Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Anthropocene

Sustainability

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:29:00 +0000

Vegetable farmer watering plants at the organic farm in Boung Phao Village, Lao PDR, 2013. Picture by the Asian Development Bank.

Alice Rudge

SOAS University of London

Initially published 18 Jul 2025

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

Abstract:

The term ‘sustainability’, as used in policy and common contemporary parlance, has a very European heritage, but its meanings and implications defy easy definition. While perhaps most famously the term is used in the UN’s ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, the term has roots in seventeenth century German forestry, where it was used to characterise optimal efficiency in tree planting. Since then, it has come to be strongly associated with questions of how the world’s resources might be better managed to ensure equality, prosperity, and health for future generations in an era of climate change. Anthropologists, however, have identified several intertwining issues with dominant approaches to sustainability that centre around questions of inclusion and exclusion from policies, metrics, and perceived global futures. Whose sustainability gets to count on the global stage? And what, exactly, is being sustained?

This entry identifies four main themes cross-cutting anthropological studies of how sustainability is imagined, enacted, and debated from the lab to the boardroom to the forest and the ocean. First, studies explore plurality in sustainable development, exploring conflicting ontologies and epistemologies of sustainability in diverse milieus. Second, studies address the problem of commensurability: as sustainability is measured and counted, compared and priced, how are diverse beings, contexts, people, and values made to stand in for one another? This leads to the third theme—moralities. Studies have addressed the conflicting moral projects brought about by sustainable development, as people grapple with what should be sustained and why. Finally, anthropologists have explored the kinds of futures that are imagined and made material by discourses on sustainability. Together, these studies form a body of work that refuses to take high-level discourses on sustainability for granted. They push anthropologists to ask how attention to on-the-ground realities might pose alternatives to dominant sustainable futures that remain defined by growth, extraction, and profit.

Introduction

Sustainability is one of the key terms of the contemporary moment—making daily headlines, shaping policy initiatives, business strategies, research grants, development projects, and public visions of what future prosperity and wellbeing in a changing world might look like. In our era of climate change, heat waves, floods, fires, and extinctions, and in the context of the economic, social, and political instability and inequality that characterise the Anthropocene, sustainability is increasingly—and rightly—on the global agenda.

However, the term ‘sustainability’, as it is used in common parlance today and often as the adjective in the phrase ‘sustainable development’, has meanings and implications that defy easy definition. For example, the coupling of ‘sustainability’ and ‘development’ has been so influential to how sustainability itself is conceptualised that any difference between the two terms is very often ‘decisively being let to blur into fuzziness’ (Rival 2017, 183). This coupling has been termed ‘oxymoronic’ because, while ‘development’ often denotes economic progress and growth, ‘sustainability’ usually denotes limits on material consumption and production. But despite this, today, the term ‘sustainability’ has becoming all-encompassing of what may once have separately been called ‘development’ or ‘sustainable development’ (Rival 2017, 183).

Perhaps because of this coupling, ‘sustainability’ has come to encompass a dizzying array of initiatives spanning access to water, gender equality, climate resilience, and economic prosperity, to name just a few (Yamada et al. 2022). It is an inherently plural term, used across politics, economics, and ecology. But despite this wide variety of ways and global contexts in which the term is used today, the word ‘sustainability’, in particular but not exclusively in its conjunction with ‘development’, tends to circulate as a tool and a goal of high-level policymaking and intervention. Anthropological approaches have therefore made important interventions, showing the social and political nature of how dominant approaches to ‘sustainable development’ have been constructed, demonstrating the friction with which such approaches to sustainability are articulated on the ground, and exploring how grassroots approaches to sustainability may offer a more hopeful way forward. The breadth of anthropological work on sustainability has therefore worked to challenge top-down approaches that have also been well described in other disciplines. Often occurring in conversation with history, political economy, science and technology studies (STS), geography, and political ecology, anthropological work on sustainability brings together longstanding debates in environmental anthropology and development studies.

To address this breadth of research, this entry begins by exploring how social scientists have understood the historical context of sustainability, before examining how anthropologies of sustainability have noted the plurality of environmental meanings and ontologies that precede and are produced by ‘sustainability’. It continues by describing two main anthropological challenges to the idea of sustainability. Anthropological scholarship has challenged the view that life can be abstracted, measured, and valued in market terms in the interests of sustainability and it has stressed the importance of attention to localised moral conflicts and the need for contextual, embedded approaches to understanding sustainability. The entry ends by reviewing anthropological work that imagines what meaningful sustainability might look like beyond the paradigms of growth, development, improvement, and progress that have harmed so many. In each case, the value of ethnography for ‘understanding what living sustainably means in practice for human societies, and what it does not’ (Brightman and Lewis 2017, v) has been reinforced, allowing anthropology to insistently ask: whose ‘sustainability’ gets to count on the global stage? And what, exactly, is being sustained?

Contextualising sustainability

Anthropologists and historians have pointed out that the concept of sustainability in its dominant form, as a term denoting the need to ensure the continued existence of the world’s resources alongside promoting economic growth, has a European heritage, with its roots in seventeenth century German forestry. It was first used to critique the conversion of woodland to fields and meadows as forests were burned to fuel the smelting plants of Saxony, and to call for optimal efficiency in tree planting for reforestation (Brightman and Lewis 2017, 3; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2013, 22; Buller 2022, 18; Scott [1998] 2020, 11). This created the impetus to develop better measurements and analysis of forests and the development of mathematical frameworks that modelled optimal planting in the interests of nachhaltende Nutzung (‘sustaining use’) (Lewis & Brightman 2017, 3).

But when the ideals of this model were enacted—trees planted and spaced accordingly, brush cleared away—it was found that trees could not thrive. In this rigid planting scheme, pests and fungi flourished and yields of trees went down. But this did not prevent such managerial approaches to natural conservation from becoming dominant throughout the colonial era. These manifested, for example, in the desire to manage and conserve landscapes in the interests of singular species or resources, or through exclusive protected areas management regimes that still exist today (Brockington 2002; Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008). Often, these came alongside the denigration of local practices in the colonised world as ‘unsustainable’ even when they may have in fact been more sustainable (Randle et al. 2017; Fairhead and Leach 1996). From its origins, then, sustainability has been defined in terms of ‘use’ (Ahmed 2019), and this use was often valued through mathematical and economic abstraction, and disembedded from context. ‘Nature’ was also considered a resource, to be ‘improved’ in the interests of sustaining profits into the future, and such efforts were often considered moral projects in and of themselves (Yamada et al 2022). Thus, environmental and social concerns have paradoxically been secondary to economic concerns in dominant paradigms of sustainability (Hirsch 2020).

A focus on the economic aspects of sustainability became accentuated in the 1930s, in the inter-war period. It was then that the very idea of the ‘economy’, as an object separate from environment and ecology, became common. This was articulated through new measurement tools such as Gross National Product (GNP), a standard measure of the value of goods and services produced by a country’s citizens in a year (Tooze 2001; Mitchell 1998). GNP created the possibility of comparing and competing between the ‘markets’ of nation-states (Lane 2019), including for natural resources. While concerns around forestry in Saxony were abstractions, they had a material basis and referred to real, existing trees. But with the emergence of standard measures, like GNP, there was a turn to ever more abstract understandings of market exchange, focused on the idea of the national economy. In this framework, natural resources were abstracted as measurable goods with economic potential that must be simultaneously sustained and used to power economic growth.

This laid the groundwork for increasing attention to the conjunction of concerns about environmental or resource collapse with ideas about the need for economic ‘development’ in the post-war period, from 1945. After WWII, the US-led boom in productivity, known as the ‘Great Acceleration’, both relied on and furthered an enormous amount of fossil fuel extraction and expansion (Lane 2019), and came alongside US-led neo-colonial endeavours in the Global South. These often took the form of large-scale, US-funded development schemes that had ending global poverty as their agenda but often had devastating environmental and social impacts. Such projects included infrastructures like roads and hydroelectric dams, but also the agricultural intensification and land development projects of the Green Revolution, and national development plans and loan schemes. Each aimed to ensure markets in the Global South for US-produced products as well as resources for their production (Bayliss, Fine, and Waeyenberge 2015; Rist 2014, Cullather 2013, Patel 2013).^[1]

However, the oil shocks of the 1970s, where oil supply from the Middle East was disrupted due to conflict, engendered fears of the end of the age of plenty. This was a new fear of resource scarcity which linked market-maintaining development schemes with ideologies of sustainable resource preservation. These fears of scarcity became entangled with fears of a growing population and political revolution in the Global South that could potentially threaten trade relations with the North (Cullather 2013). As noted, the tools of abstract economic comparison, such as GNP, facilitated the political construction of ideas of scarcity in relation to the world’s resources. And amidst these fears of scarcity, older problematic theories about the need for population control (Malthus 1803) in the Global South were re-popularised. Contemporary anti-immigrant theories drawing on Malthusian ideas, such as of the ‘tragedy of commons’, also gained traction (Hardin 1968). As per this theory, ‘rational’ self-interest would destroy ‘common’ goods, and therefore, common resources needed to be privately owned and managed (Hardin 1968). These fears and theories were also called into question at the time, for example by examining how the commons had been governed historically and had actually persevered or flourished without privatisation. For example, some mechanisms to prevent the self-interested destruction of shared resources included face-to-face communication among resource users, mutual monitoring, and locally sensitive approaches to rule-making (Ostrom 1990). E.F. Schumacher’s still-influential monograph, Small is beautiful (1973) was also born of this context of oil shocks, fears of planetary resource scarcity and population growth, and environmental and social collapse. It did, however, offer a critique of capitalist industrial growth and focused on the need for human wellbeing and local-scale approaches to technology and economic policy.

Despite these critiques, the fears of resource scarcity produced by population growth remained highly popular and were furthered by well-known environmental writers, such as Paul Ehrlich, who posited population growth as the primary driver of environmental collapse, arguing for the need for population control alongside the development of new agricultural technologies (1968). Fears of scarcity were increasingly framed in environmental terms in the image of a fragile planet with finite resources that would be outstripped by population growth. For example, the ‘Club of Rome’s’ 1972 publication, The limits to growth (Macekura 2015), also re-hashed older Malthusian ideas to argue that the planet did not have enough resources to support contemporary levels of population growth and consumption, and that this would lead to global collapse. Such discourses on population—rooted in racist, colonial thought—resulted in the use of regimes of forced sterilisation under the guise of ‘educating’ women and girls in South Asia (Murphy 2017). These narratives are echoed today in the discourses of eco-fascism and the far right, as well as in mainstream economic policy which continues to call for population reduction in the Global South in light of planetary limits (Tilley and Ajl 2022). These entwined fears of population growth and environmental collapse permeated politics and policymaking in America and Europe, where policymakers increasingly predicted that population growth and migration, especially in and from the Global South, if left unchecked, would pose a major threat to the global order. It was in light of these developments that the explicit coupling of ‘sustainable development’—that is, growth within ecological limits—would eventually take shape, thereby blending paradoxical or oppositional concepts of sustainability and development together.

As the post-WWII period saw the entanglement of environmental and economic concerns, a result was increasing environmental awareness and the consolidation of the idea of a ‘global environment’ (Selcer 2018). In the Global North, landmark events and the formation of global campaigning organisations in the 1960s and 70s such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Greenpeace, the formation of powerful international conservation organisations like the World Wildlife Fund, and major UN conferences, helped popularise and shape public attention to the global environment as an object of concern (Selcer 2018). These were supported by notable publications and ideas that also shaped public opinion and awareness, such as Silent spring (Carson 1962, Benson 2020), which raised awareness of the devastating ecological consequences of pesticide use, and the popular idea of a fragile ‘Spaceship Earth’, characterised both by the interdependence of all life and the limits of its resources (e.g. Fuller 1969).

Each of these developments from previous decades—new tools of economic comparison, fears of global resource scarcity and political revolution, the impetus for developing infrastructures and technologies for ending global poverty, and increasing environmental activism and awareness—meant that by the 1980s, the stage was set for one of the first and most important explicit institutional uses of the term ‘sustainable development’. This was in a report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, entitled ‘Our common future’, also commonly referred to as the Brundtland Report after the author, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the then-prime minister of Norway. The report defined sustainable development as, ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. It makes generalised references to ‘the effects of human activities’, arguing that the ‘limits’ that ‘we’ face as humanity are not absolute limits in the earth’s resources, but limits ‘imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources’, both of which can and should be ‘managed’ and ‘improved’. The report might be interpreted as a call to action, but many have argued that these kinds of calls for technological fixes for the crisis in sustainability (or ‘techno-fixes’, sometimes called ‘techno-optimism’) make the problem out to be the solution (Rist and Camiller 2014, 196). While perhaps grounded in a desire for change, this institutionalises a managerial view of sustainability (Brightman and Lewis 2017, 5; Rajak 2020) that masks the political origins of layered contemporary crises through making intwined crises in poverty and ecology out to be technical problems rather than political ones, just as ‘development’ did decades previously.

It is therefore worth understanding more of the context for this report and its more recent criticisms. By the 1980s, neoliberal paradigms for development were coming to the fore with ‘structural adjustment policies’ that aimed to ‘free’ national economies from the ‘constraints’ of government welfare programs and which resulted in enforced austerity measures whose underlying assumption was that countries had been living ‘beyond their means’ (Rist and Camiller 2014, 172). A ‘strange alliance’ resulted between the World Bank, NGOs, and philanthropists, which encouraged the public to believe ‘in the harmless – even positive – character of a procedure [sustainable development] with catastrophic effects’ (Rist and Camiller 2014, 173). Thus, ‘sustainable development’ relied on the political production of the idea of material scarcity and planetary limits, which by the 1980s was constructing poverty as a technical problem to be fixed by Global North’s technical and fiscal interventions and improvements in ‘market’ flexibility and integration (Li 2007). Such problematic legacies can often be seen in contemporary sustainable development initiatives that may seem ‘obviously sensible’ yet have profound epistemological and on-the-ground consequences (León Araya 2021; Howell 2017). They include intra-governmental initiatives like REDD+ (‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries’), which aims to protect forests by paying countries and companies to keep them standing, as well as ‘payments for ecosystem services’ (PES), in which donors pay individuals or communities for seemingly ecological forms of resource management. They also include work done by NGOs as they try to impose sustainable development through microfinance, entrepreneurship, and market integration (Dolan and Rajak 2016a; Schuster 2015).

For these reasons, anthropologists have argued that sustainability discourse often covers up ‘destructive practices’ (Tsing 2017) and the inequality that these practices rely on with universalising claims to the improvement of ‘humanity’ (Eriksen 2022). Yet the depth of sustainability’s inextricable yet paradoxical link with (economic) development, and the phrase’s assumed humanitarian and self-evident moral character, has continued to be marked by institutional milestones like the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, the 2000 Millennium Development Goals, and the UN’s 2015 adoption of the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’. Some ecological movements have repurposed this term to lobby for land rights and justice today, including agro-ecological movements across Latin America (Rival 2017), and Indigenous projects of planning for sustainability and social justice (Whyte, Caldwell & Schaefer 2018). However, the mainstream global sustainability industry continues to be characterised by troubling partnerships between the private and public sector; and state, NGO, and private sector violence against environmental defenders (Silva Menton and Gilbert 2021; Igoe & Brockington 2007). This situation has led some to argue that ‘perhaps the most useful contemporary working definition for sustainable development is this: an effort to extend capitalism with often token attention to environmental or economic constraints’ (Hirsch 2020, 3). However, because of the plurality of ways that sustainability circulates as either a meaningful critique of ‘unsustainability’ or as a tool of corporate greenwashing, anthropologists have found that they must both attend to critiques of dominant framings and their construction, and to the visions of a meaningful sustainability that these may mask—visions that anthropologists may be uniquely placed to bring to light owing to ethnography’s potential to understand the worldviews of all those working in and affected by sustainability from a grounded perspective.

Plurality

Anthropologists have utilised ethnographic research’s potential to highlight that, despite top-down attempts at sustainability that assume a one-size-fits-all approach to environmental management, the landscapes, institutions, and ‘communities’ into which ‘sustainable development’ initiatives land are plural, constructed, and contested, and with different political and historical contexts (Li 2007; Mosse 1999). For example, in Cape York Peninsula, Australia, different ideologies of land use and management clash in the use of fire to manage the landscape. Here, Aboriginal traditional owners, park rangers, and cattle graziers work in ‘uneasy coalition’ (Reardon-Smith 2023). While Aboriginal landowners may burn the land for environmental purposes and to create custodianship, park rangers burn to create firebreaks, and cattle graziers burn to protect and encourage pastures.

The failure of top-down approaches to sustainability to attend to these sorts of local concepts and methods of environmental management has led to the erasure of local lifeways, despite the frequent celebration of such initiatives as successful (West 2006; West, Igoe, and Brockington 2006; Brockington 2002; Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008). In East African Rangelands, ‘community based natural resource management’ initiatives, in which local people are asked to set aside land for conservation in order to increase wildlife and hence attract tourist revenue, have not demonstrated any useful environmental outcomes, despite being celebrated on the international stage. Furthermore, the financial returns from such initiatives have accrued to foreign and state actors, not local communities (Homewood 2017). In British Columbia, ‘sustainable’ fishing policies deny First Nations Gitxaała peoples access to their ancestral fisheries, despite the fact that they have managed these fisheries sustainably for generations. Surveillance, in turn, focuses on First Nations fishers, while leaving illegal commercial fishers unchallenged (Menzies 2016).

Anthropologists have thus shown how plurality, and the work it takes to navigate, can be masked by top-down approaches to sustainability, leading to real-life harms and exclusionary practices that may cause additional environmental damage. A key focus in this area has been on the UN’s REDD+ schemes, which aim to foster forest protection by paying for their sustainable management. In Suriname, anthropological work with local communities has demonstrated how Indigenous ‘cultures of ownership’ mean that the debates surrounding land ownership—and hence entitlement to inclusion in REDD+ schemes—do not easily match with Indigenous forms of relationality and sovereignty (Brightman 2019). In Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, tensions are produced by REDD+ projects when they land among Indigenous Ngaju people, where they sit uneasily with local values of autonomy and equality (Lounela 2020). Researching from the other side of the negotiating table, STS scholars have drawn attention to the contingent, situated, and ‘theatrical’ nature of UN climate negotiations that have led to and continually shape the implementation of REDD+ schemes (Ehrenstein 2018a). Such processes leave little possibility for the inclusion of Indigenous voices (Howell 2017).

These arguments link to older debates about ‘green grabbing’ (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012), in which land is ‘grabbed’ from local communities for ostensibly sustainable projects, like plantations whose crops are destined for biofuels or solar parks, while local communities still experience dispossession (Makki 2014). They also recall much older pejorative demarcations of local resource-use practices as unsustainable, to justify colonial interventions. For example, swidden agriculture in Southeast Asia was prohibited by colonial authorities as the burning and seeming abandonment of land was seen as destructive. Other allegedly more ‘sustainable’ land uses that offered more consistently predictable profits for colonial centres, such as plantation agriculture, were promoted (Yamada et al. 2022; Randle et al. 2017) despite these being less environmentally sustainable (Dove & Kammen 1997). Labelling something as ‘unsustainable’ or ‘sustainable’ can be a powerful political move (Fairhead and Leach 1996). It can mask the plurality of ways that people manage, use, and dwell in their environments, and impose hegemonic ideas of environmental responsibility that stem from the Global North (West 2006; Chua et al. 2021; León Araya 2021). This has been documented in the Himalayas, where justice needs have been sidelined through the IPCC’s imposition of scientific knowledge production from the Global North that marginalises Indigenous historical and environmental knowledge and experience (Chakraborty and Sherpa 2021).

Many argue that sustainability, therefore, ought to be reconceptualised as the ‘process of facilitating conditions for change by building and supporting diversity – ontological, biological, economic and political diversity’ (Brightman and Lewis 2017, 2), and reflecting ‘pluriversal’ politics, a politics that prioritises the existence of many distinct ontological and epistemic worlds (Escobar 2020; 2011; de la Cadena and Blaser 2018). Some have sought to enact such politics through meaningful collaborations on the ground. Anthropologists working on orangutan conservation have sought dialogue with conservationists in order to practically envision just futures through ‘mutually transformative dialogue’ (Chua et al. 2020). Such dialogue might usefully help to encourage the broader realisation that ‘[s]ustainability is an English word’ (Maldonado, Meza, and Yates-Doerr 2016), and foster greater sensitivity to collaboration and understanding across diverse positionalities (Chua et al 2021). Anthropologists have therefore usefully demonstrated the need for attention to the plurality of, and the nuances in, grassroots approaches to sustainable conservation, and collaborative land and resource management in the face of top-down approaches.

Commensurability

Just as top-down approaches to sustainability tend to flatten plurality, many sustainability projects also work through imperfect processes of making things, people, and places ‘commensurable’, that is, measurable by the same standards, so that they can be assigned comparable value, and may substitute for one another. This process of ‘commensurability’, sometimes also referred to as ‘comparity’, is used to make decisions on how to mitigate or offset the effects of certain actions to produce sustainability (Carse 2021; Schinkel 2016). Carbon measurements are a common metric through which this work of creating commensurability is done in sustainability interventions. Decontextualised from time and space, and in many cases from carbon itself, ‘carbon’ is objectified in order to be traded or exchanged in the form of permits, credits, or ‘offsets’ including in, but not limited to, REDD+ schemes. Not only does this mask the plurality of interests and value clashes that have gone into carbon trading systems (Dalsgaard 2013; Lane 2012; Ehrenstein 2018b), but appealing to ‘carbon’ becomes a way to compare and make commensurable entirely different forms of life and ‘different actions across spheres’ (Dalsgaard 2013, 83; Neale 2023). Through these processes of commensurability and comparity, ‘carbon’ has become the ‘standard’: the metric of comparison used to put a price on almost all human actions, each of which are considered to produce ‘carbon’ or avoid producing it in some way.

Anthropologists attending to these processes have pointed out that once carbon is ‘fetishised’— that is, made to seem of transcendent importance—it is able to circulate in financial markets and in the development sector. Furthermore, carbon offsets, insofar as they make the world commensurable (Cointe 2024), help pass the responsibility for climate change to the Global South, while absolving the individual off-setter in the Global North who can continue emitting (allegedly) guilt and consequence-free (Dalsgaard 2013, 86). This process is commonly referred to as ‘carbon colonialism’ (Parsons 2023) as it leaves intact or reproduces the history of long-distance resource extraction from the Global South to the Global North (Ehrenstein 2018b). In this way, the maintenance of carbon markets becomes an ‘end in itself’ (Machaqueiro 2017) rather than a meaningful way to create sustainability.

The practice of making things commensurable with carbon is also shown by social scientists to shape the work of contemporary science, in particular the common practice of ‘sustainability by substitution’ (Ulrich 2023). This is the practice of seeking sustainable substitutes for harmful substances or materials (Abdelghafour 2024, Pihl 2024, Kotzen 2024, Ulrich 2024). For example, metabolic engineers work to harness the metabolisms of microbes to encourage them to produce useful compounds that might become substitutes for petrochemical compounds. Sustainable chemical compounds, which are to be produced by these microbes, are thought of as ‘drop ins’, meaning they must be made almost commensurable with their unsustainable cousins, but without the carbon (Ehrenstein and Rudge 2024). This ‘logic of substitution’ (Ulrich, Rudge & Ehrenstein 2024; Ulrich 2023) creates both the conditions of possibility for the research itself, by making it ‘sellable’, as well as the impossibility of its meaningful success. Low-carbon alternatives must be made commensurable to their high-carbon versions: able to scale up to slot into the political, economic, social, and physical infrastructures derived for the circulation and trade of fossil fuels over centuries (Ehrenstein and Rudge 2024; Mitchell 2009; Boyer 2014). In short, sustainable substitution is often ‘about commensurability and competition’ much more than about sustainability (Ehrenstein and Rudge 2024, 15).

Work on commensuration has been crucial to scholars working on waste, recycling, and ‘circular economies’. For example, black soldier flies are, like microbes (Ehrenstein and Rudge 2024), envisioned as ‘living technologies’ for waste processing. The larvae should eat organic waste, eventually emerging to become adult flies who might also become a protein rich food for agricultural animals or a human nutrition supplement (Zhang 2020). All waste can thus become a potential source of value, as scientists develop a ‘chemical gaze’ in which waste is seen not in terms of its material or origin, but as a store of potentially useful and valuable chemical compounds (Landecker 2019). Organic waste can also be made profitable through making it commensurable with animal or human food. Agricultural residues can even be made commensurable with high-value aromatic compounds. The latter occurs through the labour of other-than-human metabolisms, producing a ‘logic of circularity’ (Zhang 2020). This work of commensuration found in circular economies becomes linked to entrepreneurial efforts by NGOs, as in plastic-waste-to-‘funky-home-accessories’ initiatives in Cambodia (Jensen 2023). Despite circularity being a ‘patchwork effect of multidirectional movements’, through the necessary work of scaling up for international markets, this multiplicity and its potentials are obstructed by visions of universal integrated markets (Jensen 2023).

But, it is precisely these markets that count on the global sustainability stage. They often operate by making various actions and things morally commensurable. For example, they create moral comparability through the lens of carbon, as individuals come to believe that they can measure their own actions and choices through carbon as the moral arbiter in which one individual action can offset another (Dalsgaard 2013, 83). Each of these ethnographies demonstrates that an unsustainable status quo is maintained in situations in which novel technologies and materials must align themselves with the infrastructures of the capitalist carbon economy. They also envision alternative possibilities and potentialities. Alternatives may lie in the labour of non-human beings, the multi-directional relations brought about by material circulations, or the critical political task of revealing flawed logics of commensurability. The next section turns to the moral economies revealed in such acts of subverting the dominant paradigms of sustainability.

Moralities

Sustainability is well-suited to being constantly reconfigured in line with diverse, often conflicting, moral positions (Yamada et al. 2022). Sustainability discourse is often characterised by ‘virtuous language’ that makes it difficult to criticise specific sustainability measures (Kirsch 2016). The paradox of ‘sustainable development’ as ‘common sense’ has, for example, allowed for the unabated acceleration of dispossessory plantation dynamics in Costa Rica’s pineapple industry (Araya 2021). New plantations are deemed necessary for sustainable economic growth and the increasing use of new technologies on plantations is used to portray them as ‘green’ and modern, providing a cover of legitimacy that hides the dispossession and violence also produced by plantations (León Araya 2021, 112). The same is true of how sustainability is mobilised as a moral narrative by the mining industry. Coal mining companies market themselves as corporations who care through funding conservation projects designed to ‘offset’ their emissions. However, these ‘sustainability measures’ may actually facilitate the corporations’ ability to extract more fossil resources from the earth with impunity (Kirsch 2010).

Anthropologists have also turned their attention to how moral boundaries are drawn by sustainability initiatives, by attending to who the beneficiaries and losers are, who is included and who excluded in these initiatives, and by examining the moral underpinnings that underlie sustainability discourse. Questions around sustainability’s moral projects surface frequently in studies of renewable and clean energy provision. In the context of a wind park development in Mexico, resident communities, state officials, corporate representatives, and environmental experts each attempted to assert ‘ecoauthority’, laying claim to an ethical, renewable future (Howe 2014). This created tensions, notably between local and global environmental knowledge (Howe 2014, 383). Comparable is the positioning or emergence of the ‘solar good’, in which solar power becomes inextricably linked to ideas of development and humanitarianism: the ‘good’ formulated in market terms and the language of inclusion in the market for the ‘bottom billion’, i.e. the world’s poorest people (Cross 2019). Solar power constitutes a seemingly ‘ethical-economic utopia’ that affords the ‘opportunity to express care for others and the environment while also fulfilling a fiduciary duty of care to investors and shareholders’, all with the magic of converting sunlight to power (Cross 2019, 48, see also Günel 2021, Abdelghafour 2024). This masks the fact that the new global demand for solar technology is producing new forms of precarity, inequality, and environmental damage through extractivism and toxic waste (Mulvaney 2019; Bedi 2022; 2018), alongside its potentially useful implications for social justice movements and the decolonisation of energy (Lennon 2017; Kinder 2021). These debates raise questions around how dominant ideas of the moral good of sustainability may be overshadowing meaningful efforts towards energy justice.

These ethical debates link with longstanding anthropological work on ‘corporate sustainable responsibility’ (CSR), a moral economy that legitimates corporate power (Dolan and Rajak 2016b; Rajak 2011; Gardner 2015; P. R. Gilbert and Dolan 2020). Similar issues are revealed in voluntary certification schemes such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), Sustainable Mining, or Fairtrade certifications (Archer 2022; Dolan 2007; Ruysschaert and Salles 2016; Delabre and Okereke 2019; Kirsch 2010; Gardner 2015), as well as in the underregulated ‘Alternative Investment Market’ (Anbleyth-Evans and Gilbert 2020). In West Papua, it is both conventional and ‘green’ palm oil plantations that dispossess Marind people from their forests and lands (Chao 2019). In the Kenyan fairtrade flower industry, although Fairtrade certification is ‘predicated on values of partnership and interdependence’, it also constructs ideas of a ‘distant poor’ in contrast to the consumer as ‘agent of progress and transformation’. At the same time, the language of ‘ethics’ is used ‘as a mode of governmentality over the African “other”’ (Dolan 2007). Similar contours exist in the coffee industry, where regimes of governmentality are produced by commodity chains which rely on images of ‘primitivity and poverty’ to sell coffee from Papua New Guinea to overseas markets, obscuring the structural relations that are the root of this poverty (West 2012). Sustainability labels can thus set up geographic imaginaries that build on histories of inequality. This is the case in New York City where the ‘false promises’ of sustainability contribute to exclusive gentrification (Checker 2020), and in the Bahamas where sea level rise was paradoxically and strategically reconfigured into ‘opportunities for more tourism-based enterprise’, such as the creation of ‘sustainable’ tourist visitor farms that appeal to ‘sustainable imaginaries’ but may exacerbate issues of environmental injustice and food sovereignty (Moore 2019, 1–3).

Such schemes work through constructing a moral Other—whether utopian, primitive, or poor—with sustainable development offering both a solution to, and an increasing difference from, them (Li 2023). Communities deemed ‘unsustainable’ are often demonised, made abject, or viewed with disgust. In Jamaica, ‘single-use’ plastics are never only single-use for those who rely on them, and yet their demonisation and banning reflects the racial, social, political, and economic geographies of their production and use (Gibson 2023). In India, narratives of disgust mask how e-waste is recycled, in which toxicity links with the unevenly distributed hazards of urban life (Perczel 2024). In Bulgaria, Roma are equated by officials with the trash that they supposedly ‘steal’ from recycling bins (Resnick 2024). In the Sundarbans, India, crab fishers are vilified by local authorities for supposedly endangering the delicate ecosystem with their centuries-old fishing practices (Mehtta 2021). There, the authorities’ denunciations of ‘greed’ against the fishermen are in fact a mere scapegoat in a context of the local authorities’ impotence against real environmental harms, like a proposed international shipping lane through the delta (Mehtta 2021, 552). This gets to the heart of anthropological questions about sustainability, which as with Anthropocene anthropology, encourage not only the interrogation of localised moral projects, but also attention to how and where their borders are drawn, and in whose interests.

Futures

Questions that anthropologists ask about moral projects of sustainability are very often linked to questions about the future—what kinds of ‘sustainable’ futures are imagined, how, and by whom? In short, whose futures get to matter?

To answer these questions, some have turned to examining finance—such as the public-private partnership called the Insurance Development Forum, or weather insurance start-ups—to explore how futures are imagined and made material by risk specialists and modellers (Vaughn 2023; Schuster, Bernardou, and Bueno 2023). In the UK and South Africa, the language of ‘political risk’ used in financing extractive industries replaces older colonial ideas of an African ‘lack’. This is used to create immovable ideas of ‘best practice’ including ‘restricted [African] host government ownership’ (Styve and Gilbert 2023). Rooted in lingering colonial anxieties, this amounts to ‘futurework’, whereby mining financiers determine potential threats to anticipated revenues, all the while masking alternative futures with long historical antecedents—such as Third World sovereignty over national resources (Styve and Gilbert 2023; Gilbert 2020). Others have explored how carbon credits make potential future actions equivalent to real actions, based on assumptions that someone would have acted otherwise; this comparison of the real with potential future creates possible value by referencing non-existing action (Dalsgaard 2013; Buller 2022, Cointe 2024). Such studies indicate that ‘one of the defining qualities of our current moment is its peculiar management of time’ (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke 2009, 246).

A particular focus for anthropologists has been the utopian promise of the aforementioned ‘techno-fix’. In agriculture, for example, sustainability discourse justifies new technologies like improved oil palm seeds that will supposedly be more sustainable as they create higher-yielding fruits that will create more oil from less land. These technologies are inspired by the Green Revolution, the post-war attempt to increase global agricultural production by technological means, and promise to do little to challenge entrenched inequality or existing plantation dispossessions (Chao 2018b; Flachs 2019). In Masdar City, Abu Dhabi (an experimental eco-city), technologies such as renewable energy currencies, driverless personal rapid transit, or carbon storage helped put forward utopic visions of a renewable future that were in fact ‘a thinly disguised version of the present’ (Günel 2019, 13). In the UK, oil company executives promote ‘win-win synergies between growth and sustainability’ that allow visions of a future in which salvation through technology will allow for fossil-fuelled business as usual to continue, while abdicating oil company executives of responsibility (Rajak 2020). Each of these ethnographies show how sustainability discourse ‘thrives on crisis and relief’, mobilising visions of an ‘impending disaster that is tempered by the promise of technological resolution’ (Yamada et al. 2022, 12), not unlike the narratives of development that preceded and co-constitute it.

Other ethnographies have laid bare the cruelty of desires for the future in a context of limited choice. In Baltimore, imagining a cleaner future happens in a context of a longstanding ‘winnowing of options’ for residents close to a planned waste-to-energy plant (Ahmann 2019, 329). The plant is posited as ‘renewable’ despite its emissions of lead, mercury, fine particulate matter, and carbon dioxide. At the same time, the development promises to ‘solve’ Baltimore’s trash problem by converting waste to energy, while providing jobs for local residents (Ahmann 2019, 329). As aspirations are pinned on this development, a ‘subjunctive politics’ is created, whereby aspirations for the future are shaped by an ‘affective pragmatism’—the felt need for choice within a context of limited options—among people who ‘feel they have been cast aside’ (Ahmann 2019, 330). Anthropology thus demonstrates the need to understand how the success or failure of energy transitions is linked to whether and how they fit with local worldviews. They also demonstrate the profound ambivalence of hope and optimism in a context where the least bad is all that’s on the table. Anthropologists, too, are encouraged to attend ‘to the many future orientations that shape our politics’ (Ahmann 2019, 341), and to demonstrate the need to understand that the success and failure of energy projects are linked to local contexts shaped by global realities.

Ambivalences and contingencies also shape future-oriented scientific work in Brazil, where sugarcane scientists grapple with paradigms of growth, development, and environmentalism, sometimes using their work with sugarcane as an ‘excuse’ to develop other, more radical research outcomes that might offer the ‘space for doing something potentially different in the future’ (Ulrich 2023, 443). Different visions of growth, in short, might offer alternative futures beyond economic growth (Ulrich 2023, see also Kaşdoğan 2020). Scholars working with and as activists have similarly pointed to the situatedness and stickiness of aspiration and hope, whether as realised through the power of art and storytelling (Vaughn 2021), the transitional nature of youth (Eriksen 2021), or ethical self-formation (Harms 2022). For some, sustainable futures are imagined as a battle (Gard 2018); for others, as a refusal to hope (Chao 2018a). For still others, futures cannot and should not be imagined without an insistence on the need to stay close to the present (Bond 2021). Such studies show how ‘we are seeing the emergence and proliferation of new ways of thinking about the future, and new ways of linking the future with the present or the past’ (Mathews and Barnes 2016, 10).

How, then, do anthropologists envision a truly sustainable future beyond false utopias? Many advocate for attention to new forms of more-than-human interdependence, such as might be found in Anthropocene ‘patches’ and ‘ruins’, or as revealed by unlikely forms of interspecies kinship (Tsing, Mathews & Bubandt 2019; Tsai 2019; Tsing 2015). Others hope for ‘a transition to an altogether different world’ that has space for spirituality, self-organisation, inter-being, and co-emergent relationality, as an alternative to the ‘modern dualist, reductionist, and economic age’ (Escobar 2011, 138). Models for a sustainable future often seek inspiration from Latin American and Indigenous political theories such as buen vivir—representing the coming together of centuries of Indigenous struggles—that force attention to dignity and social justice for all (Escobar 2011, 138). Indeed, implicit in many of the critiques of global sustainability that anthropologists outline are visions of alternative futures grounded in local realities and in meaningful conceptualisations of what environmental justice might look like ‘beyond development and progress’ (Lewis & Brightman 2017). It is often the case that in radical visions for the future, the term ‘sustainability’ is dropped in favour of a more encompassing vision of environmental justice (Checker 2020, Gilio-Whitaker 2019, Dhillon 2019, Gilbert 2021).

Conclusion

Sustainability is historically tangled with colonialism and imperialism, dispossession and land grabbing, as well as managerial approaches to conservation that tend to make ‘nature’ into a resource subsumed by economic concerns. It has been ‘riddled with tensions and contradictions from the outset’ (Escobar 2011, 137), often working more to sustain the global status quo than achieving meaningful environmental and social justice and flourishing in the context of climate breakdown.

Anthropologists, through attention to the moral boundaries and borders produced by sustainability, have shown how dominant paradigms of sustainability produce ideas of ‘too many people’ or ‘not the right people’. Such paradigms often present ideas of the need to limit the behaviours of some to grow the wealth of others, or of the need to control and manage people and their lands in the interests of the global elite, as self-evident moral goods. Sustainability’s institutionalisation as a moral good through its coupling with development has reinforced these issues: constructing the environment as a technical problem to be managed through carbon credits, risk management, fortress conservation, or exclusionary land management initiatives.

Against this backdrop, anthropology has sought to explore both the construction of difference through sustainability and the complex and thorny work of navigating difference in sustainability projects. Not only does this challenge sustainability’s ‘ideology of progress and development’ (Brightman and Lewis 2017, 2), but it also forces us to value the plurality that characterises the landscapes into which sustainability lands, that goes into constituting sustainability initiatives, and that marks definitions of sustainability itself. Thereby, anthropological work often has a keen eye for the workings of power. It highlights power relations in the reduction and streamlining that goes into making things (carbon, people, forests) commensurable, and in the forms of governance reliant on secrecy and hierarchy that actively work to hinder the achievement of environmental justice and further the profits of extractive corporations (Anbleyth-Evans and Gilbert 2020).

In revealing these workings of power, anthropologists have forced attention to alternative and more radical modes of sustainability beyond dominant paradigms, grounded in environmental justice and grassroots solidarity (Checker 2020). Together, these studies form a body of work that refuses to take high-level discourses on sustainability and their false promises for granted. They push anthropologists to ask how attention to on-the-ground realities might offer glimpses of meaningful sustainable flourishing that may pose alternatives to futures defined by growth, extraction, and profit, and encourage us to hold power to account so as to hold on to the goal of environmental justice.

References

Abdelghafour, Nassima. 2024. “Dirty kerosene.” Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, March 30. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/substitution-introduction.

Adams, Vincanne, Michelle Murphy, and Adele E. Clarke. 2009. “Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality.” Subjectivity 28, no. 1: 246–65. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.18.

Ahmann, Chloe. 2019. “Waste to energy: Garbage prospects and subjunctive politics in late-industrial Baltimore.” American Ethnologist 46, no. 3: 328–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12792.

Ahmed, Sara. 2019. What’s the use?: On the uses of use. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Anbleyth-Evans, Jeremy, and Paul R. Gilbert. 2020. “The oxygenation of extraction and future global ecological democracy: The City of London, the alternative investment market and oil in frontiers in Africa.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 19, no. 2: 567–99. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v19i2.1944.

Archer, Matthew. 2022. “How to govern a sustainable supply chain: Standards, standardizers, and the political ecology of (in)advertence.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5, no. 2: 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211014505.

Bayliss, Kate, Ben Fine, and Elisa Van Waeyenberge. 2015. The political economy of development: The World Bank, neoliberalism and development research. London: Pluto Press.

Bedi, Heather Plumridge. 2018. “‘Our energy, our rights’: National extraction legacies and contested energy justice futures in Bangladesh.” Energy Research & Social Science 41 (July), 168–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.04.009.

———. 2022. “Solar power for some? Energy transition injustices in Kerala, India.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 5, no. 3: 1146–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211046963.

Benson, Etienne S. 2020. Surroundings: A history of environments and environmentalisms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bond, David. 2021. “Contamination in theory and protest.” American Ethnologist 48, no. 4: 386–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13035.

Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2013. The shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso.

Boyer, Dominic. 2014. “Energopower: An introduction.” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2: 309–33.

Brightman, Marc. 2019. “Carbon and biodiversity conservation as resource extraction: Enacting REDD+ across cultures of ownership in Amazonia.” In Indigenous life projects and extractivism, edited by Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard and Juan Javier Rivera Andía, 195–216. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Brightman, Marc, and Jerome Lewis, eds. 2017. “Introduction: The anthropology of sustainability: Beyond development and practice.” In The anthropology of sustainability: Beyond development and progress, 9–26. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brockington, Dan. 2002. Fortress conservation: The preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Brockington, Dan, Rosaleen Duffy, and Jim Igoe. 2008. Nature unbound: Conservation, capitalism and the future of protected areas. London: Routledge.

Buller, Adrienne. 2022. The value of a whale: On the illusions of green capitalism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cadena, Marisol de la, and Mario Blaser. 2018. “Pluriverse: Proposals for a world of many worlds.” In A world of many worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, 1–22. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Carse, Ashley. 2021. “The ecobiopolitics of environmental mitigation: Remaking fish hbitat through the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project.” Social studies of science 51, no. 4: 512–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312721992541.

Carson, Rachel. (1962) 2000. Silent spring. London: Penguin.

Chakraborty, Ritodhi, and Pasang Yangjee Sherpa. 2021. “From climate adaptation to climate justice: Critical reflections on the IPCC and Himalayan climate knowledges.” Climatic change 167, no. 49: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03158-1.

Chao, Sophie. 2018a. “In the shadow of the palms: Dispersed ontologies among Marind, West Papua.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 4: 621–49. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.4.08.

———. 2018b. “Seed care in the palm oil sector.” Environmental humanities 10, no. 2: 421–46. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7156816.

———. 2019. “The truth about ‘sustainable’ palm oil.” SAPIENS, June 13. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/palm-oil-sustainable/.

Checker, Melissa. 2020. The sustainability myth: Environmental gentrification and the politics of justice. New York: New York University Press.

Chua, Liana, Hannah Fair, Viola Schreer, Anna Stępień, and Paul Hasan Thung. 2021. “‘Only the orangutans get a life jacket’: Uncommoning responsibility in a global conservation nexus.” American Ethnologist 48, no. 4: 370–85. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13045.

Chua, Liana, Mark E. Harrison, Hannah Fair, Sol Milne, Alexandra Palmer, June Rubis, and Paul Thung, 2020. “Conservation and the social sciences: Beyond critique and co-optation. A case study from orangutan conservation.” People and Nature 2, no. 1: 42–60. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10072.

Cointe, Béatrice. 2024. “Decarbonation as substitution?” Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, November 12. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/decarbonation-as-substitution

Crewe, Emma, and Richard Axelby. 2012. Anthropology and development: Culture, morality and politics in a globalised world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cross, Jamie. 2019. “The solar good: Energy ethics in poor markets.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25, no. S1: 47–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13014.

Cullather, Nick. 2013. The hungry world: America’s Cold War battle against poverty in Asia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Dalsgaard, Steffen. 2013. “The commensurability of carbon: Making value and money of climate change.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 1: 80–98. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau3.1.006.

Delabre, Izabela, and Chukwumerije Okereke. 2019. “Palm oil, power, and participation: The political ecology of social impact assessment.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 3, no. 3: 642–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619882013.

Dhillon, Jaskiran, ed. 2022. Indigenous resurgence: Decolonialization and movements for environmental justice. New York: Berghahn Books.

Dolan, Catherine. 2005. “Benevolent intent? The development encounter in Kenya’s horticulture industry.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 40, no. 6: 411–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909605059512.

———. 2007. “Market affections: Moral encounters with Kenyan fairtrade flowers.” Ethnos 72, no. 2: 239–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840701396573.

Dolan, Catherine, and Dinah Rajak. 2016a. “Remaking Africa’s informal economies: Youth, entrepreneurship and the promise of inclusion at the bottom of the pyramid.” The Journal of Development Studies 52, no. 4: 514–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2015.1126249.

———, eds. 2016b. The anthropology of corporate social responsibility. New York: Berghahn Books.

Dove, Michael, and Daniel Kammen. 1997. “The epistemology of sustainable resource use: Managing forest products, swiddens, and high-yielding variety crops.” Human Organization 56, no. 1: 91–101. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.56.1.l784408q35174516.

Ehrenstein, Véra. 2018a. “Carbon sink geopolitics.” Economy and Society 47, no. 1: 162–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2018.1445569.

———. 2018b. “The friction of the mundane: On the problematic marketization of the carbon stored by trees in the tropics.” Journal of Cultural Economy 11, no. 5: 404–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2018.1461675.

Ehrenstein, Véra, and Alice Rudge. 2024. “From fossilized life to cell factories: Microbes, biomass, and the logic of carbon substitution.” Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies 105: 99–123.

Ehrlich, Paul. 1968. The population bomb. New York: Ballantine Books.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2021. “Generation climate change.” Social Anthropology 29, no. 1: 219–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12996.

———. 2022. “The sustainability of an anthropology of the Anthropocene.” Sustainability 14, no. 6: 3674. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063674.

Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2011. “Sustainability: Design for the pluriverse.” Development 54, no. 2: 137–40. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2011.28.

———. 2020. Pluriversal politics: The real and the possible. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Fairhead, James, and Melissa Leach. 1996. Misreading the African landscape: Society and ecology in a forest-savanna mosaic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fairhead, James, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones. 2012. “Green grabbing: A new appropriation of nature?” The Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 2: 237–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.671770.

Ferguson, James. 1994. Anti-politics machine: Development, depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.

Flachs, Andrew. 2019. Cultivating knowledge: Biotechnology, sustainability, and the human cost of cotton capitalism in India. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.

Fuller, R. Buckminster. 1969. Operating manual for spaceship earth. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers.

Gard, Rowan. 2018. “Welcome to the age of sustainable development?” Anthropology Today 34, no. 1: 18–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12406.

Gardner, Katy. 2015. “Chevron’s gift of CSR: Moral economies of connection and disconnection in a transnational Bangladeshi village.” Economy and Society 44, no. 4: 495–518. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2015.1087750.

Gardner, Katy, and David Lewis. 2015. Anthropology and development: Challenges for the twenty-first century. London: Pluto Press.

Gibson, Lydia. 2023. “Plastic monsters: Abjection, worms, the Cthulhic, and the black single-use plastic bag.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41, no. 3: 529–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231178031.

Gilbert, David E. 2024. Countering dispossession, reclaiming land: A social movement ethnography. Oakland: University of California Press.

Gilbert, Paul R. 2020. “Making critical materials valuable: Decarbonization, investment & ‘political risk’.” In The material basis of energy transitions, edited by Alena Bleicher and Alexandra Pehlken, 91-108. London: Elsevier.

Gilbert, Paul R., and Catherine Dolan. 2020. “Mutuality talk in a family-owned multinational: Anthropological categories & critical analyses of corporate ethicizing.” Journal of Business Anthropology 9, no. 1: 19–43. https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v9i1.5958.

Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. 2019. As long as grass grows: The Indigenous fight for environmental justice, from colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press.

Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the desert: Energy, climate change, and urban design in Abu Dhabi. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———. 2021. “Leapfrogging to solar.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1: 163–75. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8795803.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The tragedy of the commons.” Science 162: 1248.

Harms, Arne. 2022. “Beyond dystopia: Regenerative cultures and ethics among European climate activists.” American Anthropologist 124, no. 3: 515–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13751.

Hirsch, Eric. 2020. “Sustainable development.” In Oxford research encyclopedia of anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.155

Homewood, Katherine. 2017. “‘They call it Shangri-La’: Sustainable conservation, or African enclosures?” In The anthropology of sustainability: Beyond development and progress, edited by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, 91–109. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Howe, Cymene. 2014. “Anthropocenic ecoauthority: The winds of Oaxaca.” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2: 381–404.

Howell, Signe. 2017. “Different knowledge regimes and some consequences for sustainability.” In The anthropology of sustainability: Beyond development and progress, edited by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, 127–44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Igoe, Jim, and Dan Brockington. 2007. “Neoliberal conservation: A brief introduction.” Conservation and Society 5, no. 4: 432–49.

Jensen, Casper. 2023. “Circulating objects, changing scales: Circular Cambodian worlds and economies.” Cultural Anthropology 38, no. 2: 251–73. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca38.2.04.

Kallis, Giorgos. 2019. Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kaşdoğan, Duygu. 2020. “Designing sustainability in blues: The limits of technospatial growth imaginaries.” Sustainability Science 15, no. 1: 145–60. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00766-w.

Kinder, Jordan B. 2021. “Solar infrastructure as media of resistance, or, Indigenous solarities against settler colonialism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1: 63–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8795718.

Kirsch, Stuart. 2010. “Sustainable mining.” Dialectical Anthropology 34, no. 1: 87–93. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9113-x.

———. 2016. “Virtuous language in industry and the academy.” In The anthropology of corporate social responsibility, edited by Catherine Dolan and Dinah Rajak, 48–66. New York: Berghahn Books.

Kotzen, Bronwyn. 2024. “Standard substitution and the politics of cementing equivalence.” Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, November 12. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/standard-substitution-and-the-politics-of-cementing-equivalence.

Landecker, Hannah. 2019. “A metabolic history of manufacturing waste: Food commodities and their outsides.” Food, Culture & Society 22, no. 5: 530–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2019.1638110.

Lane, Richard. 2012. “The promiscuous history of market efficiency: The development of early emissions trading systems.” Environmental Politics 21, no. 4: 583–603. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2012.688355.

———. 2019. “The American Anthropocene: Economic scarcity and growth during the Great Acceleration.” Geoforum 99 (February): 11–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.01.003.

Lennon, Myles. 2017. “Decolonizing energy: Black Lives Matter and technoscientific expertise amid solar transitions.” Energy Research & Social Science 30 (August): 18–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.002.

León Araya, Andrés. 2021. “Agrarian extractivism and sustainable development: The politics of pineapple expansion in Costa Rica.” In Agrarian extractivism in Latin America, edited by Ben McKay, Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, and Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete, 99–116. London: Routledge.

Li, Tania Murray. 2007a. The will to improve: Governmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———. 2007b. “Practices of assemblage and community forest management.” Economy and Society 36, no. 2: 263–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140701254308.

———. 2023. “Dynamic farmers, dead plantations, and the myth of the lazy native.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 50, no. 2: 519–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2022.2163629.

Lounela, Anu. 2020. “Contested values and climate change mitigation in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 28, no. 4: 862–80.

Macekura, Stephen. 2015. Of limits and growth: The rise of global sustainable development in the twenty-first century. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Machaqueiro, Raquel. 2017. ‘The semiotics of carbon: Atmospheric space, fungibility, and the production of scarcity.” Economic Anthropology 4, no. 1: 82–93. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12074.

Makki, Fouad. 2014. “Development by dispossession: Terra Nullius and the social-ecology of new enclosures in Ethiopia.” Rural Sociology 79, no. 1: 79–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12033.

Maldonado, María García, Rosario García Meza, and Emily Yates-Doerr. 2016. “Sustainability.” Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, September 30. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/sustainability.

Malthus, Thomas Robert. (1803) 1992. An essay on the principle of population; or, a view of its past and present effects on human happiness: With an inquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions. Translated by Donald Winch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mathews, Andrew S., and Jessica Barnes. 2016. “Prognosis: Visions of environmental futures.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. S1: 9–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12391.

Mehtta, Megnaa. 2021. “Crab antics: The moral and political economy of greed accusations in the submerging Sundarbans Delta of India.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27, no. 3: 534–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13551.

Menzies, Charles R. 2016. People of the Saltwater: An ethnography of Git Lax M’oon. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Mitchell, Timothy. 1998. “Fixing the economy.” Cultural Studies 12, no. 1: 82–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/095023898335627.

———. 2009. “Carbon democracy.” Economy and Society 38, no. 3: 399–432. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140903020598.

Moore, Amelia. 2019. “Selling Anthropocene space: Situated adventures in sustainable tourism.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 27, no. 4: 436–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2018.1477783.

Mosse, David. 1999. “Colonial and contemporary ideologies of ‘community management’: The case of tank irrigation development in South India.” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 2: 303–38. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X99003285.

———. 2004. Cultivating development. London: Pluto Press.

———, ed. 2011. Adventures in Aidland: The anthropology of professionals in international development. Berghahn Books.

———. 2013. “The anthropology of international development.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1: 227–46. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155553.

Mulvaney, Dustin. 2019. Solar power: Innovation, sustainability, and environmental justice. Oakland: University of California press.

Murphy, Michelle. 2017. The economization of life. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Neale, Timothy. 2023. “Interscalar maintenance: Configuring an Indigenous ‘premium carbon product’ in Northern Australia (and beyond).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 29, no. 2: 306–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13861.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parsons, Laurie. 2023. Carbon colonialism: How rich counties export climate breakdown. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Patel, Raj. 2013. “The long green revolution.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 40, no. 1: 1–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.719224.

Perczel, Julia. 2024. “Making e-waste circular: Countering vicious circles and materializing honesty.” In Circular economies in an unequal world: Waste, renewal, and the effects of global circularity, edited by Patrick O’Hare and Dagna Rams, 47–68. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Pihl, Vibeke. 2024. “Enzymatic workhorses, state-making practices, and sustainable denim dye.” Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, November 12. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/enzymatic-workhorses-state-making-practices-and-sustainable-denim-dye.

Rajak, Dinah. 2011. In good company: An anatomy of corporate social responsibility. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. 2020. “Waiting for a deus ex machina: ‘Sustainable extractives’ in a 2°C world.” Critique of Anthropology 40, no. 4: 471–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X20959419.

Randle, Sayd, Lauren Baker, C. Anne Claus, Chris Hebdon, Alder Keleman, and Michael R. Dove. 2017. “Unsustainability in action: An ethnographic examination.” In Routledge handbook of environmental anthropology, edited by Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, 170–81. Abingdon: Routledge.

Reardon-Smith, Mardi J. 2023. “Forging preferred landscapes: Burning regimes, carbon sequestration and “natural” fire in Cape York, Far North Australia.” Ethnos 90, no. 1: 50–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2023.2210264.

Resnick, Elana. 2024. “Sustaining containability: Zero waste and white space.” Cultural Anthropology 39, no. 2: 216–45. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.2.03.

Rist, Gilbert, and Patrick Camiller. 2014. The history of development: From Western origins to global faith. 4^th edition. London: Zed Books.

Rival, Laura. 2017. “Anthropology and the nature-society-development nexus.” In The anthropology of sustainability: Beyond development and progress, edited by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, 183–206. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ruysschaert, Denis, and Denis Salles. 2016. “The strategies and effectiveness of conservation NGOs in the global voluntary standards: The case of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm-Oil.” Conservation and Society 14, no. 2: 73. https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-4923.186332.

Schinkel, Willem. 2016. “Making climates comparable: Comparison in paleoclimatology.” Social Studies of Science 46, no. 3: 374–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312716633537.

Schumacher, E. F. 1973. Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered. London: Vintage.

Schuster, Caroline E. 2015. Social collateral: Women and microfinance in Paraguay’s smuggling economy. Oakland: University of California Press.

Schuster, Caroline E., Enrique Bernardou, and David Bueno. 2023. Forecasts: A story of weather and finance at the edge of disaster. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Scott, James C. (1998) 2020. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Selcer, Perrin. 2018. The postwar origins of the global environment: How the United Nations built spaceship earth. New York: Columbia University Press.

Silva Menton, Mary, and Paul Gilbert. 2021. “BINGO complicity, necropolitical ecology and environmental defenders.” Policy Matters 22, no. 3: 18 – 31. https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/Policy-Matters-Issue-22-vol3.pdf.

Styve, Maria Dyveke, and Paul Robert Gilbert. 2023. “‘The hole in the ground that cannot be moved’: Political risk as a racial vernacular of extractive industry development.” The Extractive Industries and Society 13 (March): 101100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2022.101100.

Tilley, Lisa, and Max Ajl. 2022. “Eco-socialism will be anti-eugenic or it will be nothing: Towards equal exchange and the end of population.” Politics 43, no. 2: 201–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221075323.

Tooze, Adam. 2001. Statistics and the German state 1900-1945: The making of modern economic knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tsai, Yen-Ling. 2019. “Farming odd kin in patchy Anthropocenes.” Current Anthropology 60, no. S20: S342–53. https://doi.org/10.1086/703414.

Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2017. “A threat to Holocene resurgence is a threat to livability.” In The anthropology of sustainability, edited by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis, 51–65. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tsing, Anna L., Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt. 2019. “Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape structure, multispecies history, and the retooling of anthropology.” Current Anthropology 60, no. S20: S186–97. https://doi.org/10.1086/703391.

Ulrich, Katie. 2023. “Growing sustainability, growing sugarcane in São Paulo, Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology 38, no .4: 439–66.

———. 2024. ‘I’m (not) green’. Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, November 12. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/im-not-green.

Ulrich, Katie, Alice Rudge, and Véra Ehrenstein. 2024. ‘Substitution: Introduction’. Cultural Anthropology Theorizing the Contemporary Fieldsights November 12. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/substitution-introduction.

Vaughn, Sarah E. 2021. “The aesthetics and multiple origin stories of climate activism.” Social Anthropology 29, no. 1: 213–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13007.

———. 2023. “The morality of investment: Stigma and insurance in climate governance.” Public Culture 35, no. 3: 393–403. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742565.

West, Paige. 2006. Conservation is our government now: The politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———. 2012. From modern production to imagined primitive: The social world of coffee from Papua New Guinea. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

West, Paige, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington. 2006. “Parks and peoples: The social impact of protected areas.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35, no. 1: 251–77. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123308.

Whyte, Kyle, Chris Caldwell, and Marie Schaefer. 2020. “Indigenous lessons about sustainability are not just for ‘all humanity’.” In Sustainability, edited by Julie Sze, 149–79. New York: New York University Press.

Yamada, Shoko, Lav Kanoi, Vanessa Koh, Al Lim, and Michael R. Dove. 2022. “Sustainability as a moral discourse: Its shifting meanings, exclusions, and anxieties.” Sustainability 14, no. 5: 3095. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14053095.

Zhang, Amy. 2020. “Circularity and enclosures: Metabolizing waste with the black soldier fly.” Cultural Anthropology 35, no. 1: 74–103. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.08.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are owed to Prof David Mosse, Dr Saad Quasem, and Dr Katie Ulrich who generously offered comments on drafts. All mistakes remain my own. Thanks also to the 2023-2024 cohort of SOAS’s Anthropology of Sustainability class, for their thoughts and insights that helped to shape these ideas. Finally, I am very grateful to Riddhi Bhandari, three anonymous reviewers, Felix Stein, Rebecca Tishler, and the team at the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology for their generous insights and support.

Note on contributor

Alice Rudge is a Lecturer in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, where she co-convenes the MA Anthropology of Global Futures and Sustainability. Her research examines Indigenous politics across plantation and rainforest contexts in Malaysia, as explored in her book Sensing others: Voicing Batek ethical lives at the edge of a Malaysian rainforest (2023, University of Nebraska Press).

Alice Rudge, Lecturer in Anthropology, SOAS University of London. Twitter: @Alice__Rudge / Bluesky:@alicerudge.bsky.social

[1] Anthropological interventions into this landscape of international aid and development are worthy of their own encyclopedia entry, and have focused on its discursive power, geopolitical implications, institutional practices, and neoliberal transformations. Some key texts are Crewe and Axelby 2012; Dolan 2005; Ferguson 1994; Gardner and Lewis 2015; Li 2007; Escobar 1995; and Mosse 2004; 2011. For a review of the topic, see Mosse 2013.

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Time

Felix Stein — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 18:25:09 +0000

Bronze cast by Hugo Wolfgang Rheinhold, c. 1893, depicting multiple temporalities in tension. Picture by Wikimedia.

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov

Initially published 10 Jun 2025

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

Abstract:

Time, from an anthropological perspective, is culturally specific and inseparable from our understanding of the world and our place in it. Anthropology charts how and to what extent time is culturally constituted, and how, increasingly, these cultural constructs coexist, come into conflict, and colonise each other. This entry introduces time as a field of anthropological inquiry, including its emergence in philosophy and evolutionary thought, and the dialogue between physics’ relativity theory and anthropology’s cultural relativist approach to time. The anthropology of time has asked whether it is a multiple cultural and social construct, and how its multiplicity may be explored ethnographically, be it within a given society, in contexts of socio-cultural contact, or in the context of globalisation. Being attuned to temporal multiplicities enables anthropologists to improve how social and cultural research is conducted and to ask under which circumstances temporal multiplicities can be productive for anthropological theory and practice. The entry concludes with laying out the importance of anthropology to understand time in the age of the Anthropocene.

Introduction

Time is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. Ancient and contemporary philosophers have not come to a consensus as to whether time exists independent from the entities and activities within it (Bardon 2024). Physicists of the twentieth century, notably Albert Einstein, made waves by reaffirming that time was not independent of the world, but was in fact conditioned by matter and movement. Their ideas soon reached the humanities, notably philosophy (Bergson 1924; Cassirer 1922) and anthropology. For example, Russian anthropologist Vladimir Bogoraz took Einstein’s famous insight that time is not absolute but depends on the observer, to theorize indigenous accounts of time like those of the Chukchi people in the Russian Far East, whom Bogoraz had studied in the late 19th and early 20th century (1923, 57). He recounts the following story:

A shaman went to distant lands, half-legendary or even entirely fairylands. After a year or two he returns. He is at full strength, in the full bloom of his health, but his home village has completely changed. His dwelling collapsed. His wife and young son disappeared. On the road he meets an old man with a grey beard and asks him about his son. It turns out that this old man is his own son. The shaman came back younger than his son. The two years of traveling … have passed like a whole human life. (1923,19)

In providing these and other stories, Bogoraz was in dialogue with physics’ relativity theory as well as with the work of US-based anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas had argued as early as 1887 that ‘civilisation is not something absolute, but… relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilisation goes’ (1974, 64). Such ‘cultural relativism’ and physics' relativity theory inspired emerging anthropological interest in how people around the world conceive of time. It also inspired comparative literary theory such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1975) who borrowed the concept of the space-time or ‘chronotope’ from Einstein to postulate that space and time are inseparable from our understandings of the world and our place in it.

What this scholarship adds to physics is that time depends not just on the position of the observer but also on the observer's categories of thought, and their society and culture. The view of time as largely socially constructed was formulated systematically by the early twentieth century French sociologist Emile Durkheim ([1912] 1995). He acknowledged that time—along with other ‘principal categories of thought’ such as space, cause, and group (‘species’)—was so fundamental to human lives that it seemed almost inseparable from the functioning of human intellect. Given that human societies were ultimately part of nature and nature has some ‘objective value’, so too do the principal categories of thought, such as time, that humans have developed. However, Durkheim insisted that time was still largely a product of collective thought, as the ways we understand time are strongly determined by our social and cultural methods of dividing, measuring, and expressing it. Our division of time into days, weeks, months, and years corresponds to the regular recurrence of rites and ceremonies, which are ultimately social. As Durkheim put it, ‘it is not my time that is organized in this way; it is time that is conceived of objectively by all men of the same civilization’ ([1912] 1995, 10). For Durkheim, time thus had a mostly social origin even if it was never completely arbitrary.

Durkheim’s argument—that time is a largely social category that, once constructed, exerts power over society—still holds for many anthropologists today. Together with insights from Einstein’s relativity theory and Boas’ ‘cultural relativism’, it allowed scholars to investigate how people around the world make sense of time and to illustrate that seemingly common-sense understandings of it have many viable alternatives. This entry shows that alternative views of time ‘co-evolve’ with Western concepts of it (Fabian 1983) such as the global scale of universal time that underpins world capitalist economies. For anthropology, time is not one but many. This entry charts how this temporal multiplicity has been understood in a changing landscape of anthropological approaches to time, including current work on two forms of relations within such temporal multiplicities: the first consists of relations of change in which one kind of time is taken to be true and assertions of change can be made against it. The second concerns relations of exchange, where temporal differences work as resources for each other. The entry concludes with laying out the importance of anthropology to understand time in the age of the Anthropocene.

Evolutionism, diffusionism, and fieldwork

Even before time became one of the key topics of anthropological research, it already defined the discipline as it was emerging in the nineteenth century. Anthropology aimed to shed light on human history, as explored in Ancient Society (Morgan 1878), that which predated the emergence of the state and industrialised modernity (see also Maine 1861 and Tyler 1871). Yet, unlike archaeology, anthropology was interested in cultures and societies that were contemporary to it and accessible through ethnographic study. These contemporaries, such as Australian Aborigines, were assumed to illustrate ‘early’ stages of social and cultural evolution. The Native American Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) were held to illuminate the ‘Heroic age’ of Ancient Greece (Morgan 1851, 120–40). Interested in the ‘lines of human progress’ (Morgan 1878), anthropologists conceived of themselves as located at its forefront, understood to be in Europe. From there, ‘sailing to the ends of the earth’, a scholar was deemed to be ‘in fact travelling [back] in time; he is exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age’ (Degérando [1800] 1969, 63). Such a temporal ordering of other people’s lives reflected Western intellectual culture, where evolutionary stages were based on oversimplified dichotomies of the ‘primitive’ versus ‘civilised’, ‘backward’ versus ‘modern’, and ‘undeveloped’ versus ‘advanced’.

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, such temporal distinctions were increasingly contested on political grounds, since the subjugation and colonisation of others were frequently justified by postulating others’ ‘backwardness’ (Asad 1973). But on conceptual grounds, this temporal classification had already been contested since the late nineteenth century. The Victorian polymath and originator of eugenics Francis Galton famously argued that evolutionism, which classified human groups along temporal stages with Western cultures as the final stage, overlooked how cultures and societies influenced each other. For example, the line of socio-cultural progress may not stem from ‘simpler’ origins in the remote past to greater complexity in more recent times, but rather from recently ‘civilized’ or colonised originals to equally recent ‘duplicate copies of the same original’ that were nonetheless more ‘primitive’ (Galton 1889).

This was not to say that all insights by evolutionist scholars were wrong. One of the central contributions of evolutionary anthropology’s temporal classification was the discovery of matrilineal kinship and the political prominence of women in many societies. Far from being ‘natural’, patrilineal kinship and rule by men (‘patriarchy’) was shown to be a result of relatively recent accumulation of wealth and development of private property (Morgan 1878; Engels [1884] 1990). Galton’s objection drew anthropological attention to how often this change from ‘matriarchy’ to ‘patriarchy’ was not a matter of evolution but that of influence by dominant neighbouring cultures (Rivers 1914, volume II: 90–149). Tracing these lines of influence—the geographical spread of cultures from assumed ‘cradles of civilization’ to their imitative peripheries—came to be called ‘diffusionism’. Diffusionism reinforced the idea that space was enmeshed with time:

Since all historical events occur in space, we must be able to measure the time they needed to spread by the distances that were covered or a reading of time on the clock of the globe (Ratzel 1904, 521, cited in Fabian 1983, 19).

In the twentieth century, time remains a key research tool but in a different sense than in evolutionism or diffusionism. Anthropology develops a temporally distinct understanding of research as being based in ‘fieldwork’, holding that ‘time in the field’ (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016) should take ‘a year or more’ (Rivers 1913, 7). Initially, field research was often much longer—frequently due to political circumstances that were as a rule un- or under-stated in academic publications. Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)—a study of early twentieth century travel and exchange off the eastern coast of New Guinea—became a manifesto for the method of ‘participant observation’ requiring that researchers not simply interview the people they study but participate in their lives. In creating this method, it was not frequently acknowledged that Malinowski’s fieldwork had only taken this long because he was not allowed to return to Europe during the First World War. As an Austrian citizen, Malinowski was considered an ‘enemy subject’ working on British colonial territory (Young 1984; Baker 1987). Bogoraz’s ethnography mentioned above took place under similarly prolonged circumstances, as it was conducted while he was in political exile in 1889-1899 for socialist activism in imperial Russia (Ssorin-Chaikov 2008).

Temporal multiplicity

Ethnographic fieldwork for ‘a year or more’ made time a research question rather than an answer. Instead of disassembling cultures into multiple layers of human evolution with cultural ‘survivals’ reflecting stages that were ‘once in existence’ (Engels [1884] 1990, 37), or tracking cultural traits over geographical space to measure their diffusion, anthropologists began to explore societies and cultures as largely coherent and self-referential units. This was done by following their internal logic, including when it comes to time.

For instance, kinship had previously been conceived through the lens of either an evolutionary timeline from ‘matriarchy’ to ‘patriarchy’ (Morgan 1878) or lines of diffusion on ‘the clock of the globe’ (Ratzel 1904). Now that anthropologists studied groups of people ethnographically, kinship became key to understanding their culturally distinct forms of temporal organisation. A classic example of this is the study of the Nuer of Southern Sudan by British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard (1940). Evans-Pritchard argued that the early twentieth century Nuer largely measured time in terms of socially relevant activities, determined by ecological change, such as where they reside during the dry and the rainy seasons of the year. However, the Nuer also conceived of time in a structural way, thinking of it as largely static. In this conception of time it formed an ‘unalterable’ distance ‘between two points, the first and last persons in a line of agnatic [father-based] descent’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 108) and an equally ‘unalterable’ distance between the mythical beginnings of the world and the present—so that the ‘tree under which mankind came into being was still standing in Western Nuerland a few years ago’ (1940, 108). Evans-Prichard’s work shows that time is frequently multiple—differently understood and structured not just from culture to culture but also within cultures, e.g. ecological and structural time.

Similar findings were made elsewhere. In the late 1950s, American anthropologist Clifford Geertz charted ideas of timelessness in Bali which, according to him, underpinned the Balinese calendar. Geertz examined a complex calendar which did not add up to a directional duration of years, as Western calendars would do. Instead, it featured timelessness comprising static cycles, important for religious rituals (Geertz [1966] 1973, 384). However, Geertz noted that Balinese timelessness did not prevent this predominantly Hinduist society from simultaneously noting chronological time such as exact dates, everyday occurrences, or recent historical events. Ritual timeliness coexisted with chronological or linear notions of time. Yet according to Geertz, this chronological time was of ‘distinctly secondary importance’ ([1966] 1973, 391, ft29) to the people he studied. It had emerged not ‘from within’ Balinese society but ‘from without’; that is, from a developing national state ‘whose centre of gravity lay in the cities of Java and Sumatra, where modern notions of time went hand in hand with ideas of a new nation and of youth culture’ (409–10).

Ethnographic studies of time-reckoning in 1930s Sudan and 1950s Bali showcased the many ways in which groups of people can make sense of time. This led to a debate in anthropology on whether time, particularly in its practical, everyday dimensions, is universal or culturally specific (Bloch 1977; Leach 1961; Howe 1981; Gell 1992). As part of these debates, anthropologists’ own temporal assumptions would eventually come under critique.

Temporal othering and global processes

By the 1980s, the relative autonomy of ‘field sites’ that many classical anthropological studies relied on came under question. Much anthropological work had constituted its subjects as ‘the temporal Other’ (Fabian 1983) to modernity. Ethnographies had explicitly or implicitly contrasted the lives of ‘non-modern’ peoples to that of the assumedly modern readers of anthropological work. Our lives responded to history books, calendars, and clocks, while ‘their’ lives were marked by timelessness and the falsely assumed absence of history (Wolf 1982). To remain ‘objective’— true to the reality anthropology charted—scholarship had required distance as evidence that the subjects of study were ‘independently constituted’ (Marcus and Myers 1995, 2) from the people who studied them. Now, Anthropology had to rethink its own temporal assumptions. Anthropologist became acutely aware that history in fact included the impact of societies where they were coming from on societies that anthropologists explored. Emerging scholarship now had to account for existing relationships of power between anthropologists and the people they explored, which altered the social situations where anthropologists were present as participant observers. This evinced a ‘critical ambivalence’ of the discipline’s desire for objectivity as anthropology faced itself as having been already a part of its own subjects of study’ (Marcus and Myers 1995, 2).

Several concrete solutions were developed to minimise temporal biases in anthropological research. Firstly, ‘fieldwork locations’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) were no longer thought of as being unaffected by modernity, Western cultures, or capitalist economies. They were no longer deemed to be ‘frozen in time’ or profoundly temporally distinct from Western, modern time. Places where anthropologists conduct fieldwork now appeared not as relation-neutral dots on the map or locally-specific cultural settings but rather as themselves historically produced within broader relations such as capitalist demands for resources: from gold and fur to rubber and oil, from sugar and land to workers or slaves (Mintz 1985; Wolf 1982). Following this insight, ethnography became increasingly ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus 1995), stressing that anthropology in a globalised world is about always-already interconnected spaces between what takes place ‘at home’ (of anthropologists) and in ‘the field’, i.e. the home of their research subjects. This new stance came about through research such as anthropological histories of working-class diets in Britain, which explored how British diets were linked via the North Atlantic Triangle to the changing social organisation of labour in Caribbean plantations, where sugar was produced, and to West Africa, where slaves were traded in exchange for European weapons and other goods (Mintz 1985).

A second remedy to anthropology's temporal biases was the idea of ‘multi-temporal ethnography’ (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016), a research approach that considers the multiple temporalities of research on the one hand and the multiple temporalities of people that are being researched on the other. Ton Otto’s (2016) ethnography on the Baluan Island in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s gives a clear example of this. Otto was invited to a funeral, after which he decided to walk back to the cemetery to take photos of the grave. For him, time for the photos was part of the ethnographic chronicle of that day. For his hosts, however, returning to the grave so soon after the funeral was dangerous, as the spirits of the dead might return to the funeral site too. The shared time between the ‘ethnographic present’ (research temporalities, including fieldwork photography) overlaps with other forms of presence—such as Baluan temporalities of kinship renewal. Otto describes how his return made his research subjects suspicious of his ritual powers to deal with the haunting pasts of the spirits of the dead. This made Otto not just an observer but also a participant in the Baluan time that he observed.

Global processes affect the shared time between the anthropologists and the people they study. Fieldwork time was institutionalised as part of annual academic rhythms, with a year in the field becoming a norm within the PhD in anthropology. Current work pressures and neoliberal employment insecurity generate more fast-paced research, as well as ‘patchwork ethnography’ (Günel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020) where shorter fieldwork periods are spread over longer, ‘punctuated’ (Guyer 2007) academic time (Faubion and Marcus 2009; Marcus and Okely 2007). PhD fieldwork stops being a period of academic isolation between anthropology student and supervisor. Instead, it is broken up by continuous email exchanges, proposal writing, and joint ‘improvising theory’ (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). At the same time, this happens amid ‘profound temporal turbulences’ in social and cultural settings that anthropologists explore—when (and because) anthropologists ‘can no longer make assumptions about what is necessary for their method to produce rich ethnographic data—a temporally stable scene and subject of study’ (Rees 2008, 7; Rabinow 2008). The anthropological field study also happens in the context of ‘the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now’ (Marcus 2003). One of Marcus’ examples is the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy caused by a chemical accident which attracted ethnographic research in the area from 1988, yet resulting in a book publication only in 2001 (Fortun 2001).

Globalised capitalism and temporal multiplicities within groups

As a part of global capitalism, the temporalities of people’s bodies, social lives, and consumption are increasingly subsumed to the rhythms of the markets. The globalisation of sushi, for example, shows the market value of tuna depending on how quickly it can be flown to Japanese and global high-end consumers (Bestor 2008). Despite the appearance of sushi and sashimi as traditional Japanese cuisine, it is a mass capitalist invention made possible by international jumbo jets and, within Japan, trucks with highly efficient commercial refrigeration. This research into ‘just in time production’ (Harvey 1989) and more broadly the anthropology of globalisation confirms Karl Marx’s insight that globalised capital and the market-driven industrial division of labour ‘annihilates space by time’ ([1857-1859] 1973, 535). Locations of production and consumption become increasingly closer to one another by sped-up travel.

Ethnographies such as Theodore Bestor’s reveal homogenised timetabling on a global scale, which anthropologists and historians of science research as ‘empires of time’ (Aventi 1990; Galison 2004). In 1883, the adoption of Standard Railway Time for North America meant that the residents of Cornwall, Ontario, had to set their clocks back five minutes and forty-five seconds to achieve synchronicity with the rest of the rail network (Stein 2001). That same year, a convention of railroad executives in Chicago standardised five time zones for North America on the basis of British Greenwich Mean Time. This was a precursor to the International Meridian Conference in 1884 in Washington, DC, where the global scale of universal time was agreed upon to consist of 24 time zones, counted from the initial meridian for longitude passing through the Greenwich Royal Observatory, with a universal calendar based on a 24-hour day beginning at midnight in Greenwich (Stephens 1983; Ogle 2015; Kern 2003).

As such, a calendar is homogenised globally; it comes with the homogenisation of ‘the money economy’ which was demonstrated to come hand in hand with ‘the universal diffusion of pocket watches’ (Simmel [1903] 1950, 412), alongside the equally homogeneous and clear-cut boundaries between work and rest, busyness and idleness—including culturally new experiences of boredom, as in the case of Australian Aboriginal Walpiri after clock time was introduced to them (Musharbash 2007). Ethnographies have shown how quantitative time creates qualitative temporal relations. For instance, Karen Davies (1994) illustrates the tension between clock or linear time, which takes its cues from economic principles (wage labour, punctuality), and what she calls ‘process time’ or temporal relations oriented on respect, empathy, and affection for care-receivers in Swedish day nurseries. Michael Crawley explores Ethiopian long-distance runners who use digital self-tracking devices and identify themselves not as individuals competing in natural time but as parts of groups who expend energy synchronously and suffer together ‘on the part of the self … [and] on behalf of others’ as Ethiopian Orthodox Christians (2021, 662).

Standardised forms of reckoning time were imposed on different cultures and societies at different times (Aventi 1990; Stern 2012, 2021) and locations (Shresta 2015). Current research on this harkens back to the classical point made by sociologist Pitirim Sorokin that while temporal standards take the form of quantitative time, they coexist with ‘full-blooded’ sociocultural time within different social groups consisting of their own rhythms, pulsations, and conventions, including calendars. For example, the Harvard University calendar is quite different from the Boston working-class calendar ‘in regard to holidays, beginning and the end of the “school” and factory year’ (Sorokin 1943, 197).

Temporal hierarchies

The temporal multiplicities that we see playing out on a global scale filter down into people’s daily lives as hierarchies. For example, in late August 1994, I was traveling in Central Siberia with Evenki hunters and reindeer herders to the Katonga village on a tributary of the Yenisei River that divides Western and Eastern Siberia. My co-travellers were to bring their children to boarding school by September 1 for the beginning of the school year (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 26). The trip lasted two days and began in the ecological time of hunting and herding, which was imprecise from the perspective of the school calendar. Travel itself, with the hunters, herders, and their children riding reindeer, depended on how difficult it was to cross rivers, and how far we were before it got dark. We ended up being several hours late for the start of school.

September 1 designates a ‘day of knowledge’ in the Russian national calendar. It marks the beginning of the school year that has quantitative dimensions marking hours and minutes for lessons, breaks between them, fixed times for meals—all that being very different from both the activities and daily schedule in reindeer herding and hunting camps. The ‘day of knowledge’ celebration involved a pupils’ parade and calling out all new students by name, upon which they were to step forward from their line and loudly reply, ‘Here!’ When a pupil is absent, the head teacher would say, ‘Ah, [he or she is still] in the forest’, marking a hierarchical difference between the time of the state and that of people’s ordinary lives. Hierarchy can be used to structure all aspects of temporal multiplicity, be it what goes after what (‘sequencing’), exactly when things are done (‘timing’), and through what visions of the past, present, and future activities should be interpreted (Munn 1992, 116).

Hierarchy can even govern more subtle temporal multiplicities. Anthropologist Nancy Munn, who studied the ritual trade of kula shells on the eastern coast of New Guinea during the second half of the twentieth century, showed that gift-giving generates its own time. As an ‘action system’, it produces temporal circles of cyclical obligations to give and reciprocate, and the line-like time of movement of canoes between islands. Munn argues that this inter-island movement and the circulation of shells among people ‘was not in or through time and space, but that they form (structure) and constitute (create) the spacetime manifold in which they “go on”’ (1983, 280). Hierarchy plays a role here, as both obligations and canoe movements can be ‘relatively slow’ and difficult or, conversely, ‘speedy’ and easy. They depend on people’s navigational skills, correlating the social skills and power (‘fame’) of people who give and receive gifts.

In the Evenki case, moving from the forest to the village school was conceived during the Soviet era as symbolising ‘the great removal’ up another line-like process: the evolution from ‘primitive’ to ‘scientific’ communism (Bloch 2004; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003, 140–69). There are also two cyclical times at play here: that of the school calendar and that of the annual ecological movement in Siberian reindeer herding. Being punctual or not in quantitative time makes visible hierarchical arrangements of the disciplined and the undisciplined, village versus forest lifestyles, educated teachers versus ‘ignorant’ children—and ultimately the school teachers’ temporal distinctions of modern and non-modern.

When the movement is ‘relatively slow’ and difficult (we were late), school teachers were to wait for the children that were travelling with us. In this example, the teachers, i.e. people in power, were made to wait. Yet, according to recent ethnographies of waiting, waiting is usually something that people in more vulnerable structural positions must do, such as waiting in line for medical or social services or staying at a refugee camp as ‘a waiting zone’ outside of society (Auyero 2012; Janeja and Bandak 2018, 7; Jacobsen, Karlsen and Khosravi 2021). Ethnographies of time reveal waiting as a technology of governance where power is exercised through claims on other people’s time (Bourdieu 2000, 227–30). Under state socialism, making people queue became ubiquitous of not just chronic shortages of goods and ‘distributive power’ of sellers and the apparatchik (Verdery 1991), but of the ‘etatization of time' (Verdery 1996: 39-58), i.e. the increase of state control over it. However, in this Evenki case, power is exercised over people of authority such as teachers and state bureaucrats. Waiting for the Evenki to be on time is part of a longer waiting for them to move up developmental time—waiting for history to be made.

These examples highlight the hierarchical relations between different understandings of time. One kind of time, such as ecological time or waiting time, works to affirm or challenge or indeed frustrate other kinds of temporal organisation, such as calendar school time or the time of progress. Current anthropological work focuses on relations within temporal multiplicities, which are at least two: relations of change in which one kind of time is taken to be true and in doing so falsifying or replacing others, and relations of exchange, where temporal differences work as resources for each other.

Change and exchange

One notorious example for how one conception of time replaces another is the conflict between Christianity and Western science. Christian and Western scientific understandings of time are not completely opposed. The concept of singular, natural, linear time has one of its points of origin in Christianity, as a projection of Christ’s biography onto generational biblical time from Adam to Abraham (McCarthy 1997). Christian teachings also underpin the term ‘temporality’ that refers to the condition of existing within a time that is itself temporary. ‘Temporality’ originally meant worldly or secular possessions or revenues of the church or clergy as opposed to God who is ‘eternal’, that is, timeless. The term ‘temporality’ became useful in anthropology to refer to the notions of time that themselves change historically and across cultures, highlighting time-related specificity (Guyer 2007; Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016).

Today, natural time tends to claim truth over Christian time with regard to our understanding of when the world originated and of where time might lead. Natural time also states what is timeless, namely, the laws of nature. Changing from Christian to natural time is often conceived of as part of ‘progress’, as opposing these two conceptions of time is associated with broader intellectual and political questions of what constitutes scientific truth. The time of ‘predestination’ (Weber [1905] 1992) and of religiously sanctioned hierarchies (Kantorowicz 1997), differs from the Darwinist survival of the fittest. Conflicts between conceptions of time have been reflected in state ideologies and popular culture, including fiction (Beer 1980) and material artefacts. For example, the statue in picture 1 is a famous 1893 bronze cast made by German sculptor Hugo Rheinhold, entitled 'Ape with skull', about 30 centimetres high. On it, the biblical quote 'eritis sicut deus' (‘you will be as gods’) warns us against eating from the Tree of Knowledge. It restates the temporality of the fall from Eden as that of ascent of Man. The inscription features in the open book of a pile of the works of Darwin, atop of which sits an ape contemplating a human skull and holding a drawing compass with one of its feet. The statue illustrates different conceptions of time in competition with one another.

Picture 1: Ape with skull, source: Wikipedia.

ape.jpeg

Moreover, it demonstrates how meanings of time are created by where such artefacts are placed. Copies of this bronze cast are on public display at institutions of biology and medicine such as the Boston Medical Library, the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology, the Medical Library of Queen’s University, Canada, etc. Yet, the original holds pride of place in the Kremlin Museum's collection of Vladimir Lenin's belongings. The political leader of Soviet Russia had received it as a gift from a young American businessman, Armand Hammer, who visited him in 1921. As a gift, the figurine received an unintended yet well-fitting Marxist meaning: ‘You will be as gods’ was taken to refer to building a new and radically different society. The Museum catalogue highlights this gift as a sign of international ‘affection and respect… of the world’s first socialist state’ (emphasis added; Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 2; 48)—a gift of gratitude following the gift of revolution.

Even secular conceptions of time are frequently opposed. Marxist perspectives of time have been challenged by capitalist understandings of it. Eastern European socialism lost out to capitalism, in part because it constituted a different temporal logic. Socialism placed frequent focus on longer, even historic temporal scales, while capitalism placed a great premium on turnover times when producing goods, and remains obsessed with the constant compression of decision-making and other productive activities (Verdery 1996, 35). Socialism and capitalism also constituted different “chronotopes” i.e. unities of time and space specific to a particular narrative of who is ahead and who is history (Sosnina and Ssorin-Chaikov 2009). While capitalism always moves ‘forward’ in time towards neoliberalism, postsocialism can in some locations be seen to remain at least partially stuck in times of Soviet or imperial rule (Hann 2002; Müller 2019).

Thinking of time in terms of exchange highlights additional temporal aspects. Timing makes all the difference in exchange, not least when exchanging across different temporalities. Consider the following example where two kinds of time—those of the market and of gifts—work together. In 1921, the Volga River region and the Ural Mountains of Soviet Russia experienced a massive famine. Armand Hammer (mentioned above), an American graduate of Columbia Medical School, visited the country, bringing medical supplies for the relief of a typhus epidemic that accompanied the famine. In the Urals he was surprised to see stockpiles of various commodities such as fur and precious stones, which could be used to purchase grain internationally and alleviate hunger. Hammer was told that the time that it would take to trade these commodities would make the delivery of grain too late to save lives. He solved this by telegraphing the US to ask for credit to purchase grain and ship it to Russia. In addition to obtaining credit, Hammer conducted his trade at a time when the US market price for grain was at its lowest. Grain, a commodity for which he ultimately received payment from the Soviet authorities, immediately circulated as humanitarian aid. It became a gift given by the Soviet state with the help of US credit to alleviate starvation. In this example, time can be considered Hammer’s main gift. He provided timely grain, obtained timely credit, and purchased grain at the best possible market time. As he arranged this gift of grain, the temporalities of markets and gifts complemented each other, and ultimately became intermeshed. Market and gift temporalities existed in parallel and were used as resources for one another. After Hammer arranged this, Lenin invited him for a visit, making him an offer to start American commercial operations in Soviet Russia, while Hammer gave him the above sculpture in return (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 39–42).

Exchange across temporalities also occurs in other contexts. Studying container ship navigation on the Hooghly river in India, Laura Bear (2014) charts how multiple temporalities of global capitalism and river ecology converge. Navigating container ships means dealing simultaneously with the ecological time of the highly unstable Hooghly river, with temporal demands of the international shipping trade, with the rhythms of bureaucratic decision making, and with the temporal affordances of predictive shipping technology. The mastery of ship navigation mediates between them, as river pilots attempt to reconcile ultimately incommensurable temporal rhythms through a slowly acquired art of navigation. Doing so is increasingly difficult in times of a cost-cutting public sector, which raises the risk of accidents. If a ship runs ashore, the accident may be understood in terms of the pilot’s lack of experience, and result in individual punishment and stigma. Yet, navigation is much more than an individual act. It is an attempt to balance the heterogenous times of capitalism (Bear 2016) with the temporalities of bureaucracy, infrastructure, and the natural world.

Other examples of the fruitful interplay of temporal multiplicities comes from studies of highly financialised environments where stockbrokers draw on global time differences between stock exchanges in, for example, Tokyo, Chicago, and London (Miyazaki 2003; Zaloom 2006). The same commodity—such as grain and its futures —may have its prices fluctuating differently in these different stock exchanges. Commodity futures can themselves be seen as different temporal states, the trade of which can drive markets up or lead to market crises (Stout 2016). Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that ‘time is money’ (Weber [1905] 1992, 14-16) applies, as some ethnographies demonstrate, even to the temporal difference between offices within the same global company. When headquarters in the West go to work, regional offices in an Eastern time zone may face pressure, and hierarchical exchange relations between them may mean that work time in the East spills over to ‘private’ home time (Karasyeva and Momzikova 2019). Within many financialised companies, the speed of work becomes a commodity in and of itself, both in face-to-face exchange, in screen-based trade (Zaloom 2006), and in the work of management consultants, frequently hired to speed up corporate activity (Stein 2017; 2018). In these contexts, work speed drives upward mobility and constitutes the social capital of ‘go-getters’ in banks and other corporations (Chelcea 2015; Ho 2009).

Conclusion: Time and the Anthropocene

The anthropology of time has provided us with rich insight into the different ways in which humans make sense of time, into how temporal multiplicities coexist and compete with one another, and into how anthropological research must be aware of its own temporal assumptions. One of the futures of the anthropology of time is in addressing the ecological insecurities of the Anthropocene. For instance, Lukas Ley’s recent ethnography charts rising ocean levels that affect the urban landscape in Semarang, central Java, where housing and urban infrastructure are being built on ‘borrowed time’ (Ley 2021). A similarly temporal sense of urgency to ‘think like a climate’ explores new motivations to use energy efficient housing which may shield its inhabitants from a climate-insecure future (Knox 2020). The Anthropocene compels us to think from the point of view of ‘deep time’ (Irvine 2020) that refers to long-term temporality of Earth as a planet. We need to compare conflicting temporal scales of geological time and the temporal dangers of capitalist extraction, production, and consumption (Chakrabarty 2018; Povinelli 2016). Capitalist time frequently works through the ‘evacuation of the near future’ (Guyer 2007) which includes creating incentives to consume now and to generate new forms of debt that one might repay later, but which one might also try to refinance and defer perpetually. The risks of human impact on the climate signal that this ‘evacuation of the near future’ may itself be evacuated. The Anthropocene invites ‘critical thinking … across some of the divisions that existed before’ (Haraway at al. 2016, 541; Moore 2016; Mathews 2020; Chakrabarty 2018). However, it also foregrounds its own secular and singular and true meaning of time over other temporal multiplicities if they are used to deny the risks of ongoing climate change. The possibility of human decline challenges us to consider not just the time of our lifespans but also the greater finality of human life and human time, no matter how it is culturally conceived.

References

Asad, Talal, ed. 1973. Anthropology and the colonial encounter. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.

Auyero, Javier. 2012. Patients of the state: The politics of waiting in Argentina. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Aventi, Anthony. 1990. Empires of time: Calendars, clocks, cultures. London: I.B.Taurus and Co Ltd.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1975. “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane.” In Voprosy literatury i estetiki: issledovaniia raznykh let, 234–407. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature. (English translation: 1981. “Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel.” In The dialogic imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press.)

Bardon, Adrian. 2024. A brief history of the philosophy of Ttme. Oxford: Oxford University Press,.

Barr, James. 1985. “Why the world was created in 4004 BC: Archbishop Ussher and biblical chronology.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 67, no. 2: 575–608.

Bear, Laura. 2014. “For labour: Ajeet’s accident and the ethics of technological fixes in time.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20: 71–88.

——— 2016. “Time as technique.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45, no. 1: 487–502.

Beer, Gillian. 1980. “Plot and the analogy with science in later nineteenth-century novelists.” Comparative Criticism 2: 131–50.

Bergson, Henri. 1924. “Les temps fictifs et le temps réel.” Revue de philosophie 31, no. a: 241–60.

Bestor, Theodore C. 2008. “Supply-side sushi: Commodity, market, and the global city.” American Anthropologist 103, no. 1: 76–95.

Bloch, Alexia. 2004. Red ties and residential schools: Indigenous Siberians in a post-Soviet state. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bloch, Maurice. 1977. “The past and present in the present.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, no. 2: 278–93.

Boas, Franz. 1974. "The principles of ethnological classification" In A Franz Boas reader, edited by George W. Stocking, 61–7. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Bogoraz (Tan), Vladimir G. 1923. Einstein i religiia: Primenenie printsypa otnositel’nosti k issledovaniiu religioznykh iavlenii. Moskva and Petrograd: Izdatel’stvo L.D. Frenkel’.

Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and catastrophe: The passing of mass utopia in East and West. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Cassirer, Ernst. 1922. “Einstein’s theory of relativity considered from the epistemological standpoint.” The Monist: 248–303.

Cerwonka, Allaine, and Liisa H. Malkki. 2007. Improvising theory: Process and temporality in ethnographic fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2018. “Anthropocene time.” History and Theory 57, no. 1: 5–32.

Chelcea, Liviu. 2015. “Post-socialist acceleration: Fantasy time in a multinational bank.” Time & Society 24, no. 3: 348–66.

Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Crawley, Michael. 2021. “Tracking selves or tracking relationships? Means of measuring time amongst Ethiopian runners.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27, no. 3: 653–71.

Dalsgaard, Steffen, and Morten Nielsen, eds. 2016. Time and the field. New York: Berghahn Books.

Davies, Karen. 1994. “The tensions between process time and clock time in care-work: The example of day nurseries.” Time & Society 3: 277–303.

Degérando, Joseph-Marie. (1800) 1969. The observation of savage peoples. London: Routledge.

Durkheim, Emile. (1912) 1995. The elementary forms of religious life. New York: The Free Press.

Engels, Frederick. (1884) 1990. “The origins of the family, Private property and the state in the light of the researches by Lewis H. Morgan.” In Collected works by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, vol. 26: 129–276. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1940. The Nuer: A description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Faubion, James D., and George E. Marcus, eds. 2009. Fieldwork is not what it used to be: Learning anthropology’s method in a time of transition. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Fortun, Kim. 2001. Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, disaster, new global orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freed, Stanley A., Ruth S. Freed and Laila Williamson. 1988. “Capitalist philantropy and Russian revolutionaries: The Jessup North Pacific expedition.” American Anthropologist 90, no. 1: 7–24.

Galison, Peter. 2004. Einstein’s clocks, Poincare’s maps: Empires of time. New York: W. W. Norton.

Galton, Francis. 1889. ‘Discussion of “On a method of investigating the development of institutions; applied to laws of marriage and descent” by Edward B. Tylor.’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 18: 245–72.

Geertz, Clifford. (1966) 1973. “Person, time and conduct in Bali.” In The interpretation of cultures, 360–411. New York: Basic Books.

Gell, Alfred. 1992. The anthropology of time: Cultural construction of temporal images and maps. Oxford: Berg.

Gupta, Achil, and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Anthropological locations: Boundaries and grounds of a field science. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Guyer, Jane I. 2007. “Prophecy and the near future: thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time.” American Ethnologist 34, no. 3: 409–21. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409.

Günel, Gökçe, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe. 2020. “A manifesto for patchwork ethnography.” Member Voices. Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, June 9. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography

Hann, Chris M., ed. 2002. Postsocialism: Ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge.

Haraway, Donna, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L Tsing, and Nils Bubandt. 2016. “Anthropologists are talking–about the Anthropocene.” Ethnos 81, no. 3: 535–64.

Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of post-modernity: The enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Howe, Leopold E.A. 1981. “The social determination of knowledge: Maurice Bloch and Balinese time.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, no. 2: 220–34.

Irvine, Richard. 2020. An anthropology of deep time: Geological temporality and social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jacobsen, Christine M, Marry-Anne Karlsen, and Shahram Khosravi, eds. 2021. Waiting and the temporalities of irregular migration. London: Routledge.

James, Wendy, and David Mills, eds. 2005. The qualities of time: Anthropological approaches. Oxford: Berg.

Janeja, Manpreet K, and Andreas Bandak, eds. 2018. Ethnographies of waiting: Doubt, hope and uncertainty. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1997. The king’s two bodies: A study in mediaeval political theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Karaseva, Asya I. and Maria P. Momzikova. 2019. “Chasovye poyasa i sinhronnye telekommunikacii: nezametnaya rabota po temporalnoj koordinacii u gorozhan Dalnego Vostoka Rossii.” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 3: 42–61.

Kern, Stephen. 2003. The culture of time and space, 1880–1918: With a new preface. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Kharitonova, E. N. 1980. Ot Vsego Serdza: Podarki V.I. Leninu. Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe Iskusstvo.

Knight, Daniel, n.d. Thumbelina’s fury. Forthcoming. Midview City, Singapore: Ethos.

Knox, Hannah. 2020. Thinking like a climate: Governing a city in times of environmental change. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Leach, Edmund. 1961. "Two essays concerning the symbolic representation of time." In Rethinking anthropology, 124-236. London: Athlone

Ley, Lukas. 2021. Building on borrowed time: Rising seas and failing infrastructure in Semarang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Maine, Henry James. 1861. Ancient law: Its connection with the early history of society, and its relation to modern ideas. London: Mclvens.

Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117.

——— 2003. “On the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now: Notes on a contemporary anxiety in the making of ethnography.” Cross Cultural Poetics 12, no. 12: 7–20.

Marcus, George E., and Fred R. Myers, eds. 1995. The traffic in culture: Refiguring art and anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Marcus, George E. and Judith Okely. 2007. “How short can fieldwork be.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 15, no. 3: 353–64.

Marx, Karl. (1857-1859) 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. London: Penguin.

Mathews, Andrew S. 2020. “Anthropology and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, experiments, and collaborations.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 67–82.

McCarthy, D. P. 1997. “The biblical chronology of James Ussher.” Irish Astronomical Journal 24, no. 1: 73–82.

Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking.

Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2003. “The temporalities of the market.” American Anthropologist 105, no. 2: 255–65.

Moore, Amelia. 2016. “Anthropocene anthropology: Reconceptualizing contemporary global change.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 1: 27–46.

Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1851. League of the Ho-Dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois. Rochester, N.Y.: Sage & Brother.

——— 1878. Ancient society; or, researches in the lines of human progress from savagery, through barbarism to civilization. New York: H. Holt.

Munn, Nancy. 1983. “Gawan Kula: Spatiotemporal control and the symbolism of influence.” In The kula: New perspectives on Massim exchange, edited by James W. Leach and Edmund Leach, 277–308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

——— 1992. “The cultural anthropology of time: A critical essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 93–123.

Musharbash, Yasmine. 2007. “Boredom, time, and modernity: An example from Aboriginal Australia.” American Anthropologist 109, no. 2: 307–17.

Müller, Martin. 2019. “Goodbye, postsocialism.” Europe-Asia Studies 71, no. 4: 533–50.

Ogle, Vanessa. 2015. The global transformation of time: 1870–1950. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Otto, Ton. 2016. “Times of the other: The temporalities of ethnographic fieldwork.” In Time and the field, edited by Steffen Dalsgaard and Morten Nielsen, 64–79. New York: Berghahn Books.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Rabinow, Paul. 2008. Marking time: On the anthropology of the contemporary. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ratzel, Friedrich. 1904. “Geschichte, Völkerkunde und historische Perspektive.” In Kleine Schriften, volume 2, edited by H. Helmholt: 488–525. Munich: R. Oldenbourg.

Rees, Tobias. 2008. “Introduction: Today, what is anthropology.” In Designs for an anthropology of the contemporary, edited by Paul Rabinow, George E. Marcus, James D. Faubion, and Tobias Rees, 1–12. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Rivers, W.H.R. 1913. “Report on anthropological research outside America.” In The present condition and future needs of the science of anthropology, by W. H. Rivers, A. E. Jenks, and S. G. Morley, 5–28. Washington D.C.: Carnegie Institute.

Rivers, W.H.R. 1914. The history of Melanesian society, volumes I and II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shrestha, Bal G. 2015. “To use or not to use: Nepal Samvat, the national era of Nepal.” HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 35, no. 1: 117–28.

Simmel, Georg. (1903) 1950. “The metropolis and the mental life.” In The sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by Kurt H. Wolff, 409–26. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

Sorokin, Pitirim Aleksandrovich. 1943. Sociocultural causality, space, time: A study of referential principles of sociology and social science. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Sosnina, Olga, and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov. 2009. “Postsocialism kak khronotop: post-sovetskaia publika na vystavke ‘Dary Vozhdiam’.” Neprokosnovennyi Zapas 64, no. 2: 207–26.

Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. 2003. The social life of the state in subarctic Siberia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

— — — 2008. “Political fieldwork, ethnographic exile and the state theory: Peasant socialism and anthropology in late-nineteenth-century Russia,” In New history of anthropology, edited by Hernika Kuklick, 191–206. Oxford: Blackwell.

——— 2017. Two Lenins: A brief anthropology of time. Chicago: Chicago University Press and HAU Malinowski Monographs.

Stein, Jeremy. 2001. “Reflections on time, time-space compression and technology in the nineteenth century.” In Timespace: Geographies of temporality, edited by Jon May and Nigel Thrift, 118–31. London: Routledge.

Stein, Felix. 2017. Work, sleep, repeat: The abstract labour of German management consultants. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

——— 2018. “Selling speed: Management consultants, acceleration, and temporal angst.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 41, no. S1: 103–17.

Stephens, Carlene E. 1983. Inventing standard time. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Stern, Sacha. 2012. Calendars in antiquity: Empires, states, and societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———, ed. 2021. Calendars in the making: The origins of calendars from the Roman Empire to the later Middle Ages. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Stout, Noelle. 2016. “#Indebted: Disciplining the moral valence of mortgage debt online.” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 1: 82–106.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1871. Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. London: J. Murray.

Verdery, Katherine. 1991. “Theorizing socialism: a prologue to the transition.” American Ethnologist 18, no. 3: 419–39.

Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What was socialism, and what comes next? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Weber, Max. (1905) 1992. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Routledge.

Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Young, Michael W. 1984. “The intensive study of a restricted area, or, why did Malinowski go to the Trobriand Islands.” Oceania 55, no. 1: 1–26.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Note on contributor

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg. His publications include books: The social life of the state in Subarctic Siberia (2003, Stanford University Press) and Two Lenins: A brief anthropology of time (2017, HAU Malinowski Monographs), and articles: “Rethinking performativity: Ethnographic conceptualism” (2020, Journal of Cultural Economy); “Reassembling history and anthropology in Russian anthropology” (2019, Social Anthropology); “Hybrid peace: Ethnographies of war” (2018, Annual Review of Anthropology). He edited the exhibition catalogue Gifts to Soviet leaders (2006, Kremlin Museum) and a “Forum on the New Far Right” (2021, Social Anthropology).

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

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.

References

Abram, Simone, Karen Waltorp, Nathalie Ortar, and Sarah Pink. 2023. Energy futures: Anthropocene challenges, emerging technologies and everyday life. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Appel, Hannah, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts. 2015. “Introduction: Oil talk.” In Subterranean estates: Life worlds of oil and gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason and Michael Watts, 1–26. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Askland, Hedda H., and Matthew Bunn. 2018. “Extractive inequalities: Coal, land acquisition and class in rural New South Wales, Australia.” In Energy, resource extraction and society: Impacts and contested futures, edited by Anna Szolucha, 20–36. London: Routledge.

Aykut, Stefan C., Jean Foyer, and Edouard Morena. 2019. Globalising the climate: COP21 and the climatization of global debates. New York: Routledge.

Bakke, Gretchen. 2016. The grid: The fraying wires between Americans and our energy future. New York: Bloomsbury.

Becker, Steffen and Matthias Naumann. 2018. “Energiekonflikte erkennen und nutzen.” In Bausteine der Energiewende. RaumFragen: Stadt – Region – Landschaft, edited by Olaf Kühne and Florian Weber, 509–22. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

Behrends, Andrea, Stephen Reyna, and Günther Schlee. 2011. Crude domination: An anthropology of oil. New York: Berghahn Books.

Bickerstaff, Karen, Gordon Walker and Harriet Bulkeley. 2013. Energy justice in a changing climate: Social equity and low-carbon energy. London: Zed Books.

Bollig, Michael, and Franz Krause. 2023. Environmental anthropology. Bern: Haupt Verlag.

Boyer, Dominic. 2014. “Energopower: An introduction.” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 309–34. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/anq.2014.0020.

Boyer, Dominic, and Cymene Howe. 2019. Wind and power in the Anthropocene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Bracking, Sarah, Maud Borie, Glen Sim, and Theo Temple. 2023. “Turning investments green in bond markets: Qualification, devices and morality.” Economy and Society 52, no. 4: 626–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2023.2246263.

Campbell, Ben, Jon Cloke, and Ed Brown. 2016. “Communities of energy.” Economic Anthropology 3, no. 1 (January 2016): 133–44. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12050.

Cantoni, Roberto, and Karen Rignall. 2019. “Kingdom of the Sun: A critical, multiscalar analysis of Morocco’s solar energy strategy.” Energy Research & Social Science 51 (May 2019): 20–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.12.012.

Chelsea, Chapman. 2013. “Multinatural resources: Ontologies of energy and the politics of inevitability in Alaska.” In Cultures of energy: Power, practices, technologies, edited by Sarah Strauss, Stephanie Rupp and Thomas Love, 96–109. New York: Routledge.

Coleman, Leo. 2021. “Afterword: People thinking energetically.” In Ethnographies of power: A political anthropology of energy, edited by Tristan Loloum, Simone Abram, Nathalie Ortar, 180–94. New York: Berghahn Books.

Cross, Jamie. 2019. “No current: Electricity and disconnection in rural India.” In Electrifying anthropology: Exploring electrical practices and infrastructures, edited by Simone Abram, Brit Ross Winthereik and Thomas Yarrow, 65–82. London: Routledge.

Degani, Michael. 2022. The city electric: Infrastructure and ingenuity in postsocialist Tanzania. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Degani, Michael, Brenda Chalfin, and Jamie Cross. 2022. “Introduction: Fuelling capture: Africa's energy frontiers.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 38, no. 2: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2020.380202.

Field, Sean. 2022. “Carbon capital: The lexicon and allegories of US hydrocarbon finance.” Economy and Society 51, no. 2: 235–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2022.2030606.

Fortun, Kim, and Alli Morgan. 2016. “Thinking across disaster.” In Mental health and social issues following a nuclear accident: The case of Fukushima, edited by Jun Shigemura and Rethy Kieth Chhem, 55–64. Tokyo: Springer.

Foucault, Michel. 1981. The history of sexuality. Volume I: An introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Franquesa, Jaume. 2018. Power struggles: Dignity, value, and the renewable energy frontier in Spain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Geels, Frank W. 2004. “From sectoral systems of innovation to socio-technical systems: Insights about dynamics and change from sociology and institutional theory.” Research Policy 33, no. 6–7 (September 2004): 897–920. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2004.01.015.

Goodman, James, Linda Connor, Devleena Ghosh, Kanchi Kohli, Jonathan Marshall, Manju Menon, Katja Müller, Tom Morton, Rebecca Pearse, and Stuart Rosewarne. 2020. Beyond the Coal Rush: A Turning Point for Global Energy and Climate Policy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—. Forthcoming. Decarbonising electricity: Lessons from renewable energy regions in India, Germany and Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ghosh, Devleena, Gareth Bryant, and Priya Pillay. 2022. “Who wins and who loses from renewable energy transition? Large-scale solar, land, and livelihood in Karnataka, India.” Globalizations 20, no. 8: 1328–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2038404.

Gupta, Akhil. 2015. “An anthropology of electricity from the Global South.” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 4: 555–68. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.04.

Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the desert: Energy, climate change, and urban design in Abu Dhabi. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Gusterson, Hugh. 1996. Nuclear rites: A weapons laboratory at the end of the Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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

Huber, Matthew. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, freedom, and the forces of capital. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Jacka, Jerry. 2018. “The anthropology of mining: The social and environmental impacts of resource extraction in the mineral age.” Annual Review of Anthropology 47 (October 2018): 6–77. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102317-050156.

Kaur, Raminder. 2021. “Southern spectrums: The raw to the smooth edges of energopower.” In Ethnographies of power: A political anthropology of energy, edited by Tristan Loloum, Simone Abram and Nathalie Ortar, 24–51. New York: Berghahn Books.

Kaviani, Fareed, Yolande Strengers, Kari Dahlgren, Hannah Korsmeyer, and Sarah Pink. 2023. “Building plausible scenarios for future living: Intervening in energy forecasting using household ethnography and foresight.” Energy Research & Social Science 106 (December 2023): 103315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2023.103315.

Kelly, Sarah. 2019. “Megawatts mask impacts: Small hydropower and knowledge politics in the Puelwillimapu, Southern Chile.” Energy Research & Social Science 54 (August 2019): 224–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.04.014.

Kikon, Dolly. 2019. Living with oil and coal: Resource politics and militarization in Northeast India. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Koch, Natalie. 2022. “Greening oil money: The geopolitics of energy finance going green.” Energy Research and Social Science 93 (November 2022): 102833. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2022.102833.

Küpers, Sophia, and Susana Batel. 2023. “Sacrifice discourse in historical hydropower controversies on Portuguese television.” Proceedings of the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ Renewable Energy & Post-Carbon Futures Workshop. https://ean.hypotheses.org/ean-conferences/lisbon-2023/sacrifice-discourse-in-historical-hydropower-controversies-on-portuguese-television. Accessed 29 May 2024.

Lewin, Philip. 2017. “Coal is not just a job, it’s a way of life”: The cultural politics of coal production in Central Appalachia.” Social Problems 66, no. 1 (February 2017): 51–68. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spx030.

Liubimau, Siarhei. 2019. “Post-Soviet ‘nuclear’ towns as multi-scalar infrastructures: Relating sovereignty and urbanity through the perspective of Visaginas.” In Post-socialist urban infrastructures, edited by Tauri Tuvikene, Wladimir Sgibnev and Carola Neugebauer, 89–104. New York: Routledge.

Loloum, Tristan, Simone Abram, and Nathalie Ortar. 2021. “Introduction: Politicizing energy anthropology.” In Ethnographies of power: A political anthropology of energy, edited by Tristan Loloum, Simone Abram and Nathalie Ortar, 1–23. New York: Berghahn Books.

Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala. 2014. The coal nation: Histories, ecologies and politics of coal in India. Farnham: Ashgate.

Langley, Paul, Gavin Bridge, Harriet Bulkeley, and Bregje van Veelen. 2021. “Decarbonizing capital: Investment, divestment and the qualification of carbon assets.” Economy and Society 50, no. 3 (May 2021): 494–516. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2021.1860335.

Lautrup, Andy. 2022. “Overcoming abstraction: Affectual states in the efforts to decarbonize energy among young climate activists in Stavanger, Norway.” In Digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions, edited by Siddharth Sareen and Katja Müller, 73–95. London: Palgrave Macmillan, Springer.

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. London: Verso.

Marcus, George, and Erkan Saka. 2006. “Assemblage.” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2–3: 101–6. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406062573.

Meehan, Katie M. 2014. “Tool-power: Water infrastructure as well springs of state power.” Geoforum 57 (November 2014): 215–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.08.005.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon democracy: Political power in the age of oil. London: Verso.

Moore, Jason. 2015. Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. London: Verso.

Morley, Janine, Kelly Widdicks, and Mike Hazas. 2018. “Digitalisation, energy and data demand: The impact of internet traffic on overall and peak electricity consumption.” Energy Research & Social Science 38 (April 2018): 128–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.01.018.

Morton, Tom, and Katja Müller. 2016. “Lusatia and the coal conundrum: The lived experience of the German Energiewende.” Energy Policy 99 (December 2016): 277–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2016.05.024.

Müller, Katja. 2017. „Heimat, Kohle, Umwelt. Argumente im Protest und der Befürwortung von Braunkohleförderung in der Lausitz.“ Zeitschrift für Umweltpolitik und Umweltrecht 3: 213–28. http://www.katjamueller.org/pdfs/Heimat%20Kohle%20Umwelt.pdf. Accessed 23 August 2024.

———. 2021. “Heat pipelines and climate camps: Coal mining's in/visible infrastructure.” The Extractive Industries and Society 8, no. 3 (September 2021): 100944. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2021.100944.

Müller, Katja, and Tom Morton. 2021. “The space, the time, and the money: Wind energy politics in East Germany.” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 40 (September 2021): 62–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2021.06.001.

Ortiz, Horacio. 2024. “Studying lithium-ion batteries across and beyond companies, states and the environment.” The Extractive Industries and Society 17 (March 2024): 101374. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2023.101374.

Parkhill, Karen A., Nick F. Pidgeon, Karen L. Henwood, Peter Simmons and Dan Venables. (2009) 2010. “From the familiar to the extraordinary: local residents’ perceptions of risk when living with nuclear power in the UK.” Transactions 35, no. 1 (January 2010): 39–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00364.x.

Pink, Sarah, Nathalie Ortar, Karen Waltorp, and Simone Abram. 2023. “Imagining energy futures: an introduction.” In Energy futures: Anthropocene challenges, emerging technologies and everyday life, edited by Simone Abram, Karen Waltorp, Nathalie Ortar and Sarah Pink, 1–24. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Perrin, Constance. 2005. Shouldering risks: The culture of control in the nuclear power industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Powell, Dana. 2018. Landscapes of power: Politics of energy in the Navajo Nation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Reno, Joshua. 2016. Waste away: Working and living with a North American landfill. Oakland: University of California Press.

———. 2018. “Making time with amateur astronomers and orbital space debris: Attunement and the matter of temporality.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1: 4–18. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33336.

Reyna, Stephen, and Andrea Behrends. 2008. “The crazy curse and crude domination: Towards an anthropology of oil.” Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology/ European Journal of Anthropology 52: 3–17. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2008.520101.

Richardson, Tanya, and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2014. “Introduction: Resource materialities.” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 5–30. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43652719. Accessed 23 August 2024.

Ringel, Felix. 2018. Back to the postindustrial future: An ethnography of Germany's fastest-shrinking city. New York: Berghahn Books.

Rogers, Douglas. 2014. “Petrobarter: Oil, inequality, and the political imagination in and after the Cold War.” Current Anthropology 55, no. 2 (April 2014): 131–53. https://doi.org/10.1086/675498.

———. 2015. “Oil and anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (October 2015): 365–80. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014136.

Røpke, Inge. 2012. “The unsustainable directionality of innovation: The example of the broadband transition.” Research Policy 41, no. 9 (November 2012): 1631–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2012.04.002.

Rupp, Stephanie. 2013. “Considering energy: E = mc² = (magic·culture)².” In Cultures of energy: Power, practices, technologies, edited by Sarah Strauss, Stephanie Rupp and Thomas Love, 79–95. New York: Routledge.

Sareen, Siddharth, and Katja Müller. 2023. Digitisation and low-carbon energy transitions. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature.

Schöneich, Svenja. 2022. Living on a time bomb: Local negotiations of oil extraction in a Mexican community. New York: Berghahn Books.

Schwenkel, Christina. 2018. “The current never stops: Intimacies of energy infrastructure in Vietnam.” In The promise of infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, 102–29. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Siamanta, Zoi C. 2019. “Wind parks in post-crisis Greece: Neoliberalisation vis-à-vis green grabbing.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 2, no. 2 (March 2019): 274–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848619835156.

Smil, Vaclav. 2016. “Examining energy transitions: A dozen insights based on performance.” Energy Research & Social Science 22 (December 2016): 194–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2016.08.017.

Smith, Jessica. 2019. “Boom to bust, ashes to (coal) dust: The contested ethics of energetic exchanges in the US coal market collapse.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25, no. S1 (March 2019): 91–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13016.

Smith, Jessica, and Mette M. High. 2017. “Exploring the anthropology of energy: Ethnography, energy and ethics.” Energy Research and Social Science 30 (August 2017): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.027.

Socacool, Benjamin K. 2016. “How long will it take? Conceptualizing the temporal dynamics of energy transitions.” Energy Research & Social Science 13 (March 2016): 202–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.12.020.

Sovacool, Benjamin K., and Michael Dworkin. 2015. “Energy justice: Conceptual insights and practical applications.” Applied Energy 142, no. 15 (March 2015): 435–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.01.002.

Star, Susan. 1999. “The ethnography of infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (November 1999): 377–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326.

Stock, Ryan J. 2023. “Power for the Plantationocene: Solar parks as the colonial form of an energy plantation.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 50, no. 2: 162–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2022.2120812.

Strauss, Sarah, Stephanie Rupp, and Thomas Love. 2013. Cultures of energy: Power, practices, technologies. London: Routledge.

Strengers, Yolande, Kari Dahlgren, Larissa Nicholls, Sarah Pink, and Rex Martin. 2021. “Digital energy futures: Future home life.” Monash Emerging Technologies Research Lab. Melbourne: Monash University. https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/2900257/DEF-Future-Home-Life-Full-Report.pdf. Accessed 27 August 2024.

Watts, Laura. 2019. Energy at the end of the world: An Orkney Islands saga. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

———. 2024. “Stormpunk islands.” The Climate Action Almanac, October 23 2023. Tempe: Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University. https://www.climatealmanac.org/pub/qja3wnk0. Accessed 27 August 2024.

Weszkalnys, Gisa. 2016. “A doubtful hope: Resource affect in a future oil economy.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. S1: 127–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12397.

White, Leslie A. 1943. “Energy and the evolution of culture.” American Anthropologist 45, no. 3, part 1 (July–September 1943): 335–56. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1943.45.3.02a00010.

Winther, Tanja. 2008. The impact of electricity: Development, desires and dilemmas. New York: Berghahn.

Winther, Tanja, and Harold Wilhite. 2015. “Tentacles of modernity: Why electricity needs anthropology.” Current Anthropology 30, no. 4: 569–77. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.05.

World Economic Forum. 2023. Global Future Council on the future of energy transition. https://www.weforum.org/communities/gfc-on-energy-transition/. Accessed 27 August 2024.

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.

[1] United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2024. Process and meetings: The Paris Agreement. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement. Accessed 29 May 2024.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2024. Process and meetings: The Rio Conventions. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-rio-conventions. Accessed 29 May 2024.

[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.

References

Abourahme, Nasser and Omar Jabary-Salamanca. 2016. “Thinking against the sovereignty of the concept.” City 20, no. 5: 737–54.

Abram, Simone and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2011. “Introduction: Anthropologies of planning: Temporality, imagination, and ethnography.” Focaal 61: 3–18.

Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. 2014. “Lively infrastructures.” Theory, Culture & Society 31, nos. 7-8: 137–61.

Anand, Nikhil. 2011. “PRESSURE: The politechnics of water supply in Mumbai”. Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4: 542–64.

———. 2015. “Accretion”. In “The infrastructure toolbox,” edited by Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary. September 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/accretion. Last accessed 22 January 2021.

Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. 2018. The promise of infrastructure. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy.” In Global culture, edited by Mike Featherstone, 295–310. London: Sage.

Appel, Hannah. 2018. “Infrastructural time”. In The promise of infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 41–61. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———. 2019. The licit life of capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Appel, Hannah and Mukul Kumar. 2015. “Finance.” In “The infrastructure toolbox,” edited by Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary. September 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/finance. Accessed 22 January 2021.

Arboleda, Martin. 2020. Planetary mine: Territories of extraction under late capitalism. London: Verso.

Aslanishvili, Tekla. 2022. A state in a state. Hans Nefkens Foundation.

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Barker, Joshua. 2005. “Engineers and political dreams: Indonesia in the satellite age.” Current Anthropology 46, no. 5: 703–27.

Barry, Andrew. 2005. “Pharmaceutical matters: The invention of informed materials.” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 1: 51–69.

Barry, Andrew and Evelina Gambino. 2019. “Pipeline geopolitics: Subaquatic materials and the tactical point.” Geopolitics 25, no. 1: 109–42.

Bear, Laura. 2007. Lines of the nation: Indian railway workers, bureaucracy, and the intimate historical self. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2015. Navigating austerity: Currents of debt along a South Asian river. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

———. 2016. “Time as technique.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 487–502.

———. 2017. “‘Alternatives’ to austerity: A critique of financialised infrastructures in India and beyond.” Anthropology Today 33, no. 5: 3–7.

Bear, Laura, Karen Ho, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Sylvia Yanagisako. 2015. “Gens: A feminist manifesto for the study of capitalism.” Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, March 30. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism. Accessed 5 January 2023.

Bear, Laura, Penny Harvey, Sian Lazar, Laura Rival and AbdouMaliq Simone. 2018. “Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political.” Critique Of Anthropology 38, no. 1: 3–52.

Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Boyer, Dominic. 2018. “Infrastructure, potential energy, revolution”. In The promise of infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 223–44. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Braun, Bruce and Sarah Whatmore. 2011. Political matter: Technoscience, democracy, and public life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bremner, Lindsay, ed. 2022. Monsoon as method: Assembling monsoonal multiplicities. New York: Actar Publishing.

Bryant, Rebecca and Daniel M. Knight. 2019. The anthropology of the future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carse, Ashley. 2012. “Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed.” Social Studies of Science 42, no. 4: 539–63.

———. 2014. Beyond the big ditch: Politics, ecology, and infrastructure at the Panama Canal. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Chan, Anita. 2014. Networking peripheries: Technological futures and the myth of digital universalism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Chua, Charmaine, Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cowen and Laleh Khalili. 2018. “Introduction: Turbulent circulation: Building a critical engagement with logistics.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 4: 617–29.

Collier, Stephen J. 2011. Post-Soviet social: Neoliberalism, social modernity, biopolitics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Collier, Stephen J., James Christopher Mizes and Antina von Schnizler. 2016. “Preface: Public infrastructures/infrastructural publics.” Limn 7: 2–7.

Collier, Stephen J. and Andrew Lakoff. 2020. “The vulnerability of vital systems: How ‘critical infrastructure’ became a security problem.” In Securing ‘the homeland’: Critical infrastructure, risk and (in)security, edited by Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Kristian Søby Kristensen, 17–39. London: Routledge.

Corsín Jiménez, Alberto, and Adolfo Estalella. 2017. “Political exhaustion and the experiment of street: Boyle meets Hobbes in Occupy Madrid.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23, no. 1, S1: 110–23.

Coole, Diana H. and Samantha Frost. 2010. New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The magical state: Nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.

Cupers, Kenny and Prita Meier. 2020. “Infrastructure between statehood and selfhood: The trans-African highway.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 79, no. 1: 61–81.

Dalakoglou, Dimitris. 2016. “Infrastructural gap: Commons, state and anthropology.” City 20, no. 6: 822–31.

Easterling, Keller. 2014. Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. London: Verso.

Edwards, Paul N. 2003. “Infrastructure and modernity: Force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems.” In Modernity and technology, edited by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, 185–226. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 1995. Small places, large issues: An introduction to social and cultural anthropology. London: Pluto Press.

Estalella, Adolfo and Tomás Sánchez Criado. 2019. “DIY anthropology: Disciplinary knowledge in crisis.” Anuac 8, no. 2: 143–65.

Fabian, Johannes. (1983) 2014. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Farmer, Paul. 1996. “On suffering and structural violence: A view from below.” Daedalus 125, no. 1: 261–83.

Fortun, Kim. 2004. “From Bhopal to the informating of environmentalism: Risk communication in historical perspective”. Osiris 19: 283–96.

Gabrys, Jennifer. 2014. “Programming environments: environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 1: 30–48.

Gambino, Evelina. 2019. “Beyond seamlessness: the making and unmaking of a logistical territory.” Lo Squaderno 51: 59–63.

———. 2022. “Does the future ever come? An infrastructure and its multiple delays.” Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. https://biennial.ge/programme/publication/does-the-future-ever-come-an-infrastructure-and-its-multiple-delays/6. Accessed 31 December 2022.

Gambino, Evelina and Andrew Barry, n.d. “Projects of transition.” Forthcoming in Economy and Society.

Gell, Alfred. 1992. The anthropology of time: Cultural constructions of temporal maps and images. Oxford: Berg.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2008. “Diverse economies: Performative practices for ‘other worlds.’” Progress In Human Geography 32, no. 5: 613–32.

Graham, Steve and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. London: Routledge.

Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the desert: Energy, climate change, and urban design in Abu Dhabi. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———. 2015. “Suspension”. In “The infrastructure toolbox,” edited by Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary. September 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/suspension. Accessed 22 January 2021.

———. 2018. “The future in ruins: Thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure.” In The promise of infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 62–79. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Halpern, Orit, Robert Mitchell, and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. 2017. “The smartness mandate: Notes toward a critique.” Grey Room 68: 106–29.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association.

Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

Harvey, Penelope. 2005. “The materiality of state effects: An ethnography of a road in the Peruvian Andes.” In State formation: Anthropological perspectives, edited by Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad, 216–47. London, Pluto.

Harvey, Penelope and Hannah Knox. 2015. Roads: An anthropology of infrastructure and expertise. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Harvey, Penelope, Casper Jensen, and Atsuro Morita. 2017. Infrastructures and social complexity: A companion. London: Routledge.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2019. “Reading a wave buoy.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 44, no. 5: 737–61.

Hetherington, Kregg, ed. 2018. Infrastructure, environment, and life in the Anthropocene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Hetherington, Kregg. 2020. The government of beans: Regulating life in the age of monocrops. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Holston, James. 2009. “Insurgent citizenship in an era of global urban peripheries.” City & Society 21, no. 2: 245–67.

Ingram, Gregory K. et al. 1994. Infrastructure for development. World Bank development report. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/5977/WDR%201994%20-%20English.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y.

Jiménez, Alberto Corsin. 2014. “The right to infrastructure: A prototype for open source urbanism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 2: 342–62.

Juris, Jeffrey S. 2008. Networking futures: The movements against corporate globalization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Katz, Cindi. 2001. “On the grounds of globalization: A topography for feminist political engagement.” Signs 26, no. 4: 1213–34.

Kelty, Christopher M. 2008. Two bits: The cultural significance of free software. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———. 2010. “Prototyping prototyping: A preface.” Limn 0. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5z46j29f#main.

Khalili, Laleh. 2020. Sinews of war and trade. London: Verso.

Khandekar, Aalok, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Lindsay Poirier, Alli Morgan et al. 2021. “Moving ethnography: Infrastructuring doubletakes and switchbacks in experimental collaborative methods.” Science & Technology Studies 34, no. 3: 78–102.

Knox, Hannah. 2020. Thinking like a climate: Governing a city in times of environmental change. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———. 2022. “Technology, environment and the ends of knowledge.” In The Palgrave handbook of the anthropology of technology, edited by Hojer Bruun, Ayo Wahlberg et al, 237-251. London: Palgrave.

Knox, Hannah and Gemma John. 2022. “Performance walking.” In Speaking for the social: A catalogue of methods, edited by Hannah Knox and Gemma John, 187-218. New York: Punctum.

Lapland, Martha and Susan Leigh Star. 2009. Standards and their stories: How quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The politics and poetics of infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–43.

Latour, Bruno. 1991. “Technology is society made durable.” In A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination, edited by John Law, 103-130. London: Routledge.

———. 1996. Aramis, or the love of technology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

———. 1999. Pandora's hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

———. 2007. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Laszczkowski, Mateusz. 2011. “Building the future: Construction, temporality, and politics in Astana.” Focaal 2011, no. 60: 77–92.

Law, John and John Hassard. 1999. Actor network theory and after. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Lee, Benjamin and Edward LiPuma. 2002. “Cultures of circulation: The imaginations of modernity.” Public Culture 14, no. 1: 191–213. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/26272.

Lenin, Vladimir. (1920) 1965. “Current questions of the Party’s present work”. In Collected Works, 4^th edition, 408–26. Moscow: Progress Publishers. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/21.htm.

Levinson, Marc. 2006. The box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the economy bigger. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Marx, K. (1857) 1993. The Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin.

Mattern, Shannon. 2015. “Mission control: A history of the urban dashboard.” Places Journal, March. https://doi.org/10.22269/150309.

Megoran, Nick. 2006. “For ethnography in political geography: Experiencing and re-imagining Ferghana Valley boundary closures.” Political Geography 25, no. 6: 622–40.

Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. 2019. The politics of operations: Excavating contemporary capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mitchell, Timothy. 1999. “Society, economy, and the state effect.” In State/culture: State-formation after the cultural turn, edited by George Steinmetz, 76–97. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

———. 2002. The rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkley: University Of California Press.

———. 2011. Carbon democracy: Political power in the age of oil. London: Verso.

———. 2020. “Infrastructure work on time.” E-Flux, January. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/new-silk-roads/312596/infrastructures-work-on-time/. Accessed 5 January 2023.

Moore, Amelia. 2016. “Anthropocene anthropology: Reconceptualizing contemporary global change.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 1: 27–46.

Mrazek, Rudolf. 2002. Engineers of happy land: Technology and nationalism in a colony. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mukerji, Chandra. 1997. Territorial ambitions and the gardens of Versailles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Myers, Natasha. 2018. “Becoming sensor in sentient worlds: A more-than-natural history of a Black Oak savannah.” In Between matter and method: Encounters in anthropology and art, edited by Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson, 73-96. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the state: Secularism and public life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Nye, David. 1996. American technological sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Ogden, Laura. 2021. Loss and wonder at the world's end. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Ong, Aihwa. 2005. “Ecologies of expertise: Assembling flows, managing citizenship.” In Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems, edited by Ong, A., & Collier, S. Oxford: Blackwell, 337–54.

Parikka, Jussi, ed. 2011. Medianatures: The materiality of information technology and electronic waste. https://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Medianatures#A_'Frozen'_PDF_Version_of_this_Living_Book

Pedersen, Morten Axel and Morten Nielsen. 2013. “Trans-temporal hinges: Reflections on an ethnographic study of Chinese infrastructural projects in Mozambique and Mongolia.” Social Analysis 57, no. 1: 122–42.

Pels, Peter. 2015. “Modern times: Seven steps toward an anthropology of the future.” Current Anthropology 56, no. 6: 779–96.

Pink, Sarah. 2022. Emerging technologies / Life at the edge of the future. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Pink, Sarah, Yoko Akama and Shanti Sumartojo. 2018. Uncertainty and possibility: New approaches to future making in design anthropology. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Postill, John. 2020. “Digital politics and political engagement.” In Digital anthropology, 2nd edition, edited by Haidy Geismar and Hannah Knox, 165–84. London: Routledge.

Puig de La Bellacasa, Maria. 2017. Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French modern: Norms and forms of social environment. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Reeves, Madeleine. 2014. Border work: Spatial lives of the state in rural Central Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Riles, Annelise. 2004. “Real time: Unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge.” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3: 392–405.

Rofel, Lisa, Sylvia J. Yanagisako and Simona Segre. 2018. Fabricating transnational capitalism: A collaborative ethnography of Italian-Chinese global fashion. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. Railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schwenkel, C. 2015. “Spectacular infrastructure and its breakdown in socialist Vietnam.” American Ethnologist 42, no. 3: 520–34.

Schwenkel, Christina. 2015. “Sense”. In “The infrastructure toolbox,” edited by Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary. September 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/sense. Accessed 22 December 2022.

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sharma, Aradhana and Akhil Gupta, eds. 2006. The anthropology of the state: A reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. “People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16, no. 3: 407–29.

Sneath, David. 2009. “Reading the signs by Lenin’s light: Development, divination and metonymic fields in Mongolia.” Ethnos 74, no. 1: 72–90.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The ethnography of infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3: 377–91.

Star, Susan Leigh and Karen Ruhleder. 1996. “Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces.” Information Systems Research 7, no. 1: 111–34.

Starosielski, Nicole. 2015. The undersea network. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. “Including nonhumans in political theory: Opening Pandora's box?” In Political matter: Technoscience, democracy, and public life, edited by Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore, 3–33. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1997. The magic of the state. New York: Routledge.

Tennant, Chris and Jack Stilgoe. 2021. “The attachments of ‘autonomous’ vehicles.” Social Studies of Science 51, no. 6: 846–70.

Therborn, Göran. 2007. “Transcaucasian Triptych.” New Left Review 46: 69–82.

Tsing, Anna. 2004. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2009. “Supply chains and the human condition.” Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 2: 148–76.

———. 2015. “The mushroom at the end of the world.” In The mushroom at the end of the world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolf. 2003. Global transformations: Anthropology and the modern world. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Viatori, Maximilian and Brandon Scheuring. 2020. “Saving the Costa Verde's waves: Surfing and discourses of race–class in the enactment of Lima's coastal infrastructure.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25, no. 1: 84–103.

Virilio, Paul. 1986. Speed and politics: An essay on dromology. New York: Semiotext(e).

Von Schnitzler, Anita. 2008. “Citizenship prepaid: Water, calculability and techno-politics in South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 34, no. 4: 899–917.

———. 2015. “Ends”. In “The infrastructure toolbox,” edited by Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary. September 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ends. Accessed 22 December 2022.

Winner, Langdon. 1986. “Do artefacts have politics?” In The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology, 19–39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zeiderman, Austin. 2020. “In the wake of logistics: Situated afterlives of race and labour on the Magdalena River.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39, no. 3: 1–18.

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

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

American Anthropological Association 2015. AAA statement on humanity and climate change (available on-line: http://s3.amazonaws.com/rdcms-aaa/files/production/public/anthropology_and_climate_change.pdf). Accessed 25 March 2021.

Baer, H. 2012. Global capitalism and climate change: the need for an alternative world system. Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press.

——— & M. Singer 2018. The anthropology of climate change: an Integrated critical perspective. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge.

Barnes, J. 2014. Cultivating the Nile: the everyday politics of water in Egypt. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

——— et al. 2013. Contribution of anthropology to the study of climate change. Nature Climate Change 3, 541-4.

Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Chandler.

Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Beck, U. 2009. World at risk. Cambridge: Polity.

Boyer, D. 2019. Energopolitics: wind and power in the Anthropocene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Connor, L. 2016. Climate change and anthropos: planet, people and places. London: Routledge.

Crate, S.A. 2008. Gone the bull of winter? Grappling with the cultural implications of and anthropology’s role(s) in global climate change. Current Anthropology 49, 569-85.

——— & M. Nuttall (eds) 2009. Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

——— & M. Nuttall (eds) 2016. Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge.

Dalsgaard, S. 2013. The commensurability of carbon: making value and money of climate change. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(1), 80-98.

Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Viking.

Dove, M.R. (ed.) 2013. The anthropology of climate change: an historical reader. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Eriksen, T.H. 2016. Overheating: an anthropology of accelerated change. London: Pluto.

Fagan, B. 1999. Floods, famines, and emperors: El Niño and the fate of civilization. Cambridge: University Press.

Fiske, S.J., S.A. Crate, C.L. Crumley, K. Galvin, H. Lazrus, L. Lucero, A. Oliver-Smith et al. 2014. Changing the atmosphere: anthropology and climate change. Final report of the AAA Global Climate Change Task Force. Arlington, Va.: American Anthropological Association.

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

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

Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Hastrup, K. 2009. The question of resilience: social responses to climate change. Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Hendry, J. 2014. Science and sustainability: learning from indigenous wisdom. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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.

Kellogg, W.W. & M. Mead (eds) 1980. The atmosphere: endangered and endangering. Turnbridge Wells, Kent: Castle House Publications.

Krauss, W. 2015. Anthropology and the Anthropocene: sustainable development, climate change and interdisciplinary research. In Grounding global climate change (eds) H. Greschke & J. Tischler, 59-76. Dordrecht: Springer

Latour, B. 2017. Down to earth: politics in the new climatic regime. Cambridge: Polity.

McNeill, J. & P. Engelke 2016. The great acceleration: an environmental history of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Mitchell, T. 2011. Carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil. London: Verso.

Moore, A. 2015. Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing contemporary global change. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, 27-46.

Moore, J. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism (ed.) J. Moore, 1-13. Oakland: Kairos Press.

Nöbauer, H. 2018. Von der Goldmine zum Gletscher: All Weather Snow als multiples Frontier-Phänomen. Zeitschrift für Technikgeschichte 85(1), 3-38.

Norgaard, K.M. 2011. Living in denial: climate change, emotions, and everyday life. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Oliver-Smith, A. & S. M. Hoffman (eds) 2020. The angry earth: disaster in anthropological perspective. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge.

Orlove, B., J.C.H. Chiang & M.A. Cane 2000. Forecasting Andean rainfall and crop yield from the influence of El Niño on Pleiades visibility. Nature 403, 68-71.

Polanyi, K. 1944. The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time. New York: Rinehart.

Rayner, S. 2016. What might Evans-Pritchard have made of two degrees? Anthropology Today 32(4), 1-2.

——— & E. Malone (eds) 1998. Human choice and climate change. Columbus: Battelle Press.

Rojas, D. & N. Johnson 2013. Landscapes of the Anthropocene in the UN climate negotiations (October 2013). Anthropology News.

Rosa, H. 2015. Social acceleration: a new theory of modernity. New York: Columbia University Press.

Shore, C. & S. Trnka (eds) 2013. Up close and personal: on peripheral perspectives and the production of anthropological knowledge. Oxford: Berghahn.

Steffen, W., P.J. Crutzen & J.R. McNeill 2007. The Anthropocene: are human beings now overwhelming the forces of nature? AMBIO 36(8), 614-21.

Stensrud, A.B. & T.H. Eriksen (eds) 2019. Climate, capitalism and communities. London: Pluto.

Steward, J. 1955. Theory of culture change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Strauss, S., S. Rupp & T. Love (eds) 2013. Cultures of energy: power, practices, technologies. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

Tainter, J.A. 1988. The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge: University Press.

Tsing, A., H. Swanson, E. Gan & N. Bubandt (eds) 2017. Arts of living on a damaged planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Walker-Crawford, N. 2021. Climate change in court: making neighbourly relations in a warming world. PhD dissertation, University of Manchester.

White, L. 1949. The science of culture: a study of man and civilization. New York: Grove Press.

Wilhite, H. 2016. The political economy of low carbon transformation: breaking the habits of capitalism. London: Routledge.

——— & C. Salinas 2019. Expansive capitalism, climate change and global climate mitigation regimes: a triple burden on forest peoples in the Global South. In Climate, capitalism and communities (eds) A.B. Stensrud & T.H. Eriksen, 151-70. London: Pluto.

Wilk, R. 2016. Is a sustainable consumer culture possible? In Climate and anthropology, 2^nd. ed. (eds) S. Crate & M. Nuttall, 301-18. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

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).

References

Agarwal, B. 1992. The gender and environment debate: lessons from India. Feminist Studies 18(1), 119-58.

Baer, H.A. 1996. Toward a political ecology of health in medical anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10(4), 451-4.

Bernstein, H. 1990. Taking the part of peasants? In The food question: profits versus people? (eds) H. Bernstein, B. Crow, M. Mackintosh & C. Martin, 69-79. London: Earthscan.

Berry, S. 1989. Social institutions and access to resources. Africa 59, 41-55.

Biersack, A. 1999. Introduction: from the "new ecology" to the new ecologies. American Anthropologist 101(1), 5-18.

−−−−− 2006. Reimagining political ecology: culture/power/history/nature. In Reimagining political ecology (eds) A. Biersack & J.B. Greenberg, 3-42. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

−−−−− & J.B. Greenberg (eds) 2006. Reimagining political ecology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Blaikie, P. 1985. The political economy of soil erosion in developing countries. London: Longman.

−−−−− & H. Brookfield 1987. Land degradation and society. London: Methuen.

Bridge, G., J. McCarthy & T. Perrault (eds) 2015. Editor's introduction. In The Routledge handbook of political ecology (eds) G. Bridge, T. Perreault & J. McCarthy, 3-18. New York: Routledge.

Bryant, R.L. 1998. Power, knowledge, and political ecology in the third world: a review. Progress in Physical Geography 22(1), 79-94.

Chua, L. & H. Fair 2019. Anthropocene. In Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (ed.) F. Stein, University of Cambridge (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/anthropocene).

Crate, S. 2008. Gone the bull of winter: grappling with cultural implications of and anthropology's role(s) in global climate change. Current Anthropology 49(4), 569-95.

Cruikshank, J. 2007. Do glaciers listen? Local knowledge, colonial encounters, and social imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Dove, M. 1993. A revisionist view of tropical deforestation and development. Environmental Conservation 20(1), 17-24.

−−−−− 2006. Equilibrium theory and interdisciplinary borrowing: a comparison of old and new ecological anthropologies. In Reimagining political ecology (eds) A. Biersack & J.B. Greenberg, 43-69. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

−−−−− 2011. The banana tree at the gate: a history of marginal peoples and global markets in Borneo. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Edelman, M. & A. Haugerud 2005. Introduction: the anthropology of development and globalization. In The anthropology of development and globalization: from classical political economy to contemporary neoliberalism (eds) M. Edelman & A. Haugerud, 1-74. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing.

Ehrlich, P.R. 1968. The population bomb. New York: Ballantine Books.

Escobar, A. 1999. After nature: steps to an antiessentialist political ecology. Current Anthropology 40(1), 1-28.

−−−−− 2008. Territories of difference: place, movements, life, redes. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Fiske, S.J. 2009. Global change policymaking from inside the Beltway: engaging anthropology. In Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions (ed.) S. Crate & M. Nuttall, 277-91. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

Foster, J.B. 2000. Marx's ecology: materialism and nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Frank, A.G. 1989. The development of underdevelopment. Monthly Review 41(2), 37-43.

Friedman, J. 1974. Marxism, structuralism, and vulgar materialism. Man 9(3), 444-69.

Gezon, L.L. & S. Paulson 2005. Place, power, difference: multiscale research at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In Political ecology across spaces, scales, and social groups (eds) S. Paulson & L.L. Gezon, 1-16. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Greenberg, J.B. & T.K. Park 1994. Political ecology. Journal of Political Ecology 1, 1-12.

Harcourt, W. & E. Nelson (eds) 2015. Practicing feminist political ecologies: moving beyond the 'green economy'. Chicago: University Press.

Hardin, G. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162, 1243-8.

Harvey, D. 1974. Population, resources, and the ideology of science. Economic Geography 50 (3), 256-77.

−−−−− 1996. Justice, nature, and the geography of difference. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Hoffman, S. & A. Oliver-Smith (eds) 2002. Catastrophe and culture: the anthropology of disaster. Santa Fe: School of American Research.

Jacka, J. 2015. Alchemy in the rainforest: politics, ecology, and resilience in a New Guinea mining area. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Jones, E.C. & A. Murphy (eds) 2009. The political economy of hazards and disasters. Lanham, Md.: Altamira Press.

Karlsson, B. 2015. Political ecology: anthropological perspectives. In International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (ed.) J.D. Wright, 350-5. Oxford: Elsevier.

King, B. 2010. Political ecologies of health. Progress in Human Geography 34(1), 38-55.

Kirsch, S. 2006. Reverse anthropology: indigenous analysis of social and environmental relations in New Guinea. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Kottak, C.P. 1999. The new ecological anthropology. American Anthropologist 101(1), 23-35.

Li, T.M. 2007. The will to improve: governmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

−−−−− 2014. Land's end: capitalist relations on an indigenous frontier. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Little, P.D. M.M. Horowitz & A. Endre Nyerges (eds) 1987. Lands at risk in the third world: local-level perspectives. Boulder: Westview Press.

Martinez-Alier, J. 2002. Environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and valuation. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar.

Marx, K. 1889. Capital: a critical analysis of capitalist production. New York: Appleton and Company.

Merchant, C. 1980. The death of nature: women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. New York: Harper and Row.

Mintz, S. 1985. Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. New York: Viking.

Moore, A. 2016. Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing contemporary global change. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22(1), 27-46.

Moore, D.S. 1993. Contesting terrain in Zimbabwe's eastern highlands: political ecology, ethnography, and peasant resource struggles. Economic Geography 69(4), 380-401.

−−−−− 2005. Suffering for territory: race, place, and power in Zimbabwe. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

−−−−−, J. Kosek & A. Pandian (eds) 2003. Race, nature, and the politics of difference. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Nash, J. 1993. We eat the mines and the mines eat us: dependency and exploitation in Bolivian tin mines. New York: Columbia University Press.

Netting, R.M. 1993. Smallholders, householders: farm families and the ecology of intensive, sustainable agriculture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Neumann, R. 1992. Political ecology of wildlife conservation in the Mt. Meru Area of Northeast Tanzania. Land Degradation and Rehabilitation 3, 85-98.

Odum, E. 1969. The strategy of ecosystem development. Science 164(3877), 262-70.

Ogden, L., N. Heynen, U. Oslender, P. West, K.-A. Kassam & P Robbins (eds) 2013. Global assemblages, resilience, and earth stewardship in the anthropocene. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11(7), 341-7.

Oliver-Smith, A. & S. Hoffman (eds) 1999. The angry earth: disaster in anthropological perspective. New York: Routledge.

Orlove, B. 1980. Ecological anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 9, 235-73.

Paulson, S., L.L. Gezon & M. Watts 2003. Locating the political in political ecology: an introduction. Human Organization 62(3), 205-17.

−−−−− & L.L. Gezon (eds) 2005. Political ecology across spaces, scales, and social groups. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Peet, R., P. Robbins & M. Watts (eds) 2011. Global political ecology. New York: Routledge.

−−−−− & M. Watts (eds) 2004. Liberation ecologies: environment, development, social movements. London: Routledge.

Peluso, N.L. 1992. Rich forests, poor people: resource control and resistance in Java. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Perreault, T., G. Bridge & J. McCarthy (eds) 2015. The Routledge handbook of political ecology. New York: Routledge.

Rappaport, R. 1967. Ritual regulation of environmental relations among a New Guinea people. Ethnology 6, 17-30.

−−−−− 1968. Pigs for the ancestors: ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people. New Haven: Yale University Press.

−−−−− 1971. The flow of energy in an agricultural society. Scientific American 25, 116-132.

−−−−− 1984. Pigs for the ancestors: ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

−−−−− 1990. Ecosystems, populations, and people. In The ecosystem approach in anthropology: from concept to practice (ed.) E. Moran, 41-72. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

−−−−− 1993. Distinguished lecture in general anthropology: the anthropology of trouble. American Anthropologist 95(2), 295-303.

Robbins, P. 2004. Political ecology: a critical introduction. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing.

−−−−− 2019. Political ecology: a critical introduction. 3rd ed. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley Blackwell.

Rocheleau, D., B. Thomas-Slayter & E. Wangari (eds) 1996. Feminist political ecology: global issues and local experiences. New York: Routledge.

Rocheleau, D. & D. Edmunds 1997. Women, men and trees: gender, power and property in forest and agrarian landscapes. World Development 25(8), 1351-71.

Roseberry, W. 1983. Coffee and capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Rudiak-Gould, Peter. 2013. Climate change and tradition in a small island state: the rising tide. New York: Routledge.

Sahlins, M. 1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University Press.

Sauer, C. 1965. The morphology of landscape. In Land and life: a selection from the writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer (ed.) J. Leighly, 315-50. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sawyer, S. 2004. Crude chronicles: indigenous politics, multinational oil, and neoliberalism in Ecuador. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Smith, L.T. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.

Steffen, W., P.J. Crutzen & J.R. McNeill 2007. The anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature? Ambio 36(8), 614-21.

Steward, J. 1937. Ecological aspects of southwestern society. Anthropos 32, 87-104.

−−−−− 1955. The concept and method of cultural ecology. In Theory of culture change (ed.) J. Steward, 30-42. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Tallbear, K. 2014. Standing with and speaking as faith: a feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. Journal of Research Practice 10(2), Article N17 (available on-line: http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/405/407.) Accessed 31 August 2020.

Tsing, A. 2005. Friction: an ethnography of global connection. Princeton: University Press.

Vayda, A.P. & B.B. Walters 1999. Against political ecology. Human Ecology 27(1), 167-79.

Walker, P.A. 2005. Political ecology: where is the ecology? Progress in Human Geography 29 (1), 73-82.

Wallerstein, I. 1974. The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis. Comparative Studies in Society and History 16(4), 387-415.

Watts, M. 2015. Now and then: the origins of political ecology and the rebirth of adaptation as a form of thought. In The Routledge handbook of political ecology (eds) G. Bridge, J. McCarthy & T. Perrault, 19-50. New York: Routledge.

West, P. 2006. Conservation is our government now: the politics of ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

−−−−− 2016. Dispossession and the environment: rhetoric and inequality in Papua New Guinea. New York: Columbia University Press.

Whyte, K.P. 2018. Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environmental Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1-2), 224-42.

Wolf, E. 1972. Ownership and political ecology. Anthropology Quarterly 45, 201-5.

−−−−− 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zimmerer, K.S. & T.J. Bassett (eds) 2003. Political ecology: an integrative approach to geography and environment-development studies. New York: The Guilford Press.

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.

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.

References

Akram-Lodhi, A.H. & C. Kay 2010. Surveying the agrarian question (part 1): unearthing foundations, exploring diversity. The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(1), 177-202.

Almekinders, C.J.M., G. Thiele & D.L. Danial 2007. Can cultivars from participatory plant breeding improve seed provision to small-scale farmers? Euphytica 153(3), 363-72.

Arce, A. & N. Long 1992. The dynamics of knowledge: interfaces between bureaucrats and peasants. In Battlefields of knowledge: the interlocking of theory and practice in social research and development (eds) N. Long & A. Long, 211-46. London: Routledge.

Barlett, P.F. 1993. American dreams, rural realities: family farms in crisis. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

——— & K.J. Conger 2004. Three visions of masculine success on American farms. Men and Masculinities 7(2), 205-27.

Bell, S.E., A. Hullinger & L. Brislen 2015. Manipulated masculinities: agribusiness, deskilling, and the rise of the businessman-farmer in the United States. Rural Sociology 80(3), 285-313.

de la Bellacasa, M.P. 2015. Making time for soil: technoscientific futurity and the pace of care. Social Studies of Science 45(5), 691-716.

Bender, B. 1978. Gatherer‐hunter to farmer: a social perspective. World Archaeology 10(2), 204-22.

Besky, S. 2013. The Darjeeling distinction: labor and justice on fair-trade tea plantations in India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2017. Fixity: on the inheritance and maintenance of tea plantation houses in Darjeeling, India. American Ethnologist 44(4), 617-31.

Billman, B.R. 2002. Irrigation and the origins of the southern Moche state on the north coast of Peru. Latin American Antiquity 13(4), 371-400.

Binford, L.R. 1968. Post-pleistocene adaptations. In New perspectives in archaeology (eds) L.R. Binford & S.R. Binford, 313-41. Chicago: Aldine.

Biolsi, T. 2018. Power and progress on the prairie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bolt, M. 2015. Zimbabwe’s migrants and South Africa’s border farms: the roots of impermanence. Cambridge: University Press.

Borras, S.M., Franco, J.C., Gómez, S., Kay, C., & M. Spoor 2012. Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean. Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3-4), 845-72.

Boserup, E. 1965.The condition of agricultural growth: the economics of agrarian change under population pressure. London: Allan and Urwin.

Bowen, S. 2015. Divided spirits: tequila, mezcal, and the politics of production. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Breman, J. 1985. Of peasants, migrants, and paupers: rural labour circulation and capitalist production in West India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

——— 1996. Footloose labour. Cambridge: University Press.

Bruno, M.C. 2014. Beyond raised fields: exploring farming practices and processes of agricultural change in the ancient Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes. American Anthropologist 116(1), 130-45.

Burow, P.B., Brock, S. & M.R. Dove 2018. Unsettling the land: indigeneity, ontology, and hybridity in settler colonialism. Environment and Society 9(1), 57-74.

Burton, R. 2004. Seeing through the “good farmer’s” eyes: towards developing an understanding of the social symbolic value of “productivist” behaviour. Sociologia Ruralis 44(2), 195-215.

Chao, S. 2018. In the shadow of the palm: dispersed ontologies among Marind, West Papua. Cultural Anthropology 33(4), 621-49.

Chayanov, A.V. 1966. The theory of peasant economy. Homewood, Ill.: Richard Irwin.

Childe, V.G., & G.E. Daniel 1951. Man makes himself. New York: New American Library.

Crane, T.A. 2010. Of models and meanings: cultural resilience in social–ecological. Ecology and Society 15(4), 19 (available online: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art19/).

Donald, J. (ed.) 1867. Chambers's etymological dictionary of the English language. London: W & R Chambers.

Douglas, M. 2003. Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: Routledge.

Dove, M.R. 1985. Swidden agriculture in Indonesia: the subsistence strategies of the Kalimantan Kant. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Dudley, K.M. 2002. Debt and dispossession: farm loss in America’s heartland. Chicago: University Press.

Finnis, E. 2006. Why grow cash crops? Subsistence farming and crop commercialization in the Kolli Hills, South India. American Anthropologist 108(2), 363-9.

Fitting, E. 2010.The struggle for maize: campesinos, workers, and transgenic corn in the Mexican countryside. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Fortun, K. 2001. Advocacy after Bhopal: environmentalism, disaster, new global orders. Chicago: University Press.

Friedman, H. & P. McMichael 1989. Agriculture and the state system: the rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present. Sociologia ruralis 29(2), 93-117.

Geertz, C. 1970. Agricultural involution: the process of ecological change in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Godoy, R.A. 1984. Ecological degradation and agricultural intensification in the Andean highlands. Human Ecology 12(4), 359-83.

Goldschmidt, W. 1978. As you sow: three studies in the social consequences of agribusiness. Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun & Co.

González, R.J. 2001. Zapotec science: farming and food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Gray, M. 2013. Labor and the locavore: the making of a comprehensive food ethic. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Griffith, D., P. Zamudio Grave, R. Cores Viveros & J. Cabrera 2017. Losing labor: coffee, migration, and economic change in Veracruz, Mexico. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 39(1), 35-42.

Grim, V. 1995. The politics of inclusion: black farmers and the quest for agribusiness participation, 1945-1990s. Agricultural History 69(2), 257-71.

Guthman, J. 2004. Agrarian dreams: the paradox of organic farming in California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2007. The Polanyian way? Voluntary food labels as neoliberal governance. Antipode 39(3), 456-78.

Haraway, D. 2015. Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: making kin. Environmental Humanities 6(1), 159-65.

———, N. Ishikawa, S.F. Gilbert, K. Olwig, A.L. Tsing & N. Bubandt 2016. Anthropologists are talking–about the Anthropocene. Ethnos 81(3), 535-64.

Hayden, B. 1990. Nimrods, piscators, pluckers, and planters: the emergence of food production. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 9(1), 31-69.

Holland, D. C., W. Lachicotte Jr., D. Skinner & C. Cain 2001. Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Holmes, S. 2013. Fresh fruit, broken bodies: migrant farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Holt-Giménez, E. 2006. Campesino a campesino: voices from Latin America’s farmer to farmer movement for sustainable agriculture. Oakland: Food First Books.

Janssen, B. 2017. Making local food work: the challenges and opportunities of today’s small farmers. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

——— 2018. Small farms, big plans: mechanization and specialization as measures of ‘the middle.’ Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment 40(2), 96-104.

Kautsky, K. 1988 [1899]. The agrarian question, 2 volumes. London: Zwan Publications.

Kawa, N.C. 2016. Amazonia in the Anthropocene: people, soils, plants, forests. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Kay, C. 2008. Reflections on Latin American rural studies in the neoliberal globalization period: a new rurality? Development and Change 39(6), 915-43.

Keller, J.C. 2014. “I wanna have my own damn dairy farm!”: women farmers, legibility, and femininities in rural Wisconsin, U.S. Journal of Rural Social Sciences 29(1), 75.

Kirch, P.V. 1994. The wet and the dry: irrigation and agricultural intensification in Polynesia. Chicago: University Press.

Kirksey, S.E. & S. Helmreich 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4), 545-76.

Kloppenburg, J.R. 2005. First the seed: the political economy of plant biotechnology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

——— 2010. Impeding dispossession, enabling repossession: biological open source and the recovery of seed sovereignty. Journal of Agrarian Change 10(3), 367-88.

Krögel, A. 2010. Quechua sheepherders on the mountain plains of Wyoming: the (in)hospitality of U.S. guest worker programs. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 15(2), 261-88.

Labeyrie, V., R. Bernard & C. Leclerc 2014. How social organization shapes crop diversity: an ecological anthropology approach among Tharaka farmers of Mount Kenya. Agriculture and Human Values 31(1), 97-107.

Lee, R.B. 2017. What hunters do for a living, or, how to make out on scarce resources. In Man the hunter (eds) R.B. Lee & I. DeVore, 30-48. New York: Routledge.

Lenin, V.I. 1964 [1899]. The development of capitalism in Russia. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Li, T.M. 2014. Land’s end: capitalist relations on an indigenous frontier. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Linares, O.F. 1976. “Garden hunting” in the American tropics. Human Ecology 4(4), 331-49.

Lyon, S., & M. Moberg (eds) 2010. Fair trade and social justice: global ethnographies. New York: NYU Press.

Marx, K. & F. Engels 1967. Capital: a critique of political economy. New York: International Publishers.

Mathews, A. 2018. Landscapes and throughscapes in Italian forest worlds: thinking dramatically about the Anthropocene. Cultural Anthropology 33(3), 386-414.

McCutcheon, P. 2019. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms and black agrarian geographies. Antipode 51(1), 207-24.

McDonell, E. 2015. Miracle foods: quinoa, curative metaphors, and the depoliticization of global hunger politics. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 15(4), 70-85.

Mintz, S. 1985. Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. New York: Penguin Books.

Mitchell, T. 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Moore, J. 2012. Cheap food & bad money: food, frontiers, and financialization in the rise and demise of neoliberalism. Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 33(2-3), 225-61.

Nash, J. 1994. Global integration and subsistence insecurity. American Anthropologist 96(1), 7-30.

Nazarea, V. 2005. Heirloom seeds and their keepers: marginality and memory in the conservation of biological diversity. Tucson:University of Arizona Press.

Netting, R. 1993. Smallholders, householders: farm families and the ecology of intensive sustainable agriculture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Núñez-Madrazo, M.C. 2007. Living ‘here and there’: new migration of translocal workers from Veracruz to the Southeastern United States. Anthropology of Work Review 28(3), 1-6.

Ofstehage, A. 2018a. Financialization of work, value, and social organization among transnational soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado. Economic Anthropology 5(2), 274-85.

——— 2018b. Farming out of place: transnational family farmers, flexible farming, and the rupture of rural life in Bahia, Brazil. American Ethnologist 45(3), 317-29.

——— 2019. Transmission of the Brazil model of industrial soybean production: a comparative study of two migrant farming communities in the Brazilian Cerrado. In In defense of farmers: the future of agriculture in the shadow of corporate power (eds) J. Gibson & S. Alexander, 289-324. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Ogden, L.A., B. Hall & K. Tanita 2013. Animals, plants, people, and things: a review of multispecies ethnography. Environment andSociety 4(1), 5-24.

Orlove, B. 2005. Human adaptation to climate change: a review of three historical cases and some general perspectives. Environmental Science and Policy 8(6), 589-600.

Paulson, S. 2003. Gendered practices and landscapes in the Andes: the shape of asymmetrical exchanges.Human Organization 62(3), 242-54.

Pollan, M. 2006. The omnivore’s dilemma: A natural history of four meals. London: Bloomsbury Press.

Rappaport, R.A. 1967. Ritual regulation of environmental relations among a New Guinea People. Ethnology 6(1), 17-30.

Price, T.D. & A.B. Gebaue 1995. Last hunters, first farmers: new perspectives on the prehistoric transition to agriculture. Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research.

Rhoades, R. & V. Rhoades 1980. Agricultural anthropology: a call for the establishment of a new professional specialty. Practicing Anthropology 2(4), 10-12.

Richard, W.F. 1974. Miracle seeds and shattered dreams in Java. Challenge 17(3), 41-7.

Richards, P. 1985. Indigenous agricultural revolution: ecology and food production in West Africa. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Rindos, D. 1984. The origins of agriculture: an evolutionary perspective. San Diego: Academic Press.

Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone age economics. Chicago: Aldine, Atherton.

Sayre, M., T. Stenner & A. Argumedo 2017. You can't grow potatoes in the sky: building resilience in the face of climate change in the Potato Park of Cuzco, Peru. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 39(2), 100-8.

Scott, J.C. 2010.The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

——— 2017. Against the grain: a deep history of the earliest states. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Shisler, R.C. & J. Sbicca 2019. Agriculture as carework: the contradictions of performing femininity in a male-dominated occupation. Society & Natural Resources 32(8), 875-92.

Sillitoe, P. 2006. Local science vs. global science: approaches to indigenous knowledge in international development. New York: Berghahn Books.

Siregar, P.R. & T.A. Crane 2011. Climate information and agricultural practice in adaptation to climate variability: the case of climate field schools in Indramayu, Indonesia. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 33(2), 55-69.

Specht, A.R. 2013. Killer corn and capitalist pigs: forensic noir and television portrayals of modern agricultural technology. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 35(2), 152-61.

Stone, G.D. 2001. Theory of the square chicken: advances in agricultural intensification theory. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 42(2-3), 163-80.

——— & C.E. Downum 1999. Non-Boserupian ecology and agricultural risk: ethnic politics and land control in the arid Southwest. American Anthropologist 101(1), 113-28.

——— & A. Flachs 2018. The ox fall down: path-breaking and technology treadmills in Indian cotton agriculture. The Journal of Peasant Studies 45(7), 1272-96.

Suzuki, Y. 2018. The good farmer: morality, expertise, and articulations of whiteness in Zimbabwe. Anthropological Forum 28(1), 74-88.

Weiss, B. 2016. Real pigs: shifting values in the field of local pork. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Wesz Jr., V.J. 2014. O mercado da soja e as relações de troca entre produtores rurais e empresas no Sudeste de Mato Grosso (Brasil). Ph.D thesis, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.

White, B., S.M. Borras Jr., R. Hall, I. Scoones & W. Wolford 2012. The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals. Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3-4), 619-47.

White, M.M. 2017. “A pig and a garden”: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farms Cooperative. Food and Foodways 25(1), 20-39.

Wolf, E. 2010. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolford, W. 2010.This land is ours now: social mobilization and the meanings of land in Brazil. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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.

References

Albro, R. 2005. ‘The water is ours, carajo!’: deep citizenship in Bolivia’s water war. In Social movements: an anthropological reader (ed.) J. Nash, 249-68. London: Blackwell.

Anand, N. 2017. Hydraulic city: water and the infrastructures of citizenship in Mumbai. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Anderson, S. & B. Tabb (eds) 2002. Water, leisure and culture: European historical perspectives. Oxford: Berg.

Ansar, A., B. Flyvbjerg, A. Budzier, & D. Lunn 2014. Should we build more large dams? The actual costs of hydropower megaproject development. Energy Policy 69, 43-56.

Bakker, K. 2003. An uncooperative commodity: privatising water in England and Wales. Oxford: University Press.

Baxter, B. 2005. A theory of ecological justice. London: Routledge.

Berriane, Y. 2017. Development and countermovements: reflections on the conflicts arising from the commodification of collective land in Morocco. In Development as a battlefield: International Development Policy volume 8 (eds) I. Bono & B. Hibou, 247-67. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff.

Bichsel, C. 2016. Water and the (infra-)structure of political rule: a synthesis. Water Alternatives 9(2), 356-72.

Biggs, D. 2012. Quagmire: nation-building and nature in the Mekong Delta. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Bosshard, P. 2014. Large dams are uneconomic, scientific study finds (5 March 2014). International Rivers (available on-line: https://www.internationalrivers.org/blogs/227/large-dams-are-uneconomic-scientific-study-finds).

Brightman, M. & J. Lewis (eds) 2017. Anthropological visions of sustainable futures. London: Palgrave.

Butzer, K. 1976. Early hydraulic civilisation in Egypt: a study in cultural ecology. Chicago: University Press.

Coles, A. & T. Wallace (eds) 2005. Water, gender and development. Oxford: Berg.

Crutzen, P. & E. Stoermer 2000. The ‘anthropocene’. Global Change Newsletter 41,17-18 (available on-line: http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/NL41.pdf).

Cullinan, C. 2003. Wild law: a manifesto for Earth justice. Totnes: Green.

De Wolff, K. R. Faletti & I. López-Calvo (eds) 2019. Water and the humanities: transforming currents for uncertain futures. Oakland: University of California Press.

de la Cadena, M. 2010. Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: conceptual reflections beyond ‘politics’.Cultural Anthropology 25(2), 334-70.

Drewal, H. (ed.) 2008. Sacred waters: arts for Mami Wata and other water divinities in Africa and the diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Edgeworth, M. 2011. Fluid pasts: archaeology of flow. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press.

Ereira, A. 2009 [1990]. From the heart of the world: the elder brothers' warning. UK: Tairona Heritage Trust.

Escobar, A. 2005. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: University Press.

Fienup-Riordan, A. 2005. Wise words of the Yup'ik people: we talk to you because we love you. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Finlayson, C. 2017. Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) Claims Settlement Bill. Government bill. Parliamentary Counsel Office, Te Tari Tohutohu Pāremata, 129(1). New Zealand government, Te Kāwanatanga o Aotearoa (available on-line: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2016/0129/latest/DLM6830851.html?src=qs).

Giosan, L., P. Clift, M. Macklin, D. Fuller, S. Constantinescu, J. Durcan, T. Stevens, G. Duller, A. Tabrez, K. Gangal, R. Adhikari, A. Alizai, F. Filip, S. VanLaningham & J. Syvitski 2012. Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109(26), E1688–E1694.

Gray, J. & P. Curry 2016. Ecodemocracy: helping wildlife’s right to survive. ECOS 37(1), 18-27.

Grooten, M. & R. Almond (eds) 2018. Living planet report - 2018: aiming higher. Gland, Switzerland: World Wildlife Fund.

Harvey, P. & H. Knox 2012. The enchantments of infrastructure. Mobilities 7(4), 521-36.

Hastrup, K. 2011. Waterworlds: natural environmental disasters and social resilience in anthropological perspective. Copenhagen: European Research Council.

——— & F. Hastrup (eds) 2015. Waterworlds: anthropology in fluid environments. Oxford: Berghahn.

Hocart, A. 1970 [1936]. Kings and councillors: an essay in the comparative anatomy of human society. Chicago: University Press.

Hoekstra, A. & A. Chapagain 2007. Water footprints of nations: water use by people as a function of their consumption pattern. Water Resources Management 21(1), 35-48.

Hwang, S.-S., J. Xia, Y. Cao, X. Feng & X. Qiao 2007. Anticipation of migration and psychological stress and the Three Gorges dam project, China. Social Science and Medicine 65(5), 1012-24.

Illich, I. 1986. H2O and the waters of forgetfulness. London: Marion Boyars.

Josephson, P. 2002. Industrialized nature: brute force technology and the transformation of the natural world. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Khagram, S. 2004. Dams and development: transnational struggles for water and power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kirksey, S. & S. Helmreich 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4), 545-76.

Kirsch, S. 2003. Mining and environmental human rights in Papua New Guinea. InTransnational corporations and human rights (eds) F. Jedrzej & S. Pegg, 115-36. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kopnina, H. & E. Shoreman-Ouimet 2015. Culture and conservation: beyond anthropocentrism. London: Routledge.

——— & H. Washington (eds) 2019. Conservation: integrating social and ecological justice. New York: Springer.

Krause,F. 2016. Making space along the Kemi River: a fluvial geography in Finnish Lapland. Cultural Geographies 24(2): 279-294.

——— & L. Ley (eds) forthcoming. Water, power, infrastructure: ethnographic conversations with Karl Wittfogel. Environment and Planning C. Special Issue: Politics and space.

——— & V. Strang (eds) 2013. Living water: the powers and politics of a vital substance. Worldviews 17(2), 95-185. Special Issue.

Lahiri-Dutt, K. (ed.) 2006. Fluid bonds: views on gender and water.Kolkata, Stree Press.

Lansing, S. 1991. Priests and programmers: technologies of power in the engineered landscape of Bali. Princeton: University Press.

Larkin, B. 2013. The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42(1), 327-43.

Lewis, D. & D. Mosse 2006. Development brokers and translators: the ethnography of aid and agencies. Bloomfield, C.T.: Kumarian Press.

Linton, J. 2010. What is water? The history of a modern abstraction. Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press.

Mallery, S. 2011. The Marriage Well at Teltown: holy well ritual at royal cult sites and the rite of temporary marriage. European Review of History 18(2), 175-97.

Mathur, H. 2006. Managing resettlement in India: approach, issues and experiences. New York: Oxford University Press.

McDonald-Wilmsen, B. & M. Webber 2010. Dams and displacement: raising the standards and broadening the research agenda. Water Alternatives 3(2), 142-61.

Meissner, S. 2012. Virtual water and water footprints: global supply and production chains and their impacts on freshwater resources. In People at the well: kinds, usages and meanings of water in a global perspective (eds) P. Hahn, K. Cless & J. Soentgen, 44-64. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Merlan, F. 1998. Caging the rainbow: places, politics and aborigines in a North Australian Town. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Minnegal, M. & P. Dwyer 2010. Appropriating fish, appropriating fishermen: tradeable permits, natural resources and uncertainty. In Ownership and appropriation (eds) V. Strang & M. Busse, 197-216. Oxford: Berg.

Mohamud, M. & H. Verhoeven 2016. Re-engineering the state, awakening the nation: dams, Islamist modernity and nationalist politics in Sudan. Water Alternatives 9(2), 182-202.

Morphy, F. & H. Morphy 2009. The Blue Mud Bay case: refractions through saltwater country. Dialogue 28(1), 15-25.

Mosse, D. 2003. The rule of water: statecraft, ecology, and collective action in South India. Oxford: University Press.

Muru-Lanning, M. 2016. Tupuna Awa: people and politics of the Waikato River. Auckland: University Press.

Oliver-Smith, A. (ed.) 2009. Development and dispossession: the anthropology of displacement and resettlement. Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research Press.

Orlove, B. & S. Caton 2010. Water sustainability: anthropological approaches and prospects. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 401-15.

Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the commons. Cambridge: University Press.

Plumwood, V. 1993. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge.

——— 2002. Environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. London: Routledge.

Polanyi, K. 1957. The great transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.

Reisner, M. 2001 [1986] Cadillac desert: the American West and its disappearing water. London: Pimlico.

Rodgers, D. & B. O’Neill 2012. Infrastructural violence: introduction to the special issue. Ethnography 13(4), 401-12.

Rumsey A. & J. Weiner (eds) 2004. Mining and Indigenous lifeworlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Ruru, J. 2013. Indigenous restitution in settling water claims: the developing cultural and commercial redress opportunities in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 22(2), 311-28 (available on-line: http://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/bitstream/handle/1773.1/1234/22PRLPJ311.pdf.)

Schläppy, M-L. & J. Gray 2017. Rights of nature: a report on a conference in Switzerland. The Ecological Citizen 1(1), 95-6.

Sponsel, L. 2012. Spiritual ecology: a quiet revolution. Santa Barbara: Praeger.

Stensrud, A. & T. Hylland Eriksen forthcoming. Climate, capitalism and communities: an anthropology of environmental overheating, London: Pluto Press.

Strang, V. 2004. The Meaning of water. Oxford: Berg.

——— 2005. Common senses: water, sensory experience and the generation of meaning. Journal of Material Culture 10(1), 92-120.

——— 2009. Water and indigenous religion: Aboriginal Australia. In The idea of water (eds) T. Tvedt & T. Oestigaard, 343-77. London:I.B Tauris.

——— 2013. Dam nation: Cubbie Station and the waters of the Darling. In The social life of water in a time of crisis (ed.) J. Wagner, 36-60. Oxford: Berghahn.

——— 2014. The Taniwha and the crown: defending water rights in Aotearoa/New Zealand. WIREs Water 1, 121-31 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1002).

——— 2016. Infrastructural relations: water, political power and the rise of a new ‘despotic regime’.Special Issue: Water, Infrastructure and Political Rule. Water Alternatives 9(2), 292-318.

——— 2019. The rights of the river: water, culture and ecological justice. InConservation: integrating social and ecological justice (eds) H. Kopnina & H. Washington, 105-19. New York: Springer.

——— & S. Toussaint (eds) 2008. Special Issue: Water ways: competition and communality in the use and management of water. Special Issue, Oceania 78(1).

——— & M. Busse (eds) 2011. Ownership and appropriation: ASA monographs. Oxford: Berg.

Taylor, B. 2010. Dark green religion: nature, spirituality and the planetary future. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Thomé, A., P. Ceryno, A. Scavarda & A. Remmen 2016. Sustainable infrastructure: a review and a research agenda. Journal of Environmental Management 184(2), 143-56.

Tvedt, T. & E. Jakobsson (eds) 2006. A history of water, series 1 volume 1: water control and river biographies. London: I.B. Tauris.

——— & T. Oestigaard (eds) 2010. A history of water, series 2 volume 1: the ideas of water from antiquity to modern times. London. I.B. Tauris.

United Nations High Level Panel on Water 2018a. Making every drop count: an agenda for water action. High Level Panel on Water outcome document (available on-line: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/17825HLPW_Outcome.pdf).

United Nations 2018b. The United Nations World Water Development Report: nature-based solutions for water (available on-line: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/water/wwap/wwdr/2018-nature-based-solutions/).

United Nations 2019. Transboundary waters. UN Water (available on-line: https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/transboundary-waters/).

Verhoeven, H. 2015. Water, civilisation and power in Sudan: the political economy of military-Islamist state building. Cambridge: University Press.

Wagner, J. (ed.) 2013. The social life of water in a time of crisis. Oxford: Berghahn.

Wittfogel, K. 1957. Oriental despotism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Worster, D. 2006. Water in the age of imperialism and beyond. In A history of water, series 2 volume 1: the ideas of water from antiquity to modern times (eds) T. Tvedt & T. Oestigaard, 5-17. London: I.B. Tauris.

[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

Waste

Felix Stein — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 07:49:34 +0000

Patrick O'Hare

University of Manchester

Initially published 14 Aug 2019

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

Abstract:

From plastics in the oceans, to the export of toxic materials, waste is an issue that increasingly attracts public attention as well as demands for political and environmental action. Within the social sciences, writing on waste has clustered around the emergent and growing sub-discipline known as ‘discard studies’. This entry looks at how anthropologists have broached the issue of waste, from a long-standing interest in pollution, to more recent explorations of how humans and waste constitute one another. It is divided into three main anthropological approaches to waste: a symbolic-structuralist approach focused on the relations between order/disorder and the sacred/profane; an economic-materialist approach that is more concerned with waste, value, and the connections and flows between local and global scales; and intersubjective-posthuman approaches that focus on how waste makes people as well as how people make waste. Through fine-grained ethnographies of engagements with waste and theoretical contributions, the anthropology of discards highlights how diverse waste’s materialities and representations really are, and helps to challenge taken-for-granted associations between waste, stigma, and an absence of value.

Introduction^[1]

Just as ever-growing quantities of waste have increasingly attracted the attention of governments, activists and communities, the issue of waste at a global scale has risen rapidly up political and research agendas since the turn of the millennium. Shocking photographs and videos that make visible the harm that wasting causes, such as those of the North Atlantic garbage patch (estimated to measure hundreds of kilometres) and the plastic-filled bird carcasses of photographer Chris Jordan, have captured the public imagination around the topic of plastic waste in the oceans. At the same time, waste has become an issue of international diplomacy and scandal, as a series of countries in the Global South have begun sending contaminated waste back to its sources in the Global North (see the ongoing dispute between the Philippines and Canada, Choi 2019). The initial classification of our current age as the Anthropocene by geologists was based in part on the fact that signs of human activity and wasting – plastics, metals, radionuclides – could be observed deep into the Earth’s crust (Zalasiewicz & Waters 2015). Indeed, global warming, which places human, animal, and plant life as we know it in mortal peril, is caused by a form of waste: the release of carbon emissions as petroleum deposits are consumed.

In tandem with these broader developments, research into waste has escalated both in anthropology, and across the social sciences and humanities more generally, giving rise to the interdisciplinary subfield of ‘discard studies’. Yet do we necessarily know what waste is? As the popular expression ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’ hints at, rubbish can very often be in the eye of the beholder. This encyclopaedia entry explores three analytic approaches to waste taken by anthropologists, as set out and discussed by Alexander and O’Hare (2020): symbolic-structuralist; economic-materialist; and intersubjective-posthuman.

In a symbolic-structuralist approach (e.g. Douglas 2002 [1966]; Leach 1989 [1964]), waste can be understood as what emerges through interactions between the sacred and profane, which are structurally bound to one another, a focus that can be traced back to the work of Emile Durkheim (1915), a founding father of social anthropology and sociology. In this perspective, waste is usually considered to be social and relational rather than an objective quality or categorization of phenomena in the world. The second analytical approach, heralded by Michael Thompson’s (1979) Rubbish theory, launched an economic-materialist approach to understanding the circulation of materials between different regimes of value. Within this approach, an increasing number of scholars (e.g. Gille 2007; O’Brien 2008) have focused on the materiality of waste within broader political and economic structures that act to shape how and where it appears. A third approach to the study of waste can be called ‘posthuman-intersubjective’. It has been gathering strength since the 2010s and concentrates on the subjects that waste and various forms of waste-work engender. This includes workers whose identities are tightly bound up with waste – such as waste-pickers (Millar 2018) – as well as the more general encounters with discarded materials that happen as we separate out our recyclables (c.f. Hawkins 2006), or unexpectedly meet with a tangle of trash in the street (c.f. Bennett 2009). Waste in these perspectives is given varying degrees of agency: it is seen as acting and acting upon us in ways that are outside our conscious control.

By emphasising some aspects of human-waste relations while neglecting others, each approach – symbolic-structuralist, economic-materialist, and posthuman-intersubjective – captures a part of but not the whole picture. Thus, anthropological work on waste generally foregrounds the different epistemological consequences that specific representations of waste can have, including the removal of agency from so-called ‘wasted lives’ and value created from territories depicted as ‘waste-lands’. Far from being a load of rubbish, the anthropology of waste also brings cultural perspectives into conversation with questions of power, class, religion, materiality, and economics that are at the heart of contemporary society.

Symbolic-structuralist approaches

The anthropology of waste per se is quite recent. The relatively small societies that anthropologists traditionally studied did not generate levels of waste on the scale of today’s consumer societies, and whilst materials (i.e. food waste) were inevitably discarded, such practices do not appear to have been deemed worthy of serious attention.^[2] A relevant precursor, however, is the study of purity and pollution. Pollution in anthropological discourse has had a specific meaning: a stigma linked to people or substances – generally as a result of a mixing or conflation of things that should be kept pure.

The social anthropologist most associated with the study of purity and pollution is Mary Douglas, known for classifying dirt as ‘matter out of place’. Douglas was an English social anthropologist who conducted fieldwork with the Lele ethnic group who live in the modern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but her social theories were influential beyond African anthropology. In particular, her most well-known book, Purity and danger (1968), shares with structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss the idea that prohibitions, taboos, and attachments have very little to do with the concrete thing that is prohibited, and much more to do with an interplay of symbols that reflect deeper organising principles of society. Douglas argued that the prohibition of pork in Leviticus, for example, could not be explained by the ‘dirtiness’ of the animal but lay instead in the way that pigs confounded the religious classifications of animals (hoofed/ non-hoofed; cud-chewing/ non-cud-chewing, etc.)

For Douglas, the human mind is an ordering mind, and rituals of pollution and purity tend to cluster around the anomalies that confound cultural systems of classification. In other words, cultural classification comes first, and determines ideas of pollution. Those who take for their area of enquiry matters of pollution, dirt, and waste engage with her ideas in part because the ‘matter out of place’ phrasing so succinctly defamiliarises us from the notion that what constitutes waste should be obvious and universally accepted. Rather than waste, however, she was primarily interested in the symbolism of ritual pollution in religious and what she called ‘primitive’ classificatory systems. This, as Martin O’Brien notes, makes Douglas a somewhat awkward fit for discussions of the billions of tons of municipal solid waste that arrive daily at the world’s landfills (2008: 128).

Pollution as a traditional anthropological concept is different from contemporary, everyday understandings of environmental pollution embodied in car exhaust fumes, smoking industrial chimneys, and frothing, chemically-polluted rivers. Its characteristic areas of study include menstruation – since menstruating women are viewed as polluted in many societies and are, therefore, quarantined (c.f. Kristeva 1982) – and death, where those working with or touching the dead are considered polluted and thus to be avoided or approached with ritualised caution (Parry 1994). Nevertheless, looking to some of the early approaches to pollution can help us understand the roots of the first anthropological analyses of waste.

Early anthropologists (e.g. James Frazer) exhibited two tendencies regarding pollution (c.f. Forth 2018). One was to locate pollution in the properties of substances and things as opposed to the relations between people and categories. A second was to differentiate between forms of pollution aversion that exemplified either ‘primitive’ hygiene measures or reflected religious ideas of the sacred and profane. However, these studies tended to centre on polluted people rather than the things that polluted them, whether these were menstruating women, Indian untouchables, or stigmatised gravediggers (Jewkes & Wood 1999). Where there was an interest in things, these were often substances ejected or detached from the body, including menstrual blood, nail clippings, and excrement. This focus on bodily substance was later taken up by Michael Thompson (1986: 1) to argue for the culturally relative nature of waste. That there is nothing intrinsically polluting about blood, hair, or snot indicates that there is no ‘waste in nature’, he argues, explaining that these might be valued, feared, or treated with indifference by different cultures or indeed classes.

This clustering of ideas of pollution and purity around substances emanating from the body has nevertheless given rise to quite different theoretical approaches, including those inclined to a universalist rather than relativist nature. Exemplary of the latter approach is Julia Kristeva’s (1982) psycho-analytical theorisation of abjection, which draws on the work of Douglas. For Kristeva, threats to the preservation of the integral subject inspire pollution beliefs, so that a body that leaks wastes and fluids – externalising what should be inside – violates an important inside/outside boundary and risks the dissolution of the self into the other. One example that she gives is the instinctive, visceral reaction she has to the thin film that forms on milk and that the body repels: once this has entered the mouth, and mixed with saliva, one is essentially expelling a part of oneself.

Within anthropology, Valerio Valeri (2000) draws on Kristeva and fieldwork with a small group of hunter-gatherers in Eastern Indonesia to make broader theoretical claims, ultimately arguing that ‘the embodied subject’s fear of disintegration through the body and by the body is the ultimate basis for the notion of pollution’ (2000: 111). Valeri objects to the way that Douglas treats pollution as a secondary phenomenon resulting from processes of classification. By exploring pollution beliefs around bodies, substances, and animals, he shows that not all things considered polluting are classificatory anomalies, nor all classificatory anomalies regarded as polluting. Douglas’s legacy has persisted over time and extended beyond anthropology. Take the work of a student of Douglas, Laurence Douny, on domestic waste among the Dogon, an ethnic group in Mali numbering roughly half a million people. In Douny’s analysis,

“[Dogon] categories of waste enact a conceptual ordering of daily life that allows them to set up and to maintain their socio-cultural and symbolic boundaries. It appears that through the naming of rubbish, Dogon take control over the fuzzy reality of the matter.” (2007: 313)

For example, the Dogon praise certain forms of dirt – food left on pots, sweat, and smoke – as signs of a lively, busy, and prosperous household, while people who are always clean are thought to be work-shy. Negative forms of dirt include the highly ritually polluting – menstrual blood and body solids – and the simply bothersome, such as daily sweepings and tourist trash. This description of order imposed on an assumedly formless world through the cultural imposition of different categories and classifications resembles a symbolic-structuralist approach. Yet Douny is careful to note a relative fluidity and dynamism in categorisation processes, explaining that “the local classification of refuse is versatile, being a daily practice that constantly redefines and generates new categories of waste with which differing world-views are associated” (2007: 313). Plastic waste brought by outside visitors, for example, might be assimilated into existing waste categories but can also be recovered as a resource that can be fashioned into craftwork sold back to tourists.

Despite its plentiful insights, Douglas’s approach is not the primary framework that guides the contemporary social science of waste. Contributing factors have been its binary nature; her lack of focus on waste per se; and the theoretical consideration of only one side of a ‘primitive’/’civilized’ binary that itself has long been discarded. To theorise the ever-greater flows of waste across the planet it would be necessary to develop approaches that attended to politics, economics, and the material stuff of waste itself.

Economic-materialist approaches

If earlier anthropological engagements with ‘rubbish’ in the religious sphere were concerned with the sacred/profane and pure/polluted dichotomies, economic anthropology brought in another important binary: waste and value. These are critical categories for Thompson’s recently reissued Rubbish theory (2017 [1979]), whose theoretical ambitions, Josh Reno argues, go ‘far beyond anything heretofore attempted by anyone in discard studies’ (Thompson 2017: xi). Against the binaries of symbolic-structuralist models, Thompson introduces a tripartite schema to help understand how objects, from houses to antiques, can undergo radical transformations in value. He starts out with two categories of goods common to economics: transient and durable. A classic example of a transient good is a car, which decreases in value from the moment that it is purchased until it is reduced to scrap, while durables, such as certain antiques, ‘increase in value over time and have (ideally) infinite life-spans’ (2017: 25). Thompson’s initial interest is in how an object can cross over from one category to the other, as they do in the case of ‘vintage’ cars, re-valued pieces of furniture, and works of art. The question precipitates a new third category for goods that are neither decreasing nor increasing in value but are of no value at all: rubbish.

Whilst at first glance Thompson appears to be discussing something that fits with normative ideas of waste, his ‘rubbish’ category is in fact quite specific. Although he explicitly describes the rubbish stage as denoting a value-less state, the examples he uses – which later move into the category of durables – never seem to attain the state of zero value. Stevengraphs^[3], for example, steadily decreased in value throughout the first half of the twentieth century before reaching relatively astronomical prices from the 1960s onwards. Yet even at the Stevengraphs’ point of lowest value, Thompson quotes a source noting that there were still probably ‘a few discerning people quietly collecting them for their decorative charm’ (44). Thompson’s rubbish category is thus restricted to a class of objects that still have owners, have depreciated in value, but have not been disposed of. This constitutes a restricted category of rubbish, excluding what most would think of as waste and the discarding practice that others would regard as the key moment when objects pass into a waste category. Drawing on Douglas’s assertion that ‘dirt is simply matter out of place’, Thompson is not particularly interested in the lowly objects that do not attract attention because they are widely regarded to be in the right place: the dustbin or landfill. His concern lies in radical value transfers as a source of social transformation.

Nevertheless, the aspiration to understand material flows and the creation and destruction of value in British society arguably laid the foundations for more recent social science studies into globalised flows of discards and their connection to domestic waste practices (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020). This scholarship is interested in the question of value but not necessarily as the polar opposite of waste, with attention directed towards the political economy and government of waste, and how these are impacted by contemporary knowledge about waste and its effects. Gille’s concept of ‘waste regimes’, for instance, includes the idea that at particular historical conjunctures, one kind of waste and its treatment can be taken symptomatically or even synecdochally by the state to stand for all generated waste. This is neatly illustrated by the 1950s Hungarian state emphasis on collecting scrap metal, what Gille calls the ‘metallic regime’ of post-war recovery communism. While metal can be easily stored, the stockpiling of toxic chemicals, ignoring their unique chemical composition, meant that often barrels rapidly corroded and leaked, opening the way for subsequent waste regimes that were more centred on questions of safety. Here we see a focus on materiality, the state, cultural representations, and the political economy of waste replacing the idea of unique ‘cultural’ approaches to waste.

Historical works (e.g. Strasser 1999, Zimring 2005, Thorsheim 2015) have shown the long lineage of domestic practices of material recovery and re-use. Recently attention has turned to the global nature of the recycling industry and how this links domestic practices to transnational flows of stuff. Thus, Catherine Alexander and Joshua Reno’s collection, Economies of Recycling (2012), mobilised economic anthropology and a focus on how people use, consume, and engage with objects (material culture studies) to destabilise conventional understandings of household and global economies. Contributors analysed the profoundly unequal global flows of waste materials – textiles, ships, electronics, uranium, medical discards – in terms of their location of production and recycling – concerns also taken up by The Waste of the World project and its subsequent publications.^[4] The collection also highlighted how various forms of waste labour and waste processing have been cast as redemptive, drawing on a Protestant-inflected language of salvation. Britt Halvorson’s (2012) ‘No Junk for Jesus’ chapter, for example, examines the flow of medical discards between Lutheran churches in the United States and Madagascar, where the sorting of waste from viable donation constitutes a form of religious service. One of the key benefits of this global approach was to highlight that, for all the focus on consumer and domestic recycling practices, household waste accounts for only a fraction of the waste stream.^[5]

Construction waste, for example, makes up a large percentage of urban waste streams and it has served as a useful lens through which anthropologists have studied wider questions of land speculation, urban development, and dispossession. Gastón Gordillo (2014) analyses how the rubble of different rural development schemes in northern Argentina, from Jesuit agricultural collectives to soy production, can provide clues to changing socio-economic forces. Across the world, Erik Harms’ (2016) study of two housing developments in Saigón is 'more concerned with the conversion of wastelands than with waste material per se’ (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020). Yet a link to Gordillo’s work can be found in Harms’ exploration of the ways in which existing productive uses of land (in his case, smallholder farming) are ignored whilst urban development is championed, through a dominant Vietnamese trope of ‘civilising the southern wasteland’. In both cases, it is not symbols, but the materiality of rubble, bricks, building plans, and maps that tell us something about societies and the utopias that transfigure and disfigure landscapes at distinct moments in time.

For Harms, waste is evoked in order to open up space for economic and political intervention and value creation through the construction of real estate. This is only one of a number of possible relations between waste and value. As Catherine Alexander and Andrew Sanchez (2018: 3) note, waste can be seen as the antithesis of value, lost value, the enabler of value, or simply another word for resource. Their 2018 volume on indeterminacy, waste, and value echoes the work of Thompson in that they introduce a third term – indeterminacy – to trouble the stubborn binary between waste and value. Rather than proceeding from an analytical definition of indeterminacy, they start from ethnographic examples to highlight different modes of indeterminacy for people and materials. They share with Douglas an interest in the people that fall through the cracks of classificatory systems, suggesting that such systems are by their very nature exclusionary and key to creating discarded populations. Simultaneously, their idea of indeterminacy challenges both Thompson’s scheme of distinct value positions (transient, rubbish, durable) and Douglas’ framework of single, unified cultural systems of order (2019: 15).

Materialist scholars have gone so far as to criticise Douglas for ignoring the qualities of dirt and its alleged dangers in the study of pollution, as part of an alleged ‘rubbish idealism’ (O’Brien 2002: 133). For this new generation of anthropologists, with eyes trained on waste’s materiality, its odours, and hazards as well as creative potentials, nothing could be further from their position. Economic-materialist analyses of waste in anthropology have tended to highlight how waste’s materiality influences its nature and appearance even if it does not determine it fully. They have also thought of new ways in which waste may be extracted from its classification and become re-valued.

Intersubjective and post-human

For symbolic-structuralist approaches, a fundamental question is why different things are considered waste in different cultures – and the answer given is their culturally-specific classificatory systems. As Alexander and O’Hare (2020) note, ‘economic-materialists shift the question to how the dynamics of waste flows link domestic and global industrial scales, and answer it by examining… flows in a globalised schema of reproduced inequalities'. A third thematic concern among anthropologists, which also has to do with the how, but often at different scales, is a focus on subjectivity and the kinds of relationships and identities that are created through associations with waste. For scholars such as Gay Hawkins (2006), creating subjectivities by engaging with waste is at once an ethical process and similar to actor-network theory (ANT) it signals that waste itself has agency. Thereby it acts, and is acted upon. Household recycling, for example, is an everyday ethical act that becomes drummed into the body – embodied – through repetition and practice.

The role of waste and dirt in creating and sustaining oft-unequal subjectivities has a long history of study inside and outside anthropology. In colonial public health policies, for example, we find two interlinked processes: colonial subjects are often portrayed as dirty, backward, and thus in need of a civilising mission, whilst at the same time the most oppressed people are often called upon to carry out the jobs seen as ritually and hygienically polluting, such as waste work. Race, waste, and power often come together to mark out such distinctions. In the American Philippines (Anderson 1995), as in British India, Australia (Bashford 2003), and elsewhere, colonial governments used public health measures such as vaccines, quarantine, and segregation to demarcate physical and racial boundaries and govern unruly populations. These are far from purely historical questions: consider the furore in early 2019 over a Fox News host’s comment, echoing similar statements made by Donald Trump, that mass migration made America ‘poorer, dirtier, and more divided’, an assertion he supported with images purporting to depict garbage and trash left behind by migrants at the US-Mexico border. Indeed, representations of the dirty colonised other have arguably been transferred onto the figure of the immigrant other (c.f. Thorleifsson 2017), although proletariat or lumpenproletariat populations have also often been the target of similar discourse and measures of bio-political governance.

‘Waste colonialism’ and its sister term ‘garbage imperialism’ are nowadays primarily used to describe instances or patterns of rich countries dumping their waste on poorer ones. This is to some degree limited by the Basel convention^[6] and a spectrum of injustice can be detected in such practices, which range from the export of recoverable, non-toxic recyclate to the dumping of contaminated materials. As Reno notes, ‘not only waste but also waste regimes have been exported and experimented with abroad through colonial and imperial formations’ (2015: 565). Max Liboiron likewise argues that ‘waste colonialism goes beyond the export of waste from colonial centres to… peripheries’ (2018). Relevant to our discussion of ‘rubbished’ subjects here is her point that dominant interpretative frameworks of hygiene and cleanliness are still imposed on peoples whose landscapes and means of subsistence have already been rubbished or enclosed. Waste-pickers and scavengers, for example, are often cited as exemplary polluted subjects, the discards of modernity, or as indexing global inequality (Reno 2009: 32).

Anthropologists have been able to get behind the headlines and assumptions about waste work through ethnographies of informal waste labour like Rosalind Fredericks (2018) on Dakar, Minh Nguyen (2018) on Vietnam, Kathleen Millar (2018) on Rio de Janeiro, Jamie Furniss (2017) on Cairo, and my own research on Montevideo (O’Hare 2018). In Montevideo, waste-pickers proudly adopt the term ‘classifiers’ to signal the productive and environmentally important nature of their labour and overturn the stigma associated with their previous moniker, ‘rummagers’. Similarly, Furniss (2017) describes how Egyptian Christian minority waste-workers downplay both derogatory titles – such as the Zabaleen – and upper-class attempts to focus on the ‘environment’, emphasising instead their role as cleaners of the city. Nguyen (2018), meanwhile, tracks the complex networks and connections between city and village. In her account, Vietnamese waste traders opt to suffer and even perform stigma in the city in order to amass sufficient capital to build their homes and status in rural villages.

Millar’s longitudinal research with Brazilian catadores at Rio’s Gramacho landfill is a good example of an ethnography that gets close to waste-picker perspectives and seeks to understand their social worlds. She shares with Reno’s (2016) ethnography of an industrial Michigan landfill an attempt to highlight the way that waste work helps to constitute desirable subjectivities, from masculine identities of repair and manual labour to the freedoms of autonomous work outside of waged work. As such, Millar argues that academics should be careful when echoing reactionary commentators by referring to people as surplus or waste even if we simultaneously voice a critique of injustice (cf. Bauman 2003).

While Millar attends to the materiality and plasticity of waste, her focus remains on the human subject. Other approaches, however, also accord agency – and sometimes subjectivity – to waste materials and the non-human animals that co-produce them. Gregson et al. (2010), for example, identify an economically performative aspect of asbestos, as its presence intervenes in ship-breaking work in the EU. Undetected asbestos slows down the work of waste removal and complicates contracts given that these are based on asbestos removal estimates gleaned from initial surveys. Hird (2013) meanwhile, emphasises how the inhuman and nonhuman life forms found within waste (e.g. leachate and bacteria) and their physically, biologically, and chemically determined time-frames 'complicate human technocratic attempts to measure, know, and control waste’ (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020). The engineering time of landfills, for example, is only a hundred years, whereas the thousands of diverse materials assembled there – chemicals, bacteria, organic matter – will continue to interact and have unpredictable effects long beyond this time period.

Reno (2014) has also drawn attention to the ways in which waste can be considered a ‘sign of life’ rather than ‘matter out of place’. Only with great difficulty could we understand scat (animal faeces) through a symbolic interpretative framework or view it as a human problem. Instead, when scat is encountered in the wild, whether by scientists, hunters, or non-human animals, it constitutes a trace of the animal that has left it behind, “not at all a symbolic classification but a sign of life” (9). This approach is post-human in that it relegates the anthropos to just another animal involved in cross-species interactions; indeed, waste more broadly can be thought about bio-semiotically here, as “the outcome of interactions between the many species that both create, and are created by it” (Alexander and O’Hare, 2020).

If forms of ‘scat’ have been around for millions of years, more recent forms of waste material also shape human life rather than being simple reflections of cultures. The continued work of Gay Hawkins (2006, 2015, 2018) has brought some of these instances to light. In her most recent book, she argues that the plastic water bottle was revolutionary in shifting people’s perception of plastic away from ideas of durability towards ideas of disposability and single-use: disposability highlights how things design us. For profitable ‘throw-away’ economies to succeed, people’s habits and customs had to be changed, creating the consumer who only in recent years has begun to rediscover forms of re-use and recycling.

What kinds of subjects might be needed for responsible engagements with waste in the twenty-first century and what can social scientists contribute to this debate? One potential ethical position is that advocated by Jane Bennett (2010), who suggests a re-enchantment with the power of agentive things, waste included. As others have noted, this invitation comes up against the hard reality of certain materials that simply aren’t nice for humans to become enchanted with (from asbestos to nuclear waste). Yet perhaps we can learn from the enchantment and pleasure that waste-pickers and dumpster divers experience both from rummaging in the trash and from carrying out socially responsible acts of recovery and cleaning (c.f. Millar 2018, Barnard 2016). More broadly, what the mutual constitution of subjects and their wastes exemplifies is that in a world of rapidly evolving materials, many of which become waste, human beings change our actions, categories, and indeed ourselves according to our responses to these materials. More circular models of production and consumption are certainly part of this story. Yet in redrawing the line of disposal as a virtuous circle, anthropologists can also bring attention to the ways that subjects who have built positive identities and livelihoods out of waste work might be left out the loop.

Conclusion

Waste does not exist in the singular, and indeed it can be the combining of substances and things in particular spaces that leads to their classification as waste, a point highlighted in the early symbolic-structuralist approaches to waste that has continued relevance today. Purity in waste management is important: muddling materials in composite packaging and baled recyclate makes things very difficult to recycle, leading to landfilling, and accusations of ‘waste colonialism’. The technical dynamics of transnational waste chains might seem far from relativist understandings of what constitutes waste, but cultural understandings of hygiene and cleanliness continue to play an important role. To give just one example, David Evans (2014) has explored how residents’ ideas that food waste caddies are ‘out of place’ on kitchen counters play a role in limiting the recycling of food waste in the UK.

Similarly, there is no single anthropology of waste, and although the different approaches sketched out here imply a chronological arc, residues of earlier orientations can still be found in the present, often in unexpected places. While anthropologists of waste might still be interested in menstrual pollution and taboo, they increasingly deal with global flows of problematic, indeterminate matter that challenge binaries along the sacred-profane or waste-value axes. Categories such as ‘indeterminate’ or ‘rubbish’ indicate some of the mediating roles that waste plays between the creation and destruction of value, as do ethnographies that highlight how people situate themselves pragmatically with regard to ascriptions of waste. Societal stigmas of being associated with waste still matter, but anthropologists have shown how these can be manipulated and disguised, from respected waste traders in Vietnam, to medical discards that are repackaged as benevolent donations as they travel from the United States to Madagascar. By getting its hands dirty, the anthropology of waste contributes to an epistemology of the ever-more complex and voluminous materials that humans and non-humans produce, consume, discard, and digest in our Anthropocenic present.

Note

This article makes some use of material published in Alexander, C. & P. O’Hare (2020). Waste and its disguises: technologies of (un)knowing. Ethnos. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1796734

References

Alexander, C. & J. Reno (eds) 2012. Economies of recycling. London: Zed Books.

——— & A. Sanchez 2018. Introduction: the values of indeterminacy. In Indeterminacy: waste, value and the imagination (eds) C. Alexander & A. Sanchez, 1-31. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

——— & P. O’Hare (2020). Waste and its disguises: technologies of (un)knowing. Ethnos. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1796734.

Anderson, W. 1995. Excremental colonialism: public health and the poetics of pollution. Critical Inquiry 21(3), 640-69.

Barnard, A.V. 2016. Freegans: diving into the wealth of food waste in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bashford, A. 2004. Imperial hygiene: a critical history of colonialism, nationalism and public health. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Baumann, Z. 2003. Wasted lives: modernity and its outcasts. London: Wiley.

Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Choi, T. 2019. Ship carrying waste arrives back in Canada from the Philippines (29 Jun 2019). Reuters. Accessed 7 August 2019 (available on-line: https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-canada-waste/ship-carrying-waste-arrives-back-in-canada-from-the-philippines-idUKKCN1TU0TB).

Douglas, M. 2002 [1966]. Purity and danger. London: Routledge.

Douny, L. 2007. The materiality of domestic waste. Journal of Material Culture 12(3), 309-31.

Durkheim, E. 1915. The elementary forms of the religious life: a study in religious sociology. London: G. Allen & Unwin.

Evans, D. 2014. Food waste: home consumption, material culture and everyday life. London: Bloomsbury.

Forth, G. 2018. Purity, pollution, and systems of classification. In The international encyclopedia of anthropology (ed.) H. Callan, 1-12. New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.

Gille, Z. 2007. From the cult of waste to the trash heap of history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

— — — 2013. Is there an emancipatory ontology of matter? A response to Mya Hird. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2(4), 1-6.

Gordillo, G. 2014. Rubble: the afterlife of destruction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Gregson, N., W. Watkins & M. Calestani 2010. Inextinguishable fibres: demolition and the vital materialisms of asbestos. Environment and Planning A 42, 1065-83.

Halvorson, B. 2012. No junk for Jesus: redemptive economies and value conversions in Lutheran medical aid. In Economies of recycling (eds) C. Alexander & J. Reno, 207-34. London: Zed Books.

Hawkins, G. 2006. The ethics of waste. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

———2018. Plastic and presentism: the time of disposability. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5(1), 91-102.

———, E. Potter & K. Race 2015. Plastic water: the social and material life of bottled water. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Jewkes, R. K. & K. Wood 1999. Problematizing pollution: dirty wombs, ritual pollution, and pathological processes. Medical Anthropology 18(2), 163-86.

Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of horror: an essay in abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.

Leach, E. 1989 [1964]. Anthropological aspects of language: animal categories and verbal abuse. Anthrozoos 2(3), 151-65.

Liboiron, M. 2016. Municipal versus industrial waste: questioning the 3-97 ratio. Discard Studies online (available on-line: https://discardstudies.com/2016/03/02/municipal-versus-industrial-waste-a-3-97-ratio-or-something-else-entirely/).

——— 2018. Waste colonialism. Discard Studies online (available on-line: https://discardstudies.com/2018/11/01/waste-colonialism/).

Millar, K. 2018. Reclaiming the discarded: life and labor on Rio’s garbage dump. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Nguyen, M. 2018. Waste and wealth: labour, value and morality in a Vietnamese migrant recycling economy. New York: Oxford University Press.

O’Brien, M. 2008. A crisis of waste. London: Routledge.

O’Hare, P. 2018. ‘The landfill has always borne fruit’: precarity, formalisation and dispossession among Uruguay’s waste pickers. Dialectical Anthropology 43(1), 31-44.

Parry, J. P.1994. Death in Banaras. Cambridge: University Press.

Reno, J. 2014. Toward a new theory of waste: from ‘matter out of place’ to signs of life. Theory, Culture & Society 31(6), 3-27.

——— 2015. Waste and waste management. Annual Review of Anthropology 44, 557-72.

——— 2016. Waste away: working and living with a North American landfill. Oakland: University of California Press.

Royte, E. 2007. Garbage land: on the secret trail of trash. Columbus: Back Bay Books.

Strasser, S. 1999. Waste and want. New York: Metropolitan Book.

Thompson, M. 2017 [1979]. Rubbish theory: the creation and destruction of value. London: Pluto Press.

Thorsheim, P. 2015. Waste into weapons: recycling in Britain during the Second World War. Cambridge: University Press.

Zalasiewicz, J & C. Waters 2015. The Anthropocene. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science online. Accessed 18 January 2019 (available on-line: https://oxfordre.com/environmentalscience/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389414-e-7).

Zimring, C. 2009. Cash for your trash: scrap recycling in America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Note on contributor

Patrick O’Hare is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on plastic, waste, recycling, and labour cooperatives in Latin America, where he has conducted ethnographic research in Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico.

Patrick O'Hare, Department of Social Anthropology, 71 North Street, St Andrews, KY16 9AJ, Fife, United Kingdom

[1] This entry has been updated on April 15th, 2020. If you would like to have access to the original version, please contact us via email.

[2] As an indication of this, the first review article for waste dates from 2015 (Reno).

[3] Silk woven pictures produced through a method developed by Thomas Stevens in the 19^thcentury.

[4] See https://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/grants/RES-060-23-0007/read/outputs

[5] In the United States, for example, it is estimated that municipal solid waste makes up just 3% of total waste, with the rest composed of industrial waste (see Royte 2007), although this oft-cited figure has recently been called into question (Liboiron 2016).

[6] The Basel Convention, fully the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, is an international treaty signed by 186 states and the European Union and in place since 1992.

Anthropocene

Felix Stein — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 07:26:40 +0000

Liana Chua Hannah Fair

Brunel University London

Initially published 8 Jan 2019

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

Abstract:

‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes. Although it originated in the Earth Sciences, it has since been widely adopted across academia and the public sphere as a catch-all description for the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. This entry examines how anthropologists have engaged with the Anthropocene, both as a set of phenomena (e.g. climate change, mass extinction) and as a politically and morally loaded concept. It identifies four main anthropological approaches to the Anthropocene, those that: 1) take the Anthropocene as a context for or backdrop to ethnographic inquiry; 2) interrogate ‘the Anthropocene’ as a socially and politically constructed idea; 3) treat the Anthropocene as an opportunity for creativity and hopeful speculation; and 4) view the Anthropocene as the outcome of long-standing global political and socio-economic inequalities. Such approaches entail distinct methods, analytical frameworks, concepts, and ethico-political programmes. Collectively, they form a large and still-evolving body of work that destabilises divisions between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, as well as the scholarly disciplines traditionally built around them. In this capacity, they are also pushing anthropologists to ask what distinctive methodological, analytical, and ethico-political contributions their discipline can make to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of Anthropocene studies.

Introduction

‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary era: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes. Initially emerging in the Earth Sciences as the name for a proposed new geological epoch^[1] (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000), the Anthropocene has been widely adopted across academia as a catch-all description of the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. Its key markers include climate change and its consequences (e.g. sea level rise), the effects of plastic pollution on marine and terrestrial processes, unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss and extinction, and the changing chemical composition of soils, oceans, and the atmosphere.

Academic interest in the Anthropocene has been paralleled by a growing awareness of its existence in the public sphere. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) dedicated an entire journal issue to the Anthropocene (UNESCO 2018), while many of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Sustainable Development Goals (2016-present) are built around key Anthropocenic concerns, such as global emissions, ecosystem damage, and overreliance on fossil fuels. At the same time, productions such as Edward Burtynsky’s film Anthropocene: the human epoch (2018) are drawing public attention to both the term and the challenges that it poses in the contemporary world. The Anthropocene has thus become a ‘charismatic mega-concept’ (Turpin & Davis 2015: 6) that bridges the natural and the social sciences, and academia and the public realm, igniting heated debates across all of them.

This entry provides a short and necessarily partial account of anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene—an immense, burgeoning, and still-embryonic field of study (Gibson & Venkateswar 2015; Swanson, Bubandt & Tsing 2015). After briefly considering what the Anthropocene is, we shall examine four key anthropological approaches to it: those that a) put ethnography to work in spaces most directly affected by Anthropocenic phenomena; b) critically interrogate the idea of the Anthropocene: its discourses, truth-claims, politics, and ethical injunctions; c) take the Anthropocene as an opportunity for speculation, creativity, and hopeful regeneration; and d) treat the Anthropocene as a political and socio-economic problem and symptom of global inequalities and injustices.

These approaches are characterised by distinct methods, analytical frameworks, conceptual vocabularies, and ethico-political agendas. However, they also share certain key traits. First, they point to how the Anthropocene destabilises dichotomies between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, as well as the academic disciplines built around them. At a time when microplastics have infiltrated marine food chains and ‘natural disasters’ like floods and coastal erosion are precipitated by human-induced climate change, such dichotomies have become increasingly hard to maintain. Many anthropologists have responded to this problem by transcending their own disciplinary boundaries, and engaging with methods and frameworks from other disciplines, such as biology and art.

Secondly, none of these approaches can be said to be agnostic about their subject matter. Rather, they exemplify what has become an increasingly pervasive tendency in this field: the imbrication of the analytical with the political and the ethical. More than analyzing the Anthropocene, anthropologists are increasingly asking what can and should be done in response to the threats and opportunities that it poses. Their agendas and interventions, however, vary significantly—as do the demands that they make on themselves. The upshot of all this, thirdly, is that anthropologists are increasingly pushed to ask what exactly their discipline can bring to the evolving ‘Anthropo-scene’, i.e. the intellectual field that has emerged around the concept (Lorimer 2017), and vice-versa. This entry suggests that classic anthropological methods, such as small-scale participant-observation and the critical juxtaposition of ‘strange’ and ‘familiar’ insights, are well suited to adding empirical depth and nuance to this multidisciplinary field. Yet the same time, it is also becoming clear that engagements with the Anthropocene are reshaping anthropological practices and imaginaries, with profound ethical and political implications.

What is the Anthropocene?

Since the early-2000s, the Anthropocene has received increasing scientific attention as a proposed new geological epoch: one dominated by the impact of human activity on planetary systems. These impacts include anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss leading to mass extinction, and the ubiquity of microplastics in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Proposed bio-geophysical evidence for these and other features of the Anthropocene includes increasing global average temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations, rising sea levels and ocean acidification (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008; Lewis & Maslin 2015). On the basis of such evidence, in 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (founded in 2009) provisionally recommended that the Anthropocene be formally recognised as a distinct unit of geological time (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). However, debates continue regarding its starting point.

Events as early as the extinction of mammoths through human predation 13,800 years ago (Doughty et al. 2010) and forest clearances and rice cultivation 5,000-8,000 years ago (Ruddiman 2003) have been proposed as boundary points that mark the start of the Anthropocene. While Paul Crutzen and other members of the working group previously endorsed the Industrial Revolution and the development of the steam engine as the Anthropocene’s origin (Crutzen 2002; Zalasiewicz et al. 2008), the working group’s members now largely favour the ‘Great Acceleration’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015)—the period of extensive technological, demographic, economic, and resource use expansion from 1945 onward—as the origin point. Members of the working group contend that the Great Acceleration represents a global synchronous phenomenon (a key criterion for selecting a stratigraphic marker), compared to earlier suggestions, which they argue were merely regional or did not occur simultaneously across the world.

Alternatively, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015) have proposed 1610 as a starting date, due to the profound alterations to ecosystems produced by the Colombian Exchange^[2]as well as the dip in CO2 concentrations most likely caused by reforestation in the Americas, due to the enormous loss of Indigenous life. As well as identifying an event they deem stratigraphically significant, Lewis and Maslin therefore foreground colonial violence as a foundation of the Anthropocene. This position is endorsed by feminist scholars Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017), who contend that selecting this starting date would create space for Indigenous thought within the Anthropocene debate.

Decisions regarding the formal boundaries of the Anthropocene have political and socio-economic repercussions. Depending on the starting date that is chosen, particular processes will come to be held responsible for our current planetary predicament. This will suggest certain avenues for action, and foreclose others. For instance, selecting the Industrial Revolution as a start-date suggests that capitalism as a socio-economic system is primarily culpable for the Anthropocene, whereas 1610 foregrounds colonialism and the historic and ongoing exploitation of the majority world,[3] suggesting that former imperial nations have a particular responsibility to mitigate Anthropocenic problems. These debates reflect how the Anthropocene is not simply a natural scientific phenomenon, but a methodological, conceptual, and ethico-political challenge for scholars across a range of disciplines. The following sections examine how anthropologists have both approached and intervened in these debates.

The Anthropocene as context

While the Anthropocene encompasses many different processes, anthropogenic climate change is often treated as its main ‘yardstick’ due to the scale and ubiquity of its impacts (Rudiak-Gould 2015: 48). Ethnographic research into the effects of, responses to, and understandings of climate change constitute some of the earliest anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene. These approaches draw upon anthropology’s traditional strengths of rich qualitative research in small scale societies, focusing particularly on regions mostly critically threatened by climate change impacts, such as low-lying small island states. Such ethnographic research provides insights into how Anthropocenic phenomena are apprehended, experienced, and conceptualised in specific settings. In this way, they point to the heterogeneous nature of the Anthropocene, and the need to examine its social and cultural dimensions, rather than approaching it as a purely natural scientific concern.

Anthropologists have commonly tried to understand how climate change is experienced in particular local settings (Crate & Nuttall 2009). In these studies, the Anthropocene is treated as a backdrop to social life or a key factor shaping social relations, rather than as a purely geophysical phenomenon. For example, Heather Lazrus (2009) documents how, in Nanumea, Tuvalu, the tips of islands, which are associated with particular family lineages and corresponding levels of community prestige, are shifting due to coastal erosion, potentially causing changes in familial status and social hierarchies. Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall argue that climate change is ‘ultimately about culture’ (2009: 12) as it has emerged from a culture of mass consumerism, requires cultural change to mitigate it, and threatens Indigenous cultural practices by disrupting cosmologically significant human-environment relations. This emphasis on culture chimes with the work of geographer Mike Hulme (2008), who contends that climate change discourse is dominated by natural scientific frameworks, and consequently has been stripped of cultural context (see also Malm & Hornborg 2014). Instead, he argues both that the climate must be understood culturally, and that climate change must be locally situated and rendered culturally and ethically meaningful for those that it impacts. Thus, culture can be understood as both a cause of climate change, integral to understanding it, and a means of influencing responses to it. This latter process has been explored in relation to Christian responses to climate change, with ethnographies analyzing the use of Biblical stories in challenging the hegemony of predictions of sea level rise in Kiribati (Kempf 2017) and advocating for greater preparedness in the face of intensifying cyclones in Vanuatu (Fair 2018).

Many researchers advocate bringing Indigenous knowledge of climate change into dialogue with scientific knowledge, for example by drawing on Athapaskan and Tlingit oral histories of glacial travel in the Gulf of Alaska (Cruikshank 2001), or organising community knowledge exchanges that bring together ethnographic accounts and scientific data regarding changes to the permafrost in northeastern Siberia (Crate & Fedorov 2013). This approach, however, raises more fundamental questions about the distinction between local and scientific knowledge. There have been calls to recognise how scientific knowledge of climate change is shaped by specific local and cultural conditions, rather than accepting it as a ‘view from nowhere’ (Hulme 2008), as well as recognising that local knowledge itself is not isolated, static, or sealed off from scientific discourse. In this vein, anthropologists have explored how scientific knowledge is received, interpreted,and incorporated within specific local cultural settings. For example, Jerry Jacka (2009) shows how the impacts of El Niño in the Porgera Valley in Papua New Guinea have been accommodated within Christian narratives of punishment and apocalypse and understood as revenge for the destruction of significant ritual sites through road building. These local understandings can render problematic the anthropogenic dimension of climate change. While they concur regarding the human responsibility for global warming, they do not agree which specific human actions have caused it.

Peter Rudiak-Gould’s (2012) work in the Marshall Islands also highlights how scientific understandings are combined with local understandings and used to bolster existing moral frameworks, a process he describes as ‘promiscuous corroboration’. He identifies a prevalent Marshallese understanding of climate change as symptomatic of wider, pre-existing cultural decline, due to increasing American influences and the loss of traditional knowledges, lifestyles,and practices. Similar understandings have been identified in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu (Fair 2018) where climate change impacts, including the intensification of cyclones, have been attributed to deviations from both Christian morality and kastom (traditional knowledge, beliefs, and practices). Climate change as rendered intelligible through these existing ethical frameworks therefore also lead Islanders to hold themselves morally culpable for Anthropocenic impacts, in distinction to their nation’s minimal contributions to carbon dioxide emissions.

Rudiak-Gould’s work reveals some of the tensions that can emerge between research and political advocacy. He argues that while most anthropologists subscribe to a narrative of climate change blame focused upon the responsibilities of industrialised nations, researchers should be open and alert to alternative narratives, even those that challenge their own politico-ethical standpoints. While the Marshallese narrative of Islander responsibility is at odds with conventional framings of small island states as victims of climate injustice, it is also empowering on a local level, as ‘innocence implies impotence’ (Rudiak-Gould 2015: 58).

This raises a broader question: what political and ethical demands does the Anthropocene make of social scientists? Crate and Nuttall (2009) argue that anthropologists have a privileged point of engagement: many are already working with communities who are experiencing the severest impacts of climate change while being some of the least responsible for those impacts. Consequently, some researchers have focused their energies not just on analysis but advocacy, engaging with legislation and policy (Fiske 2009), setting up university sustainability initiatives (Bartlett & Stewart 2009), and participating in climate justice movements (Chatterton et al. 2012). Their efforts exemplify a form of engaged research that seeks to alleviate, or at least highlight, the deleterious effects of the Anthropocene.

Studying ‘the Anthropocene’ as a concept

Much of the work cited above is situated in the Anthropocene, which serves as an encompassing, real-life backdrop to ethnographic inquiry. However, there is also a growing body of scholarship that advocates a critical understanding of the Anthropocene as an idea (Moore 2015: 28). Drawing partly on critical traditions such as science studies and post-structuralism, these writings examine how Anthropocenic knowledge practices and truth-claims are constructed, circulated, contested, and strategically deployed—as well as how these can bring new realities and relations into being.

This approach is marked by a commitment to rendering the familiar strange by showing how apparently clear-cut Anthropocenic ‘facts’, such as ‘climate change’, ‘carbon emissions’, and ‘biodiversity loss’, are inherently partial and dynamic constructs. Rather than assuming their veracity, anthropologists ask: how are such concepts defined, made visible or knowable, and formalised, and to what effect? In recent years, for example, scholars have examined how the Anthropocene is made ‘imaginable and comprehensible’ (Marzec 2014: 249) through specific technologies, including narratives, photography (Kember 2017), infographics (Houser 2014), and environmental visualizations (Carruth & Marzec 2014). Another fecund area of inquiry is that of climate science, with anthropologists examining the scalar, spatial, temporal, and speculative dimensions of climate modelling (Hastrup & Skrydstrup 2013), the universalization of carbon as a metric through which to quantify (and thus compare) a vast array of human activity (Günel 2016), and the impact of ideals of accountability (Hall & Sanders 2015) and expertise (Vaughn 2017) on climate science research. Their insights into the all-too-human production of scientific knowledge are exemplified by Jessica O’Reilly’s discussion of Antarctic research (2016), which reveals how scientific data about the shifting Antarctic landscape is indelibly shaped by scientists’ intimate, sensory engagements with the ice, national research logistics and nationalism, guesswork, and, often, pure chance.

By treating scientific practices and categories as objects of ethnographic scrutiny, such scholars highlight the vital point that

[k]nowledges do not ﬂoat free from their contexts of production, and cannot arrive any old way. They travel well-worn paths, and are preconditioned by other academic knowledges, knowledge-producing apparatuses, and institutional arrangements (Hall & Sanders 2015: 454).

These approaches thus reveal how seemingly ‘factual’ Anthropocenic discourses, categories, and epistemologies are in fact malleable, fragile, and socio-historically specific (see, e.g., Last 2015). Moreover, the truth-claims that they generate are often tied up with profoundly moral ideas that evoke specific ways of thinking and feeling. Some of these, such as paintings of scenes from the Industrial Revolution, romanticise and naturalise the very conditions of human dominance over nature that fuelled the Anthropocene (Mirzoeff 2016). Others, notably public discourses about climate change, are apocalyptic (Swyngedouw 2010), depicting the Anthropocene as a threat to humankind’s very survival.

More than making the Anthropocene knowable, such ideas and imaginaries can have powerful social, political, and material effects in multiple settings. Narratives of low-lying island states being imminently engulfed by rising sea levels, for example, can disempower affected communities and inhibit effective mitigative action by representing Islanders as helpless victims and their homelands as inevitably lost (Farbotko 2010). Rather than reflecting an inherent vulnerability to climate change, these discourses can actually encourage people in affected areas to produce and perform their vulnerability in order to receive development funding (Webber 2013), and in doing so divert resources from other areas. Other studies show how discourses of climate change vulnerability have been mobilised in order to reinforce existing stereotypes of certain places and groups of people as vulnerable, hazardous, and disadvantaged (Yamane 2009).

It is here that anthropologists are well-placed to intervene in ongoing conversations by producing detailed ethnographic accounts of the

events animated by the Anthropocene idea, from emergent political alliances and spatializations to modes of subjectivity and citizenship, from forms of scientific objectification and naturalization to shifting research methods and narratives, from green markets, products, and flows of capital to the materialization and embodiment of these ideas in spaces, places, bodies, and earthly relations (Moore 2015: 40).

Through such accounts, Amelia Moore suggests, anthropologists can begin to treat ‘the Anthropocene idea as a problem space’ (2015: 41; italics in original) that needs to be explored rather than taken for granted.

Moore’s work on the growth of sustainability, conservation, and eco-tourist initiatives in the Bahamas (e.g. Moore 2015) exemplifies the value of such an approach. Taking the Bahamas as one particular ‘Anthropocene space’ (2015: 31), she traces how rising sea levels, notions of sustainability, and concerns about biodiversity loss have collectively reframed and literally reworked the islands’ ecological, spatial, and socio-economic makeup—for example, through the promotion of sustainable fisheries, the establishment of new marine protected areas, and the growth of ecotourism initiatives. In her work, the Anthropocene is not simply a backdrop to ethnographic inquiry, but a material and imaginative space that constantly generates new relations and effects.

Similar approaches can be found in Jason Cons’ (2018) ethnography of the pre-emptive restructuring of Bangladeshi borderlands in the name of climate security; Cymene Howe’s discussion of multiple claims to ‘anthropocentric ecoauthority’ in the context of wind power development in Mexico (2014); and Nayanika Mathur’s description of the political work performed by Anthropocenic categories like ‘climate change’ in the context of human-wildlife conflicts in the Indian Himalayas (2015). Rather than asking how anthropology can illuminate small-scale responses to the Anthropocene, these writings push us to interrogate the very idea of the Anthropocene, the truth-claims and the ethical demands that it makes, and the effects of such claims and demands in multiple settings. By adopting this critical perspective, they imply, anthropologists can not only challenge the deleterious effects of oversimplified concepts such as ‘anthropogenic’ or ‘climate change’, but can also begin to explore ‘alternative visions’ (Cons 2018: 286) and possibilities for life in the Anthropocene. On this point, their work converges with that of another form of scholarship, to which speculation and creativity are central.

Remaking the Anthropocene: speculation, creativity, and experimentation

Rather than critically unpack the ‘Anthropocene’ idea, other scholars have opted to play with the speculative and regenerative possibilities that it presents. While not uncritical of its horrors and injustices, their writings approach the Anthropocene as an opportunity: as a still-emergent entity to be appropriated, recast, and even redone (Buck 2015: 372).

This diverse body of work is often animated by a shared concern with unsettling, reworking, and transcending dominant scholarly categories such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘human’, and ‘nonhuman’. Although social scientists have long questioned these categories’ universality, the Anthropocene has thrown their contingency into starker relief: if ‘human agency has become the main geological force shaping the face of the earth’ (Latour 2014), how, then, can we tell what is ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’? By thrusting this vital question into the public spotlight, the Anthropocene has, as Bruno Latour puts it, been a gift to contemporary scholarship—an invitation to ‘renegotiate the shape, boundary, limit and extent’ of anthropology’s core concern, ‘humanity’ (2014), and much more besides.

A common response to this invitation is to embrace rather than abhor the Anthropocene’s human-nonhuman hybrid ‘monsters’ (Latour 2011; Swanson et al. 2017: M4), from bacteria that have evolved to resist human-synthesised drugs to ‘blasted landscapes’, such as sites of oil spills, that are simultaneously ‘natural’ and ‘social’ (Kirksey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014). Many scholars point out that the Anthropocene has simply made visible the complex webs of relations in which humans and nonhumans have always been enmeshed, while also generating new, inescapable hybrids and relations in the present. Apprehending these old and new hybrids and relations means finding ways to transcend anthropology’s traditional focus on humans, and asking: on what other terms can the Anthropocene be approached? To this end, many anthropologists draw on methods and analytics developed in ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010), a field of scholarship that foregrounds how all humans and nonhumans on the planet are ‘entangled’—tied together and interdependent in various ways (e.g. Haraway 2008; Mitchell 2016; Reinert 2016; Rose 2011; Tsing 2015; van Dooren 2014). Rather than shunning such entanglements, they posit, why not use them to engender new possibilities for thinking about and living in the Anthropocene?

Such calls are often underpinned by a distinct ethical injunction: to elevate nonhuman entities into subjects worthy of scholarly attention, and also care and solidarity. Musing on the presence of penguins and flying foxes in urban spaces, for example, Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose refute the assumption that such animals are ‘out of place’ (2012: 2), advocating instead an ‘ethic of conviviality for a genuinely inclusive multispecies city…that provides a space for the flourishing of as many different forms of life as possible’ (2012: 17). Similarly, Anna Tsing (2011, 2015) propounds a form of ‘multispecies love’—‘passionate immersion in the lives of…nonhumans’ (2011: 19)—as an antidote to the destructive excesses of global capitalism. For her, multispecies entanglements offer a glimpse of how life, like mushrooms in abandoned anthropogenic landscapes, can emerge from ruined places (2015: 6). Indeed, ‘in a global state of precarity’, she argues, ‘we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin’ (2015: 6).

For many of the scholars mentioned in this section, then, the interdependence of humans and nonhumans is not simply an ontological fact, but it may be a potent conceptual and ethical way of moving forward on a ‘damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017). As Swanson et al. put it:

Our continued survival demands that we learn something about how best to live and die within the entanglements we have. We need both senses of monstrosity: entanglement as life and as danger (2017: M4).

In such work, the Anthropocene is thus an opportunity to: 1) right old wrongs, particularly the anthropocentric hubris that caused such planetary ruination; and 2) create and experiment with new modes of understanding, living with/in, and transforming the Anthropocene, so as to make it plural, livable, even charming (Buck 2015). Here, hope and possibility (Kirskey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014) are key motifs; correctives to what Donna Haraway calls the ‘game over’ attitude (2016: 2) that characterises more cynical, hopeless responses to the Anthropocene.

Such hopeful interventions are often accompanied by an impulse to play and experiment with existing scholarly methods and frameworks. Rather than writing straightforward ethnographies, anthropologists are increasingly turning to cross- and trans-disciplinary engagements—with art and artists (Davis & Turpin 2015; Kirksey, Schuetze & Helmreich 2014), natural sciences and scientists (Tsing 2015), and stories and storytelling (Haraway 2016; van Dooren & Rose 2012)—to overcome the limits of disciplinary knowledges, practices, and barriers. These experimental, collaborative projects are generally characterised by two attributes.

First, many are ‘transgressive’ (Kirksey, Schuetze & Helmreich 2014: 17) and ‘speculative’ (Davis & Turpin 2015: 17; Haraway 2016). Defying, rather than conforming to, academic conventions and expectations, they experiment with different methods, forms of knowledge, and aesthetics to ‘imagine alternative [Anthropocenic] futures’ (Lorimer 2017: 131). For example, Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson (2015), creators of the art installation The Museum of the History of Cattle (2013), use the narrative of an imaginary cow in a way that urges the reader to reimagine the world’s history, animal sociality, and the Anthropocene in bovine terms. In the process, they invite us to consider how we relate to nonhuman others in the Anthropocene, and what a non-anthropocentric Anthropocenic future might look like.

Second, as we saw above, these interventions are commonly framed as ethico-political manifestos that implicate their audiences in the urgent project of finding new ways to live and survive in the Anthropocene (see esp. Gibson, Rose & Fincher 2015; Kirksey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014; Tsing et al. 2017). Treating the ethical, the political, and the scholarly as of a piece, such speculative discussions impel anthropologists to embrace their connections with other entities and to formulate ‘alternative political visions, modes of relation and opportunities for ethical responsiveness’ (Mitchell 2016: 39). In contrast to the critical, deconstructionist agendas of the works cited in the previous section, these interventions are self-consciously experimental and collaborative—and always ethically and politically loaded. Yet, as the next section shows, they have their own limitations.

Re-politicising the Anthropocene

While enthusiastically adopted in some quarters, creative approaches to the Anthropocene have also been criticised for failing to rigorously interrogate the relationships between capitalism, power, inequality, and the Anthropocene. Such critiques typify a fourth main response to the Anthropocene in our discipline: one that emphasises historical contingency, political contestation, and socio-economic inequality. Contributors to this field have reproached both speculative and dominant scientific approaches for depoliticising their subject matter at a time when political engagement is most needed.

Three major concerns have been expressed regarding the dominant narrative generated by the Anthropocene Working Group. The first concerns its portrayal of the Anthropocene as a moment of rupture. In The shock of the Anthropocene, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016) contend that the dominant narrative perpetuates a historically inaccurate myth: that humans have suddenly awoken to the negative consequences of their actions upon the environment (see, e.g., Steffen et al. 2011). This awakening narrative, they argue, presumes that environmental inaction emerges from ignorance, as opposed to an ideological battle over how humans engage with the non-human world. It conceals longstanding environmental consciousness and previous grassroots political struggles against ecological degradation in the Global North and Global South, thereby depoliticising the contested history of the Anthropocene (Swyngedouw & Ernstson 2018). Bonneuil and Fressoz further argue that such narratives glorify the position of scientists, placing them above society and suggesting that science can provide straightforward solutions to the Anthropocene while concealing a need for political choices. This narrative frames the Anthropocene in terms of human accomplishments, rather than taking it as an opportunity for humility and recognising the distinction between human influence and human control (Nixon 2017). The notion that the Anthropocene represents a sudden new era of ecological dystopia has also been critiqued by Indigenous scholars. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2018), for example, argues that this fails to recognise that, from one Indigenous perspective, the Anthropocene is a perpetuation of environmental destruction, displacement, and extinction due to the violence of colonialism: for some Indigenous communities, he argues, the apocalypse already arrived long ago.

Secondly, scholars have argued that the dominant Anthropocene narrative treats humanity —the Anthropos —as a ‘unitary species actor’ (Nixon 2017: 24), or a singular universal subject. In this capacity, the imaginary of ‘the anthropogenic’ covers over the global and historical inequalities between humans that caused the Anthropocene, and that continue to structure global politics today (Sayre 2012). It thus fails to recognise the inequity of responsibility for anthropogenic climate change, as well as the unequal distribution of exposure to its impacts, thereby depoliticising analysis. Moreover, far from being universal, this vision of the Anthropos has been criticised for making wealthy European perspectives stand in for the experiences of all of humanity, thereby replicating the homogenising violence of colonialism (Davis & Todd 2017). Métis scholar Zoe Todd argues that the Eurocentrism of the dominant Anthropocene narrative is a consequence of its emergence from white Eurocentric institutions, and instead advocates a decolonization of the Anthropocene through bringing in Indigenous knowledges that emphasise the ‘reciprocal, ongoing, and dynamic relationships’ (2015: 251) between humans and nonhumans.

Thirdly, dominant Anthropocene narratives may also naturalise the development of the Anthropocene, depicting it as inevitable rather than identifying it as a consequence of contingent historical developments and particular political choices. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) note how, in some accounts, a linear trajectory is drawn from the discovery of fire to the development of the steam engine. This presentation of the Anthropocene as a natural, inevitable, teleological development depoliticises its origins, and limits political responses to it. Instead, they argue that the Anthropocene should be understood as a ‘sociogenic’ phenomenon, emerging from particular social relations and an uneven distribution of power between different nations, social groups, and species. Naturalising the Anthropocene can lead to an understanding of human domination of the planet and of nonhuman life as inevitable, with the epoch’s very name maintaining an anthropocentric perspective to the exclusion of all others (Crist 2016). This failure to recognise the Anthropocene’s historically contingent conditions can be attributed to a ‘consequentialist bias’ (Moore 2016) of dominant scientific approaches, reflecting their greater emphasis upon evidence of biophysical changes as opposed to systemic causes.

Responses to this singular Anthropocene grand narrative vary. Bonneuil and Fressoz advocate producing multiple histories of the Anthropocene, which recognise the different political choices that have been and can be made (2016). Bringing analyses of power into the Anthropocene and rejecting the homogenised figure of the Anthropos, Malm and Jason Moore present contrasting accounts of a ‘Capitalocene’, an epoch defined by the impacts of Capitalism upon planetary systems, as opposed to those of all of humanity. While Malm (2016) focuses on the Industrial Revolution and the role of fossil fuels in capital accumulation, Jason Moore (2016; but c.f. Hornborg 2017) identifies 1450 and the mercantile capitalist era as the starting point of the Capitalocene. He argues that this period witnessed the production of ‘Nature’ as an abstracted object of power, and that it was the violent exclusion of ‘Nature’ from ‘Society’ that enabled the development of capitalism. Meanwhile, Hann (2017) urges an even more long-term perspective on the development of capitalism, one that overcomes what he perceives as the Eurocentrism of existing analyses. He focuses on Jack Goody’s work and urban revolutions of the Bronze Age, arguing that the emergence of commodity as opposed to gift economies can be seen as part of the social, political, and cosmological preconditions of the Anthropocene.

Like the speculative scholarship discussed earlier, such writings undermine the Euro-American modernist division between ‘nature’ and ‘society’. However, their interventions take a markedly different form. Rather than treating the Anthropocene as an opportunity for hopeful, creative speculation, they view it as a spur to unmasking and contesting long-standing political and socio-economic inequalities in the present. But does this entail entirely dissolving the differences between ‘nature’ and ‘society’? Hornborg (2017), for one, rejects Moore’s view of nature and society as entirely entangled. He contends that without a clear analytical separation of nature and society, capitalism cannot be critiqued, thereby diminishing the possibility for political action. Similarly, Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson (2018) challenge what they label as a post-humanist rejection of nature/society distinctions. For them, an understanding of nature as entirely part of society and capitalism creates a view of nature that can be too easily managed and co-opted by neoliberalism. This depoliticises the Anthropocene, as it perpetuates the fantasy that life and capitalism can continue as they are, ignoring the need for decisive, radical socio-economic transformation.

Such neo-Marxist concerns about depoliticising the Anthropocene extend to their critiques of the speculative and creative approaches discussed above. Hornborg (2017), for example, accuses scholars like Tsing (2015) and Haraway (2016) of ‘dithering’ in the face of ecological crisis: producing poetic yet inaccessible, theoretically imprecise interventions that preoccupy the attention of critical scholars rather than critiquing inequality or encouraging political action. While blunter than most, Hornborg’s critique typifies a specific kind of ethico-political position on the Anthropocene. Underpinned by the insights of political economy and political ecology, such scholarship treats anthropological critique as an intervention in the world: as a means of highlighting ongoing inequalities and historical contingencies and continuities, as well as the basis of a direct, engaged form of political action.

Conclusion

Jason Moore describes the Anthropocene as having ‘two lives’: one as a scientific concept and object of geological debate; and another as an idea that has moved beyond its natural science origins, permeating the social sciences and public discourse, and raising questions about the relationship between humans and the non-human world (2016: 80). This entry has offered a glimpse of the Anthropocene’s second life as it is playing out in various anthropological quarters.

As we have seen, the Anthropocene is apprehended in multiple ways within anthropology: as an encompassing, threatening backdrop to ethnographic inquiry; as an idea and ‘problem space’ to be interrogated; as an opportunity for creativity, speculation, and experimentation; and as the outcome of historical inequalities and injustices. These varied figurations of the Anthropocene give rise to equally varied ethico-political positions and interventions. As the approaches above reveal, there are different, and differently scaled, ways of responding to the Anthropocene: to take it apart and focus on its small-scale, localised challenges; to critique its truth-claims and politics on various levels; or to capitalise on the Anthropocene as an opportunity to formulate new, hopeful, experimental possibilities for the future.

Embedded in, but also evolving through, these propositions are thus different visions of what anthropology is, could be, and can do. But such competing visions—and they are likely to be joined by many more—are not simply about the future of anthropology. As lenses onto the world, they raise much bigger questions about how the very categories of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ and ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are being reproduced, transformed, or even dissolved in the present moment. And as Anthropocenic phenomena impact ever more of the planet, and Anthropocenic discourses gain greater social, political, and moral traction, these are questions that will animate academic debates and affect the lives of millions of people for years to come.

Notes

Research for this entry was carried out as part of a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant agreement No.758494.

References

Bartlett, P.F. & B. Stewart 2009. Shifting the university: faculty engagement and curriculum change. In Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions (eds) S.A. Crate & M. Nuttall, 356-69. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

Bonneuil, C. & J.-B. Fressoz 2016. The shock of the Anthropocene: the earth, history and us. London: Verso.

Buck, H.J. 2015. On the possibilities of a charming Anthropocene. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2), 369-77.

Carruth, A. & R.P. Marzec. Environmental visualization in the Anthropocene: technologies, aesthetics, ethics. Public Culture 26(2), 205-11.

Chatterton, P., D. Featherstone & P. Routledge 2012. Articulating climate justice in Copenhagen: antagonism, the commons, and solidarity. Antipode 45(3), 602-20.

Cons, J. 2018. Staging climate security: resilience and heterodystopia in the Bangladesh borderlands. Cultural Anthropology 33(2), 266-94.

Crate, S.A. & A.N. Fedorov 2013. A methodological model for exchanging local and scientific climate change knowledge in Northeastern Siberia. Arctic 66(3), 338-50.

——— & M. Nuttall (eds) 2009. Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.

Crist, E. 2016. On the poverty of our nomenclature. In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history and the crisis of capitalism (ed.) J. Moore, 14-33. Oakland: PM Press.

Cruikshank, J. 2001. Glaciers and climate change: perspectives from oral tradition. Arctic 54(4), 377-93.

Crutzen, P. 2002. Geology of mankind. Nature 415, 23.

——— & E.F. Stoermer 2000. The ‘Anthropocene’. Global Change Newsletter 41, 17-18.

Davis, H. & Z. Todd 2017. On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4), 761-80.

——— & E. Turpin 2015. Art in the Anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press.

Doughty, C.E., A. Wolf & C.B. Field 2010. Biophysical feedbacks between the Pleistocene megafauna extinction and climate: the first human-induced global warming? Geophysical Research Letters 37: L15703.

Fair, H. 2018. Three stories of Noah: navigating religious climate change narratives in the Pacific Island region. Geo: Geography and Environment 5(2), e00068 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.68).

Farbotko, C. 2010. Wishful sinking: disappearing islands, climate refugees and cosmopolitan experimentation. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 51(1), 47-60.

Fiske, S.J. 2009. Global change policymaking from inside the beltway: engaging anthropology. In Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions (eds) S.A. Crate & M. Nuttall, 277-91. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

Gibson, H. & S. Venkateswar 2015. Anthropological engagement with the Anthropocene: a critical review. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 6, 5-27.

Gibson, K., D.B. Rose & Ruth Fincher (eds) 2015. Manifesto for living in the Anthropocene. New York: Punctum Books.

Günel, G. 2016. What is carbon dioxide? When is carbon dioxide? PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(1), 33-45.

Haapoja, T. & L. Gustafsson 2015. A history according to cattle. In Art in the Anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies (eds) H. Davis & E. Turpin, 293-8. London: Open Humanities Press.

Hall, E.F. & T. Sanders 2015. Accountability and the academy: producing knowledge about the human dimensions of climate change. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(2), 438-61.

Hann, C. 2017. The Anthropocene and anthropology: micro and macro perspectives. European Journal of Social Theory 20(1), 183-96.

Haraway, D.J. 2008. When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

——— 2015. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: making kin. Environmental Humanities 6, 159-65.

——— 2016. Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Hastrup, K. & M. Skrydstrup (eds) 2013. The social life of climate change models: anticipating nature. New York: Routledge

Hornborg, A. 2017. Dithering while the planet burns: anthropologists’ approaches to the Anthropocene. Reviews in Anthropology 46(2-3), 61-77.

Houser, H. 2014. The aesthetics of environmental visualizations: more than information ecstasy? Public Culture 26(2), 319-37.

Howe, C. 2014. Anthropocenic ecoauthority: the winds of Oaxaca. Anthropological Quarterly 87(2), 381-404.

Hulme, M. 2008. Geographical work at the boundaries of climate change. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33(1), 5-11.

Jacka, J. 2009. Global averages, local extremes: the subtleties and complexities of climate change in Papua New Guinea. In Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions (eds) S.A. Crate & M. Nuttall, 197-208. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

Kempf, W. 2017. Climate change, Christian religion and songs: revisiting the Noah story in the Central Pacific. In Environmental transformations and cultural responses (eds) E. Dürr & A. Pascht, 19-48. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kirksey, E. & S. Helmreich 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25, 545-76.

——— C. Schuetze & S. Helmreich 2014. Introduction: tactics of multispecies ethnography. In The multispecies salon (ed.) E. Kirksey, 1-24. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, pp. 1-24.

——— N. Shapiro & M. Brodine 2014. Hope in blasted landscapes. In The multispecies salon (ed.) E. Kirksey, 29-63. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Last, A. 2015. We are the world? Anthropocene cultural production between geopoetics and geopolitics. Theory, Culture and Society 34(2-3), 147-68.

Latour, B. 2011. Love your monsters: why we must care for our technologies as we do our children. Breakthrough Journal (Fall 2011), 21-8.

——— 2014. Anthropology at the time of the Anthropocene: a personal view of what is to be studied. Distinguished lecture, 113^thAmerican Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C.

Lazrus, H. 2009. The governance of vulnerability: climate change and agency in Tuvalu, South Pacific. In Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions (eds) S.A. Crate & M. Nuttall, 240-9. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

Lewis, S.L. & M.A. Maslin 2015. Defining the Anthropocene. Nature 519, 171-80.

Lorimer, J. 2017. The Anthropo-scene: a guide for the perplexed. Social Studies of Science 47(1), 117-42.

Malm, A. 2016. Fossil capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. London: Verso.

——— & A. Hornborg 2014. The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative. The Anthropocene Review 1(1), 62-9.

Mathur, N. 2015. ‘It’s a conspiracy theory and climate change’: of beastly encounters and cervine disappearances in Himalayan India. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1), 87-111.

Marzec, R.P. 2014. Militarized ecologies: visualizations of environmental struggle in the Brazilian Amazon. Public Culture 26(2), 233-55.

Mirzoeff, N. 2014. Visualizing the Anthropocene. Public Culture 26(2), 213-32.

Mitchell, A. 2016. Beyond biodiversity and species: problematizing extinction. Theory, Culture & Society 33(5), 23-42.

Moore, A. 2015. Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing global contemporary change. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22(1), 27-46.

Moore, J. (ed.) 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history and the crisis of capitalism. Oakland: PM Press.

Nixon, R. The Anthropocene and environmental justice. In Curating the future: museums, communities and climate change (eds) J. Newell, L. Robin & K. Wehner, 23-31. Abingdon: Routledge.

O’Reilly, J. 2016. Sensing the ice: field science, models, and expert intimacy with knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, S27-45.

Reinert, H. 2016. About a stone: some notes on geologic conviviality. Environmental Humanities 8(1), 95-117.

Rose, D.B. 2011. Wild dog dreaming: love and extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Ruddiman, W.F. 2003. The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago. Climatic Change 61, 261-93.

Rudiak-Gould, P. 2012. Promiscuous corroboration and climate change translation: a case study from the Marshall Islands. Global Environmental Change 22, 46-54.

——— 2015. The social life of blame in the Anthropocene. Environment & Society 6, 48-65.

Sayre, N. 2012. The politics of the anthropogenic. Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 57-70.

Steffen, W., J. Grinevald, P. Crutzen & J. McNeill 2011. The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369(1938), 842-67.

Swanson, H.A., N. Bubandt & A. Tsing 2015. Less than one but more than many: Anthropocene as science fiction and scholarship-in-the-making. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 6, 149-66.

———, A. Tsing, N. Bubandt & E. Gan 2017. Introduction: bodies tumbled into bodies. In Arts of living on a damaged planet: monsters of the Anthropocene (eds) A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan & N. Bubandt, M1-M12. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Swyngedouw, Erik. 2010. Apocalypse forever? Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change. Theory, Culture and Society 27(2-3), 213-32.

——— & H. Ernstson 2018. Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene: immuno-biopolitics and depoliticizing ontologies in the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society 5(6), 3-30 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418757314).

Todd, Z. 2015. Indigenizing the Anthropocene. In Art in the Anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies (eds) H. Davis & E. Turpin, 241-54. London: Open Humanities Press.

Tsing, A. 2011. Arts of inclusion, or, how to love a mushroom. Australian Humanities Review 50, 191-203.

——— 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: University Press.

——— H. Swanson, E. Gan & N. Bubandt (eds) 2017. Arts of living on a damaged planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

UNESCO 2018. The UNESCO Courier no.2: Welcome to the Anthropocene!, April-June 2018 (available on-line: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0026/002619/261900e.pdf).

Van Dooren, T. 2014. Flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.

——— & D.B. Rose 2012. Storied-places in a multispecies city. Humanimalia 3(2), 1-27.

Vaughn, S.E. 2017. Disappearing mangroves: the epistemic politics of climate adaptation in Guyana. Cultural Anthropology 32(2), 242-68.

Webber, S. 2013. Performative vulnerability: climate change adaptation policies and financing in Kiribati. Environment and Planning A 45(11), 2717-33.

Whyte, K.P. 2018. Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1-2), 224-42.

Yamane, A. 2009. Climate change and hazardscape of Sri Lanka. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 41(10): 2396-416.

Zalasiewicz, J., M. Williams, A. Smith, T.L. Barry, A.L. Coe, P.R. Bown, P. Brenchley, et al. 2008. Are we now living in the Anthropocene? GSA Today 18(2), 4-8.

——— C.N. Waters, M. Williams, A.D. Barnosky, A. Cearreta, P. Crutzen, E. Ellis, et al. 2015. When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal. Quaternary International 383, 196-203.

——— C.N. Waters, C.P. Summerhayes, A.P. Wolfe, A.D. Barnosky, A.Cearreta, P. Crutzen, E. Ellis, et al. 2017. The working group on the Anthropocene: summary of evidence and interim recommendations. Anthropocene 19, 55-60.

Note on contributors

Liana Chua is Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She has studied conversion to Christianity, ethnic politics, indigeneity, resettlement and development in Malaysian Borneo since 2003. She is currently leading a large multi-sited project that explores the global nexus of orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene. http://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/liana-chua

Hannah Fair’s doctoral research concerned Pan-Pacific climate justice movements and religious understandings of climate change in Vanuatu. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from University College London, and is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology at Brunel University London, investigating interspecies compassion, extinction, and orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene.

Anthropology, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom.

[1] At the time of writing (late 2018), ‘the Anthropocene’ has yet to be formally recognised by the International Union of Geological Sciences or the International Commission on Stratigraphy as a distinct geological epoch.

[2] A term that refers broadly to the movement of plants and animals such as potatoes, tomatoes, cattle, and sugarcane between the Americas and Europe, Africa, and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies.

[3] The term ‘majority world’ collectively refers to the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania – who make up the majority of the world’s population – without defining them negatively in comparison with Europe and North America (unlike the categories ‘third world’ or ‘developing world’).