, such concretization inscribes long-term patterns of human-environmental engagement upon the land and waterscape (Bichsel 2016, Harvey & Knox 2012, Larkin 2013).

Over time, human communities have engaged with water with varying degrees of determination to control its movements and direct its flows into serving their interests. Early societies, and those that have retained pre-industrial economic modes of hunting and gathering, horticulture, and small-scale agriculture, have tended to be conservative in their practices, working with the inherent processes of local ecosystems, and imposing relatively low-key forms of manipulation of the landscape for their purposes. In many larger societies, however, trajectories of human-environmental engagement have been very different, as population growth and technological developments have encouraged more assertive efforts to control water flows. Social and religious changes, in particular movements from nature religions to monotheistic beliefs, have led to notions of ‘dominion’ and the desire to impose patriarchal authority on ‘nature’, often feminised as alternate to male ‘culture’ (Plumwood 1993, 2002). The objectification of nature has also been encouraged by a more scientific lens upon the world, through which ideas about what water is have become ‘disenchanted’, leading to its reconceptualization as H₂O (Illich 1996, Linton 2010).

Greater dominion over water has been realised through new forms of science and technology enabling extensive engineering of the landscape and increasing capacities to direct water flows into supporting the needs and desires of rapidly enlarging human populations. Water usage has risen, in part because of more profligate domestic habits, but also in its use to support societies’ growing dependence on irrigated agriculture, as well as industry itself, which – due to the embodied water in goods and production processes – often results in the movement of water globally from arid environments to densely populated and wealthier temperate regions (Hoekstra & Chapagain 2007, Meissner 2012).

The commoditization of water, and its reductive reframing as a resource or economic asset, has further encouraged utilitarian ideas about the material world as the basis for the provision of ‘environmental services’ or ‘ecosystem services’ to humankind. Patterns of water use in many societies have reflected the dominance of these ideas. In the last century there has been a race to build large dams, canals, and other infrastructures designed to direct water into enlarging urban areas; into hydro-electric generation; and into irrigated agriculture (Khagram 2004). Today over 70% of the Earth’s freshwater is directed into irrigation, and the World Bank has stated that a further 15% will be needed in the next decade to provide sufficient food and energy for the expanding human population.^[1]They are predicting major shortfalls, which raises the prospect of a range of problems, including rising numbers of environmental refugees.

Infrastructure and conflict

Shortfalls in water supply also exacerbate the issues surrounding the management of transboundary water flows which provide opportunities for both collaboration and conflict. The United Nations reports that 145 states share transboundary lakes or rivers (2019). In the last fifty years, 295 international water agreements have been signed, but there have also been thirty-seven ‘acute transboundary water disputes’ and two-thirds of the 263 transboundary river basins lack any framework for cooperative management. With rising demand, and with water flows becoming less reliable (in particular where global warming has diminished the water storage provided by glaciers), there is obvious potential for greater conflict.

Such tensions are readily evident in the controversies relating to the construction of big and ‘mega’ dams, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (built in 1936); the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River (funded by the World Bank in the 1950s); and, more recently, the Sardar Sarovar Damon the Narmada River, and the Three Gorges Dams on the Yangtze River. 57,0000 large dams have been constructed over the last century: these generate nearly 20% of the world’s energy, and assist much of its irrigation. They have supported worldwide population movement into urban areas, and the development of industries. Thus – like the earlier hydraulic infrastructures noted by Arthur Hocart – they have often been seen as integral to the building and flourishing of the nation state (Biggs 2012, Mohamud & Verhoeven 2016, Verhoeven 2015).

However, the human and environmental costs of such large-scale directive engagements with water have also been massive (Rodgers & O’Neill 2012). As well as increasing the potential for transboundary conflicts, their focus on water storage for resource extraction, urban supply, and cheap hydro-electricity has resulted in many human rights violations and, with concomitant social impacts, the displacement of thousands of people living in riparian rural communities (Hwang et al. 2007, Mathur 2006, McDonald-Wilmsen & Webber 2010, Oliver-Smith 2009). Such projects have also resulted in extreme violence at times – such as the massacre of 400 Indigenous people to make way for the Chixoy Dam in Guatamala in 1982. Thousands more have been killed by dam failures; for example the collapse of China’s Banqiao Dam in 1975 killed an estimated 171,000 people.^[2]Huge dams, because of the enormous weight of water that they contain, have also been implicated in causing earthquakes: thus the Zipingpu Dam in Sichuan is thought to have triggered a major earthquake in 2008.

Many of the costs of dams and related water infrastructures are less dramatic but no less damaging. Financially, large dams tend to be uneconomic: they typically overrun predicted levels of investment by up to 96% (Ansar et al. 2014). They also incur major social, economic, and environmental costs. In disrupting hydrological flows, dams are hugely destructive to aquatic ecosystems, and there are human costs as well in the loss of access to water for downstream farmers, fisheries, and tourism. More broadly, irrigated agriculture in many regions has led not only to diminishing harvests, but also to widespread land salination, rendering vast areas infertile even for native vegetation. This is particularly the case in ecologically vulnerable areas such as Australia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and the southern United States, where irrigation has been aimed at producing profitable – but for arid regions, unsuitable – crops, such as cotton, rice, and wheat.

But, as Peter Bosshard, the policy director for International Rivers (an international NGO seeking to protect rivers) notes, ‘[m]any actors have vested interests in building dams’ (2014). It is an area rife with corruption, in which major engineering contractors, irrigation consortia, and others stand to gain considerably, either through huge profits on construction, or through the gaining of water allocations for massive irrigation or hydroelectric schemes.

A notorious example is provided by Cubbie Station: an irrigation venture in south Queensland, so large as to be visible from space (Strang 2013). Cubbie Station’s directors persuaded the Queensland Government to allow it to buy up over 50 water licences, and to build a series of dams along twenty-eight kilometres of the Culgoa River. The station is situated just above the New South Wales border, and diverts about a quarter of the water that would otherwise flow into the Darling River, and thus into the Murray Darling Basin, one of the most intensively farmed and ecologically compromised river basins the world. Unsurprisingly, this upstream abstraction has fuelled considerable inter-state conflict. As well as depriving downstream farmers and other local communities of water, irrigation has destroyed over 90% of the wetlands in the Basin, which formed critical breeding areas for migrating birds. The major beneficiaries are the station’s owners (an international consortia) its directors, and shareholders, and to a lesser extent the rural community for which it provides some employment and other local economic benefits.

Owning water

Major irrigation schemes such as Cubbie Station, and the thousands of other companies and consortia around the world taking control of water through dam building and the acquisition of water allocations, bring to the fore key questions about the ownership of water. For much of human history, water’s status as a common good remained the norm, albeit with some managerial control exercised by powerful groups: for example, the dynastic rulers of hydraulic societies or, in the medieval period, the Church, whose monasteries often provided communities with hydrological expertise and management (Tvedt & Oestigaard 2010). Although many of the traditional common property regimes described by Elinor Ostrom (1990) have undergone major alterations, water continued to be seen, until recently, as a common good.

Patterns of water ownership changed, however, as societies began to build major urban areas which demanded greater investment in technologies for water supply and waste removal. The Industrial Revolution introduced a new level of complexity, both in enlarging conurbations, and generating increasing levels of domestic and industrial pollution. The impacts of these developments were so challenging as to require major reform. In early twentieth century Britain, for example, water supply and waste removal services were initially provided by a mix of municipal authorities and Victorian philanthropists. The results were patchy, leading to considerable inequality within cities, in terms of access to piped supplies, and between cities and rural areas, the latter often remaining reliant upon local wells and pumps well into the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, democratic ideals demanded comprehensive provision of piped supplies and the public ownership of water. A national network of local water authorities was established, with water users paying for services via property rates. This worked well until the costs of maintaining aging water infrastructures became more pressing, and politicians were faced with the vote-losing prospect of raising charges for water. The Thatcher government, in accord with its conservative ideologies, decided (despite angry public protests) to privatise water, leading to a situation in which British water companies today are largely owned by international corporations (Bakker 2003). This proved profitable for water company directors and shareholders, but as water charges jumped by 60% in the following five years, rather less so for domestic water users (Strang 2004). The UK-based water companies made further profits by exporting to many parts of the world their expertise on how to privatise water.

This process proved even more controversial in countries where increases in water charges have more extreme impacts. In 2000, when the government of Bolivia responded to pressure from the World Bank to pay off its international debts through water privatization, and invited an American company, Bechtel, to enact this, citizens revolted and a violent water war erupted that succeeded in retaining public ownership (Albro 2005). However, although governments internationally have subsequently become wary of such wholescale national water privatizations, the process has continued in various forms: for example, through types of public-private partnership, and through mechanisms such as Government Owned Corporations which, as the name suggests, reform local or regional water authorities along the lines of privatised companies, sometimes separating the profitable operational (supply) side from the more costly infrastructural maintainance, with only the latter remaining a wholly public responsibility.

There have also been more covert forms of enclosure, as illustrated by the example of Cubbie Station in Queensland, Australia. Following the colonial appropriation of land and water from Indigenous groups, European settlers’ rights to water generally came with riparian land ownership. As pressure on limited resources increased, farmers were given volumetric water allocations. In the 2000s, these were effectively privatised and transformed into tradeable commodities, which could be bought up en masse (as with Cubbie Station) or, in other cases, traded away from the related land, leaving ‘dry blocks’. The conversion of allocations into profitable assets meant that those using water for the most profitable purposes (mining, cotton, rice, and wheat production) could readily outbid small farmers, or conservation organisations hoping to preserve wetland areas. This has resulted in higher levels of water use and environmental degradation.

In Australia and elsewhere, the creation of virtual water markets, whether in the form of allocation trading or as shareholding in water companies, has effectively detached water from the landscape. This process of ‘disembedding’ material things from their local environments and creating virtual global markets (Polanyi 1957) raises some key questions about social and environmental accountability. There is an important recent trend towards more ownership and trading of water (and other resources) by transnational corporations who are not physically present in the social communities or in the material environments where the water is located. Cubbie Station, for example, was bought up by a Chinese consortium; most large oil and mining companies are owned transnationally, as are other extractive industries. Regulating water users, even when these are locally based, is complex and challenging, and becomes more so when regulators have to deal with major transnational corporations. There are more fundamental questions, too: if a government hands control of the country’s most essential resources to external agencies, how does this affect its decision-making capacities about these resources? And does it uphold democratic processes? (Strang 2016).

Similar patterns can be seen in the use of marine resources, where overfishing has led to a process of formalising quotas and creating virtual trading schemes (Minnegal & Dwyer 2010). Competitive economies have done little to address the inequalities that pertain in both areas: customary rights to fishing have often been overridden by commercial interests, just as local rights to freshwater have been overtaken by the commodification of the water industry.

The loss of customary rights of access and the devastation of local waterways by extractive industries have been particularly distressing for place-based Indigenous communities, who retain close and affective attachment to their homelands, and for whom local land and waterscapes are often both sentient and sacred. As their land and other material resources have been appropriated, enclosed, and privatised, many groups have protested, and continue to do so (Berriane 2017, Strang & Busse 2010). Given the meanings of water within their cultural landscapes, the misuse and despoilation of waterways has evoked particularly anguished protests; exemplifed, for example, in response to the downstream pollution caused by mining on the Ok Tedi, in Papua New Guinea (Kirsch 2003), or in relation to rivers in northern Australia (Rumsey & Weiner 2004).

Over the last several decades, Indigenous communities have created international networks, working with each other, and with conservation organisations, to tackle these issues. In 2016, for example, the Dakota Sioux brought together a range of like-minded groups to stage a major protest at Standing Rock about the impacts of an oil pipeline on their land and water. Indigenous communities are challenging not only the appropriation of their traditional ownership of water (Morphy & Morphy 2009), but also the imposition of ideologies that in their view fail to value it properly. In New Zealand, in the 2000s, the Māori Council, on behalf of all iwi [tribes], fought a legal battle to try to reclaim Indigenous people’s ownership of freshwater, taking a case through the Waitangi Tribunal, the High Court, and the Supreme Court (Strang 2014). Although the claim did not succeed, the debates resulted in a robust co-management agreement, ensuring that Māori iwi would have a substantial voice in decisions about their related waterways (Muru-Lanning 2016, Ruru 2013).

Water in the Anthropocene

There is a readily discernible link between the enclosure and privatization of water and constant growth and intensification in the use of freshwater and other resources. Such intensification, and humankind’s impacts upon the planet, have become so extreme that we have now entered an age described as the Anthropocene (see Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, Stensrud & Hylland-Eriksen forthcoming). It is equally plain that water is a central factor – and a key area of vulnerablity – in climate change. As well as melting the ice caps and raising sea levels, higher planetary temperatures are melting the glaciers that store freshwater for many of the world’s major rivers, and destablising global weather patterns. Meanwhile, the clearance of forests and wetlands for further agricultural expansion continues. The result is much greater volatility in water flows, and higher risks of unmanageable floods and droughts.

The impacts on ecosystems are not only felt by human communities, but also by their non-human inhabitants. The Anthropocene marks the first human-caused mass extinction event on par with earlier planetary devastations. In the last century, species extinctions have spiked dramatically: a report by the World Wildlife Fund (Grooten & Almond 2018) documents the loss of 60% of species since the 1970s, and rates of extinction are continuing to rise.^[3]As Donald Worster observed, this pattern of environmental destruction goes hand in hand with an extremely exploitative mode of environmental engagement, and the widespread control of resources by commercial corporations, rather than by local communities with long-term attachments to places:

Whatever they [major corporations] may accomplish in the manufacture of wealth, they are innately anti-ecological. Immense, centralised institutions, with complicated hierarchies, they tend to impose their outlook and their demands on nature, as they do on the individual and the small human community, and they do so with great destructiveness. They are too insulated from the results of their actions to learn, to adjust, to harmonize. That is another way of saying that a social condition of diffused power is more likely to be ecologically sensitive and preserving (2006: 332).

It is not a given that relocating environmental control locally will necessarily produce less exploitative kinds of engagements with land and water. However, it is useful to consider the alternative values promoted by place-based communities in relation to non-human interests. Many retain traditionally egalitarian and reciprocal positionality towards non-human beings, locating humankind within living systems, rather than as rulers over them. This way of thinking has been inspirational for environmentalists, and interactions between Indigenous peoples, conservation groups, and scholars has produced a serious critique of notions of human dominion, and of the anthropocentricity and the entitlement implicit in exploitative practices (Brightman & Lewis 2016, Kirksey & Helmreich 2010, Orlove & Caton 2010). This critique argues that there is an urgent need for a repositioning that – for both ethical and pragmatic reasons – gives greater parity to non-human interests, with a view to halting (and hopefully reversing) the wholescale destruction of ecosystems and their dependent species, including, of course, human communities (Kopnina & Shoreman-Ouimet 2015, Kopnina & Washington 2019). The proponents of this critique recognise the centrality of water in this regard, and thus protecting waterways has become a key part of their endeavours.

Indigenous communities have approached this challenge in various ways. Some, such as the Kogi in Columbia, have spoken up to warn about the consequences of rampant exploitation of the environment (Ereira 2009, see also de la Cadena 2010, Fienup-Riordan 2005: 233). There have been protests (as in the case of Standing Rock), and some have pushed their governments to make constitutional changes. Thus, in 2008 Ecuador passed legislation affirming the rights of nature, and a few years later Bolivia established the Rights of Mother Earth (Pachamama). Some groups have campaigned for rivers (such as the Atrato River in Colombia, and the Ganges in India) to be acknowledged as living persons with concomitant legal rights. In New Zealand, Māori iwi succeeded in gaining legal rights for the Whanganui River. In 2017, the New Zealand government announced that the river had been granted the status of a living entity, ‘comprising the River from the mountains to the sea, its tributaries, and all its physical and metaphysical elements, as an indivisible and living whole’ (Finlayson 2017: 129(1); see also Strang 2019).

At an international level, there is growing pressure from environmental activists to persuade the UN to make a formal declaration about the rights of nature (Cullinan 2003, Gray & Curry 2016).^[4]Some are trying to establish ‘ecocide’ as an international crime.^[5]There is a widening conversation about ecological justice (Baxter 2005, Schläppy & Gray 2017) and the ethics of human-environmental relations, and for some groups this is connected with ideas about spiritual engagement with the world and, most particularly, with water (Sponsel 2012, Taylor 2010). There has thus been a refocusing on the spiritual meanings of water, which as well as permeating traditional religions, has an important role in New Age movements long aligned to environmental activism. New rituals are appearing to celebrate the spiritual or social meanings of water: in the UK, this has taken the form of well dressing, a revival of an ancient Roman ritual, fontanalia; in Australia, there are events such as the Splash! Festival in Queensland, in which people bring containers of water from their home places, and pour them into a central vessel to celebrate the social and spiritual connections between communities (Strang & Toussaint 2008).

The input from Indigenous, environmental, and related groups into global debates, along with widespread concern about societies’ unsustainable direction of travel, has led international NGOs, state governments, religious leaders, and the United Nations to focus on the issue of values. In 2016, the UN established a High Level Panel on Water to focus on water and values, which, in their terms, meant ‘economic’, ‘environmental’ and ‘cultural and spiritual’ values. Their aim was to produce a set of principles for water to underpin the Sustainable Development Goals declared in 2015, with the aim of encouraging heads of state to rethink their policies and practices in relation to water (UN 2018a). This was followed by a wider World Water Development Report, which advocated an infrastructural turn towards ‘nature-based solutions’ (UN 2018b). These aim to work with the processes inherent in ecosystems and to therefore move towards more sustainable practices (Thomé et al. 2016). There are thus concerted efforts to address the urgent issues that societies face in relation to water. Whether these endeavours will change human engagements with water ecosystems sufficiently, and quickly enough, to avert social and ecological collapse, remains to be seen. It is therefore vital that the anthropological study of water continues to elucidate the relationships between human societies, non-human beings, and the material world, and assists efforts to reform these relationships to ensure that the rights, needs, and interests of all are sustained.

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[1] Water (1 Jul 2019). Topics: understanding poverty. World Bank Group Water Global Practice (available on-line: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water/overview).

[2] Fish, E. The forgotten legacy of the Banqiao Dam collapse (8 Feb 2013). The Economic Observer (available on-line: http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens/2013/0208/240078.shtml).

[3] Summary statistics. The IUCN red list of threatened species. Version 2019-2. International Union for the Conservation of Nature (available on-line: http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/summary-statistics).

[4] See also Universal declaration of river rights (17 Sept 2017). Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (available on-line: https://therightsofnature.org/rights-of-nature-laws/universal-declaration-of-river-rights/).

[5] See, for example, the work of lawyer Polly Higgins (available on-line: ecocidelaw.com).

Note on contributor

Veronica Strang is the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study, and a Professor of Anthropology. She is the author of The Meaning of Water (Berg, 2004), Gardening the World: agency, identity, and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009), and Water, Nature and Culture (Reaktion 2015). She is currently working on a major volume about long-term trajectories in human engagements with water. See https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/staff/?id=10491.

Professor Veronica Strang, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, Cosin’s Hall, Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RL, UK. veronica.strang@durham.ac.uk