Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Climate Change

Humanitarianism

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:00:56 +0000

Bosnians waiting at a UN food distribution point in the town Ilijaš, in 1996. Picture by AMN M. Andrea

University of Bristol, Arizona State University

Initially published 18 Oct 2025

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

Abstract:

Humanitarianism can be broadly understood as a concern with human suffering and a moral desire to alleviate it. It manifests not only through discrete acts of helping, but also through a set of practices, norms, laws, and forms of government. The urgency of humanitarian causes is regularly invoked to justify the large-scale mobilisation of people and resources. They provide anthropologists with a critical site for studying the structural tension between two competing impulses within humanitarianism: the ethical yearning to alleviate suffering, and the political inclination to control suffering populations.

This entry explores four main areas of anthropological scholarship on humanitarianism. First, anthropologists have examined the political implications of the humanitarian management of suffering populations, with its emphasis on fostering physical survival. Second, they have developed critiques of humanitarian ethics, particularly in relation to how lives are valued differently within Western humanitarianism, and the political and moral weight carried by the word ‘humanitarian’. Third, anthropologists have interrogated the concept of crisis, with a focus on how local communities are transformed by the routine presence of humanitarians in protracted conflicts or disasters. Finally, they have explored non-Western humanitarian practices rooted in different traditions of care and different scales of action.

As climate change impacts prospects for human life in vulnerable areas of the world, it is likely that climate-induced displacement crises will only grow more common and prolonged. Humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, offering anthropologists an important terrain of inquiry into how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.

Introduction

In the public imagination, the term ‘humanitarian’ invokes a concern for human suffering and a motivation to alleviate it in some form. It gestures to an altruism borne of the recognition of a shared humanity with distant others. One need only think of humanitarian appeals launched on TV, social media, or billboards to see how representations of the suffering of others might inspire an urge to act (Boltanski 2004), be it through donations, volunteering, or public support for governmental action. These sentiments can mobilise people and resources on a large scale in response to disruptive events with devastating human impacts, such as armed conflicts and disasters. Given the scope and reach of humanitarian deployments, it is vital to understand their inner workings and their unintended consequences. This is particularly important because the concept of humanitarianism can be used by different actors for different purposes and in different contexts, ranging from calls for emergency assistance in the aftermath of earthquakes to justifications for military interventions with the purported aim of saving lives. As a contested concept with multiple meanings and uses, humanitarianism offers an especially rich and productive site of research for anthropology.

One of the enduring origin stories of humanitarianism dates its creation to the establishment of the Red Cross by Henry Dunant in response to the suffering he witnessed at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. In its early years, the Red Cross primarily provided medical assistance to soldiers wounded in battle, though the organisation would later expand its scope to include civilians affected by war and disasters. Today, the sector is represented by United Nations (UN) agencies such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in partnership with international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) including Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF), Oxfam, Save the Children, among others. The Red Cross has also grown into a more complex institution, with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) being a private entity under Swiss law, while national Red Cross Societies such as the British Red Cross or the Syrian Arab Red Crescent function as appendices of the states where they are based. Each of these organisations has different mandates and modes of operation, but they generally share an emphasis on prioritising urgent needs through specialised life-sustaining aid, including medical care, shelter, and food assistance. It is important to note, however, that these organisations comprise a highly institutionalised and largely Western mould of humanitarianism, originating and headquartered in Global North countries, whereas there are other forms of humanitarian aid espoused by religious, community, and grassroots actors both within and outside the West that are not encompassed by the formal Western aid system (Brković 2023).

Early scholarly critiques of Western humanitarianism highlighted how humanitarian actors took ‘war as a fact’, in the sense that they sought to remedy not the root causes of war but the suffering that resulted from it. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross in its foundational tenets acknowledged the persistence of war in modern life, and sought to collaborate with all parties to conflict—including states and non-state armed groups—to humanise its conduct and minimise the suffering it caused (Kennedy 2004, 267). Such a narrow focus on suffering, however, failed to consider how aid could fuel the conditions for further conflict. Numerous examples exist from conflict zones across the world where aid has been diverted by armed groups to sustain the fighting, or fomented violence and resentment between different groups, or used to recruit new soldiers from refugee camps and settlements. In particular, the figure of the ‘refugee-warrior’ benefiting from aid poses a moral and political conundrum for aid workers working to provide humanitarian sanctuaries in the midst of war (Terry 2002).

Scholars have also criticised humanitarianism for its historical complicity with Western colonialism and imperialism, and for the continued instrumentalisation of aid to serve the geopolitical and national security interests of donor countries in the Global North (Barnett 2011; Donini 2012). Governments throughout the twentieth century have justified military actions on humanitarian grounds, from India’s intervention in East Pakistan in 1971 to NATO air strikes in Kosovo in 1999 (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010). While these actions have not necessarily involved the explicit cooperation of humanitarian INGOs, the United States’ long war in Afghanistan from 2001 until 2021 co-opted aid organisations into counter-insurgency programs aimed at ‘winning hearts and minds’ among local communities through developmental aid and reconstruction efforts (Williamson 2011). While this entry primarily focuses on the values and practices of aid actors rather than states, we discuss the growing entanglement between humanitarianism and development and its implications for the independence of aid organisations from geopolitical agendas.

Anthropology has contributed to these debates by questioning the foundational notion that humanitarianism is an inherently altruistic enterprise, and by interrogating the power relations that underpin the humanitarian endeavour. Anthropologists have asked: what does it mean to help ‘suffering others’? Who is being helped and how are their lives valued? Who is providing assistance and what motivates them? The discipline helps answer these questions through sustained ethnographic inquiries into the everyday operations of humanitarian organisations, and the social, political, and ethical implications of the humanitarian drive to help. In particular, it points to a structural tension between two competing impulses within humanitarianism: the ethical yearning to alleviate suffering, and the political inclination to control suffering populations. The anthropological approach to humanitarianism as ‘an ethos, a cluster of sentiments, a set of laws, a moral imperative to intervene, and a form of government’ (Ticktin 2014, 274) captures this tension.

Other anthropologists have challenged the predominant focus of scholarship on Western institutionalised forms of humanitarianism, and have pushed for a broader understanding of the concept that encapsulates grassroots mutual aid initiatives led and implemented by vulnerable people themselves (Brković 2020). After all, impacted populations are often ‘first responders’ to crises through mutual aid networks involving community, religious, and local organisations, blurring the boundaries between the ‘providers’ and ‘recipients’ of aid (Fechter 2023). Large-scale responses organised by UN agencies, INGOs, and foreign governments arrive later as a crisis garners international attention, displacing local interpretations of humanitarian giving with professional guidelines and principles.

Biopolitics and the management of populations

The gradual institutionalisation of Western humanitarianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place at a time when ideas about the state’s responsibility to care for its citizens assumed growing legitimacy (Glasman 2020). Anthropological studies of humanitarianism are therefore profoundly influenced by the concept of ‘biopolitics’, which refers to governmental techniques and procedures that aim ‘to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order’ (Foucault 1998, 138). Biopolitics encompasses a range of practices and institutions established to regulate the health, reproduction, and sexuality of the biological body based on hierarchical ideas about normality and deviance. Humanitarian actors can be thought of as exercising a form of biopolitics in contexts where state actors are either absent or incapable of safeguarding life (Fassin 2007b; Pandolfi 2003; Redfield 2005; Ticktin 2014).

Much of the anthropological writing on this area has analysed the biopolitical logics and rationales espoused by humanitarian INGOs in the management of populations they purport to help. MSF, for example, enacts a ‘minimal biopolitics’ (Redfield 2013, 18) as they temporarily administer to lives perceived to be in immediate danger—providing medical assistance to endangered populations in conflict zones and ceasing operations once they deem the crisis is over. The INGO’s decision-making on the deployment and withdrawal of personnel is based on assessments of the magnitude of life-threatening needs, such as medical care or child nutrition, and critics have noted instances when MSF waited for the crisis to grow more aggravated before establishing a field mission (Redfield 2013). This focus on temporary solutions prioritises immediate survival but does little to ensure the long-term dignity and empowerment of vulnerable people.

Another key site for the exertion of humanitarian biopolitics is the refugee camp. The refugee camp represents a ‘biopolitical figure par excellence’ (Fassin 2010a, 81), where bodies are contained, disciplined, and sustained towards a potentially indefinite future. An early ethnographic study of Burundian refugees in Tanzania described the representation of refugees in public and policy discourse as a form of ‘bare humanity’, a living body presumed to have lost all its cultural and identitarian inheritances (Malkki 1995, 11). This work presaged later critiques of humanitarian action that centred on what form of life is possible in refugee camps. Drawing from the concept of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998)—which denotes a form of persecuted humanity reduced to its basic biological existence—anthropologists argued that refugee camps are zones of exception that sustain people only at the level of physical survival and prevent them from realising their full biographical selves as social and political beings (Agier 2011; Diken and Laustsen 2006; Hanafi and Long 2010; McConnachie 2016). Such framings of refugees as ‘bare life’ presupposed an ethnically homogenous nation-state as the ‘natural order of things’, from which refugees were excluded as demographically threatening outsiders (Malkki 1995).

In recent years, anthropologists have questioned the notion that refugees are merely passive subjects of humanitarian management, or that refugee camps are little more than temporary way-stations without a lived history of their own. A growing body of ethnographic work on camps has pointed to the political agency, heterogeneous identities, place-making practices, and transgenerational memory of refugees living in long-term camps. Palestinian camps in particular have fostered a robust national liberation movement, which imbues everyday spaces with intense political significance (Allan 2014; Gabiam 2016; Peteet 2005). Similarly, Burundian Hutus living in Tanzanian camps during the 1980s developed new expressions of Hutu identity anchored in shared narratives of victimisation and memories of violent displacement. In their case, the camp represented a locus of ‘purity’ that protected Hutu identity from contamination through assimilation (Malkki 1995). In other words, refugee camps over time become invested with a ‘politics of living’ (Feldman 2018), revealing how refugees not only survive, but strive, thrive, and contest their devaluation as ‘bare life’.

Beneficiaries of aid also reshape the terms of their humanitarian protection. For example, as the French government tightened its immigration policies in the early 2000s, it introduced a humanitarian exception for undocumented immigrants with life-threatening illnesses that could not access adequate medical treatment in their country of origin. Facing stricter bureaucratic requirements and longer wait times, many immigrants translated their narratives of suffering into medical categories, or even deliberately infected themselves in order to qualify for medical asylum, thereby leveraging the diseased body as an object of humanitarian concern (Ticktin 2006; 2011). Paradoxically, their survival depended on their very exposure to vulnerability (Ticktin 2006). ‘Bare life’ in these instances is not associated with passive victimhood, but points to the myriad ways in which migrants wield their biological vulnerability as a form of capital. Taken together, this literature on humanitarian biopolitics reveals that international aid wields enormous managerial power over the subjects it governs while being actively contested and appropriated by those subjects as well.

Humanitarian ethics

In 1965, the Red Cross established seven fundamental principles governing humanitarian practices—humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity, and universality—which have since found widespread adoption across the aid sector (International Committee of the Red Cross 2015). Taken together, these principles embody a form of secular morality committed to the sacred but material value of all life (Redfield 2012a). Furthermore, humanitarian morality serves as a governing framework that extends beyond formal humanitarian institutions and may be invoked by state and non-state actors alike. Didier Fassin (2007a) calls this a form of ‘humanitarian government’. Concerns around the formulation of ethical objectives and processes in governmental affairs has garnered keen interest from anthropologists studying the intersections between life, health, and suffering (Daniel 1996; Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Kleinman et al. 1997; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2003). One of the core challenges they raise pertains to the ethical ideal of humanity that underpins humanitarian action. During the early years of the Iraq War, for instance, a worsening security outlook compelled MSF to terminate its operations in the country, evacuate its staff, and leave behind vulnerable populations unassisted (Fassin 2010b). Humanitarians thus produced a ‘politics of life’ by establishing a hierarchy of humanity between the lives deemed worthy of saving and those left to perish (Fassin 2007b; 2012).

This hierarchy also manifests among aid workers themselves. Ethnographies of humanitarian diplomacy have revealed how local aid workers skilfully leverage their identities to negotiate humanitarian access in places torn apart by ethnic strife (James 2022; Pottier 2006). However, even as they are uniquely positioned to deliver aid in areas inhospitable to international staff, local aid workers also face greater risks to their own safety and more limited prospects for career progression within the organisations that employ them. Transnational border regimes permit humanitarian staff from the Global North to travel more easily between countries, usually along geographical circuits established by colonial history (Redfield 2012b). Meanwhile, aid workers hired locally by INGOs from the Global South frequently do not have the option to evacuate if their lives are endangered, or receive the same standard of international care should they fall ill (Benton Forthcoming).

In the context of the Syrian Civil War, for example, restrictions on the entry of foreign nationals into the country placed the responsibility of providing humanitarian assistance entirely onto Syrian aid workers. While shouldering the risk of navigating an active warzone, these local humanitarian teams were nevertheless managed by INGOs with offices in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, with major policy decisions being taken by senior leadership predominantly from the Global North (Fradejas‐García 2019). Even within the humanitarian sector, therefore, human lives are valued differently according to their race, gender, nationality, and other markers of social difference (Firoz and Lima 2024). The ‘politics of life’ maintains hierarchies between not only aid workers and refugees, but between different categories of aid workers as well.

At an institutional level, the ethical principle of neutrality dictates that humanitarian actors must not take sides in hostilities in order to secure trust by all parties involved and maintain access to vulnerable populations. While a neutral stance appears to position humanitarians ‘beyond politics’, anthropologists point out that this claim to neutrality is also a tactical one, as aid workers regularly engage in political negotiations with warring parties behind closed doors (Redfield 2012a; Malkki 2015, 174). Rather than simply retreating from politics, neutrality is deployed as a political strategy toward political actors, constituting ‘an impossible or negative form of politics’ (Redfield 2010a). Such paradoxes in humanitarian logics represent what Fassin calls ‘aporias’, which, ‘contrary to contradictions, are not a matter of organisational dysfunction but rather of the dysfunction intrinsic to their very functioning’ (2010c, 50). These aporias have been constitutive of Western humanitarianism from its very inception, and at the same time remain insurmountable for the success of its mandate.

Another question related to humanitarian ethics is the political weight carried by the attribution of the term ‘humanitarian’. Humanitarianism is an unstable concept and claims to being humanitarian have to be maintained through constant ‘ethical labour’, which can be described as ‘an ethical practice that join[s] concern for others with care of the self’ (Feldman 2007; cited in Brada 2016). For example, in an HIV clinic in Botswana where American healthcare staff worked alongside with national staff, the former’s claim to be ‘humanitarian’ engendered a sense of ‘unquestionable technical and moral superiority’ that disregarded the ethical commitments and expertise of their Motswana counterparts (Brada 2016, 757).

Even for beneficiaries of aid, the ethical claim to humanitarian relief carries important political connotations. Palestinians have resisted for decades the framing of aid they receive from the UN as ‘development’—broadly construed as the long-term improvement of human life—and insisted on a humanitarian narrative that highlights the transience of their status as refugees (Gabiam 2012). Here, the appeal to humanitarian aid is not only pitched as a global right, but rather, amplifies the urgency of their predicament. Like the immigrants who leverage their biological vulnerability, Palestinians leverage their status as humanitarian subjects to demand a political solution that guarantees their right to return to their lands.

Finally, it is worth noting that anthropological critiques of humanitarian ethics do not dismiss the ethical commitments of individual aid workers, but rather, address the systems and structures within which they perform their ethical labour. In her ethnography of the Finnish Red Cross, Malkki (2015) questions the tendency of critics to trivialise small gestures of humanitarian care, such as making toys or weaving blankets, as being insufficient for real structural transformation. Rather than simply equating the ‘real’ with the grand ambitions of geopolitics, she calls for scholars to take the sentimental practices of humanitarians seriously as a form of ‘imaginative politics’ that is rooted in culturally specific modes of helping. Such an analytical orientation resonates closely with how anthropologists describe the mandate for an anthropological approach to morality and the social good, which requires attending ‘to the way people orientate to and act in a world that outstrips the one most concretely present to them, and to avoid dismissing their ideals as unimportant or, worse, as bad-faith alibis for the worlds they actually create’ (Robbins 2013, 457). In other words, anthropology does not adopt a moralising or normative stance on humanitarian action itself, but rather, empirically traces what moral commitments mean to aid workers themselves and how they are practiced, challenged, and transformed during humanitarian emergencies.

The politics of ‘crisis’

The large-scale mobilisation of humanitarian interventions relies on the naming of specific sites as ‘emergencies’ or ‘crises’. The label of crisis evokes the sense of a temporary interruption in social order, an ‘unpredictable event emerging against a background of ostensible normalcy’ that will eventually be succeeded by the return to normalcy (Calhoun 2013, 30). The declaration of crisis produces a temporality of urgency that demands immediate action, and cultivates moral clarity for humanitarian actors to intervene (Redfield 2013; Calhoun 2004; Roitman 2014). However, by virtue of this logic of naming, situations that remain ‘on the verge of crisis’ or in ‘states of permanent emergency’ are sometimes confounded with the ‘ordinary’—a non-site for humanitarianism—leaving aid organisations in a state of ethical uncertainty, constantly renegotiating the terms of their engagement (Redfield 2010b; Pandolfi 2010). Ethnographies that address the categorisation of crisis situations, and the potentially novel sites and modes of operation that emerge from this exercise, are therefore especially useful for uncovering the ‘complexities, limits and boundaries’ of humanitarianism as it responds to new challenges (Ticktin 2014, 283).

There are many areas of protracted conflict or displacement where humanitarian actors have been at work for decades. Anthropologists have analysed these contexts to inquire how crises are experienced and understood by the populations impacted by them, in some cases over multiple generations. Haiti is one such context. The country has seen waves of civil unrest, authoritarian rule, and gang violence since the 1990s, coupled with disasters such as the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, a cholera epidemic in its aftermath, and more recently the disintegration of the country’s state apparatus. Haiti was often dubbed a ‘Republic of NGOs’, characterising the prolonged administration of life during this period by aid organisations, with international funding being channelled mainly to humanitarian and development actors rather than the country’s own government (Schuller 2017). As aid came to encompass all aspects of daily living, the presence and logics of humanitarian care became banal (Beckett 2019). Anthropologists make a similar point about the decades-long displacement of Palestinians, for whom crisis is a ‘condition of life’ and whose everyday survival hinges upon their claims on humanitarian rights (Feldman 2012). In such contexts, everyday life is saturated with layers of crises past and present, such that the very idea of crisis becomes ordinary. Put differently, crisis becomes ‘an atmosphere – the often invisible outer layer of life that surrounds us, envelops us, and comes to be taken for granted or even ignored’ (Beckett 2020, 79).

Narratives of crisis can also be rendered useful to neoliberal governing strategies. We might look at the recent shift among aid organisations towards an auditorial approach to aid: instead of engaging directly with vulnerable communities during a crisis, the ICRC has pivoted to tutoring state actors or armed groups on monitoring threats and violations through the collection of data, the production of indicators, and the use of risk management tools (Billaud 2020; Lima 2022). In Rio de Janeiro, for example, a humanitarian programme created by ICRC trained healthcare workers on how to promote their own safety while also protecting their patients from the risk of gun violence, since local police did not operate effectively in territories controlled by drug-trafficking gangs (Lima 2022).

Aid organisations have similarly adopted a ‘managerial orientation’ that frames refugees as an economic burden for host states and advocates strategies to mitigate the burden through international cooperation (Calhoun 2013, 41). For Global South countries where the large majority of the world’s displaced population resides, such strategies also offer unique economic opportunities. Under the auspices of building refugee resilience and self-reliance, UN agencies have negotiated livelihood rights for refugees in exchange for exploiting their labour to benefit the developmental agendas of host states (Easton-Calabria and Omata 2018; Skran and Easton-Calabria 2020). For instance, the Jordan Compact launched in 2016 committed the host government to providing vocational training, the formalisation of Syrian businesses, and the provisioning of temporary work permits for Syrian refugees in designated labour sectors, in exchange for US $1.7 billion in international assistance and trade concessions for Jordanian exports to Europe (Lenner and Turner 2019). This approach was formalised in 2018 into the Global Compact on Refugees between donors and aid organisations, providing a blueprint for future humanitarian responses to mass displacement.

Humanitarian crises are thus used by states to advance the frontiers of what scholars have called ‘disaster capitalism’, forcing open new territories and economic sectors to capital accumulation (Gunewardana and Schuller 2008; Klein 2007; Swamy 2021). At the same time, the promise of development is designed to incentivise refugee integration in the Global South and prevent their onward migration to the Global North. This multi-pronged approach to aid, often referred to as the ‘humanitarian–development nexus’ (Lie 2020; Strand 2020) or in some cases the ‘humanitarian–development–security’ nexus (Riggan and Poole 2024), anchors the legitimacy of humanitarian efforts to the national interests of host states and the security agendas of donor states, which many scholars and practitioners consider a betrayal of core humanitarian values such as neutrality and independence.

De-centring Western humanitarianism

Recent anthropological scholarship has attempted to de-centre the analytical focus on Western institutionalised humanitarianism by turning its attention to humanitarian practices rooted in different traditions of care and different scales of action. The principles guiding these alternative forms of humanitarianism can differ markedly from the Red Cross principles espoused by international organisations, and are often more consonant with cultural notions of mutual aid and communal solidarity found among grassroots networks that emerge in response to emergencies. To understand these ‘vernacular humanitarianisms’, anthropologists propose to interrogate ‘what people in a certain place understand as ‘human’, ‘humanity’, or ‘humanitarian’, and then to build an analysis from there’ (Brković 2023, 9).

Displaced communities in Myanmar, for example, routinely alternate between the positions of aid provider and aid recipient depending on their circumstances: those who are helped might shift to helping others once they are settled (Fechter and May 2024). Similarly, Greek humanitarians helping migrants (solidarians) during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in the Mediterranean actively refused the labels of ‘volunteer’, ‘beneficiaries’, or ‘services’ when describing their motivations, insisting instead on a principle of solidarity based on horizontal, non-hierarchal relations (Rozakou 2017). These cases of Myanmar and Greece are not uncommon, and highlight the value of letting in-depth ethnographic research inform our understanding of how people invest the concepts of humanitarianism and humanity with meaning (Brković 2023).

We may alternatively examine how states and civil society in the non-Western world mobilise aid for distant others by drawing on different articulations of suffering, rights, and humanity (Osanloo and Robinson 2024). Anthropologists have drawn our attention to an older genealogy of humanitarian care rooted in the Hindu concept of dān, which refers to the sacred virtue of charity considered essential for spiritual liberation in Hinduism (Bornstein 2012). Whereas the anthropology of humanitarianism often separates religious philanthropy from professional humanitarianism, the shared symbolism of the ‘gift’ binds both institutionalised redistribution and individual acts of giving to shifting notions of citizenship and the entitlements it affords. Similarly, the concept of zakat undergirding Islamic humanitarianism is seen by its adherents not as a voluntary virtue but as a form of ‘financial worship’ that purifies both the giver and the receiver (Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2003). While this pillar of Islam may have functioned as an early system of social security, anthropologists note that it has diminished in modern Islamic states from a public welfare institution into a private, voluntary practice of piety.

The idea of humanitarian duty as synonymous with service to God continues to survive at other scales of civil society. The distribution of free meals near a mosque in Cairo, for instance, was primarily motivated not by a formalised commitment to alleviate human suffering but by khidma, a sense of service ‘directed by’ and ‘at God’ (Mittermaier 2024, 256). In Northern Pakistan, humanitarian action is often motivated by jazba, an ‘emotional impulse’ or ‘spirit to get the unlikely done’ and to leave behind a material legacy of concrete, transformative projects (Mostowlansky 2020, 251). These specific orientations notwithstanding, the broader geopolitical logics of Islamic humanitarianism can still at times echo its Western counterparts: Turkish humanitarians, operating in Islamic Africa south of the Sahara, draw on the heritage of a shared religion but nevertheless frame themselves as heirs to an Ottoman civilisation that protects its less fortunate Black African neighbours. The racialised and colonial underpinnings of ‘white’ Turkish humanitarianism here reproduce the historical associations between Western humanitarianism and the European colonial project (Güner 2023).

Conclusion

As prospects for life on earth deteriorate with climate change, it is likely that climate-induced displacement will only grow more protracted and routine for the world’s most vulnerable communities. Humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, as a new array of actors mobilise humanitarian logics to pursue their own agendas. New spaces may be reframed as sites for humanitarian intervention, such as cities affected by urban violence (Lima 2022), while existing sites and instruments such as refugee camps may continue to proliferate. To deal with these emerging challenges, humanitarians are innovating with new technologies, including drones, biometrics, digital currencies, artificial intelligence, blockchains, and algorithmic data management. Anthropologists tend to remain sceptical of such limited, technical solutions to humanitarian needs, and often warn against the sector’s deepening reliance on proprietary tools—often developed in partnership with Big Tech companies—that rely on extractive data collection practices with minimal safeguards for refugee privacy, rights, and freedoms (Ajana 2013; Firoz 2024; Iazzolino 2021; Scott-Smith 2016; Tazzioli 2019).

In 2025, international humanitarianism faces one of the largest financial crises in its history. Following the abrupt withdrawal of support from the world’s largest humanitarian donor, the United States, donors across Europe also implemented major reductions in their aid budgets. Humanitarian organisations have warned of disastrous consequences for food security, primary healthcare, disaster relief, educational access, poverty alleviation, and refugee protection across the globe. In particular, the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has sent shockwaves through the sector, interrupting operational partnerships and supply chains. At the same time, the complicity of Western states with Israel’s genocide in Gaza has also undermined the framework of international law that enshrine humanitarian rights and obligations. As another genocide rages on in Sudan, it is more difficult than ever to imagine a sustainable future for survivors of humanitarian crises. In a future marked by resource scarcity, ecological collapse, warfare, and militarised borders, when the protections once afforded by citizenship are waning and the moral appeal of our shared humanity is endangered by the resurgence of authoritarianism, humanitarianism will continue to offer anthropologists a vital terrain of inquiry to understand how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.

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Notes on contributors

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima is a research associate in anthropology at the University of Bristol, and was previously Lecturer in Disaster Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. His work has featured in American Anthropologist, Humanity, and Focaal. Pedro has also previously co-convened the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Rd, Bristol BS8 1TH.

Malay Firoz is an assistant professor of anthropology at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. He currently serves as director of ASU's Global Human Rights Hub and has previously co-convened the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Firoz’s work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Humanity, Migration and Society, among others, and has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Malay Firoz, Faculty Administration Building S171, 4701 W. Thunderbird Road, Mail Code 3051, Glendale, AZ 85306-4908, USA. malay.firoz@asu.edu. ORCiD: 0000-0002-1323-1946.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

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.

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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

Energy

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

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

Katja Müller

Merseburg University for Applied Sciences

Initially published 5 Nov 2024

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Power and politics

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

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

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

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

Energy transitions and conflict

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

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

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

Energy’s meanings and materialities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forms and materialisations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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Note on contributor

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

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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

Resilience

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 17:20:11 +0000

Person during a 2009 flood in Vietnam. Photo: Rob

Kathrin Eitel

University of Zurich

Initially published 31 Mar 2023

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

Abstract:

'Resilience’ is becoming a new policy buzzword. The term describes the ability to recover from expected and unexpected situations, stresses, or threats in order to sustain, thrive, and to move on. As a concept and as an approach, it guides people’s adaptation, persistence, and response strategies to sustainably cope with challenges of all kinds, such as pandemics, political oppression, or extreme weather events related to climate change. This entry highlights anthropological insights into and theoretical antecedents of resilience. Anthropologists have studied resilience in highly diverse contexts, ranging from cybernetics and systems theory, to the study of disaster, human psychology, science and technology studies, and multispecies research. The notion of resilience keeps being expanded and remains diverse. Theoretically, anthropologists have foregrounded the importance of viewing resilience as a practice and as being situated. They also emphasise the complexity of interactions and processes involved in coping with adversities and they often foreground a relational rather than an individualistic understanding of resilience. Importantly, resilience always includes more-than-human actors such as plants, animals, and technologies. How exactly people are able to become resilient is often determined by structural inequalities, (post-)colonisation and prevailing understandings of how the world ought to be. Anthropological research on resilience is much needed in times of adversity, as technological fixes to planetary threats are insufficient to ensure future wellbeing.

Introduction

Today, the term ‘resilience’ is on everyone's lips. As a policy strategy, it aims to ‘prepare’ communities, cities, regions, and even entire nations to cope with threats such as climate change, financial crises, or pandemics. As a new development buzzword, resilience has slowly replaced the long-cherished term of ‘sustainability’ that had taken over the world of politics and academia in previous decades. But what sorts of ideas are associated with resilience? How is the concept used and what have anthropologists found out when studying it? Looking at the literature, one learns that theories of resilience have been developed in very different research traditions, from ecology to psychology, economics, development studies, international relations, and climate policy. It is mostly through work in climate policy that resilience has become known beyond academic discourse since the 1990s (Wakefield, Grove and Chandler 2020). As a practical and situated feature of sociocultural life, resilience has also gained interest in anthropological research. That said, it has not replaced the adjacent concept of ‘adaptation’, which is an antecedent of resilience and has remained at the centre of much anthropological study. The genealogy presented in this entry blends together thoughts, concepts, and personal experiences related to resilience. It traces one path of the development of the concept, without, however, claiming that it is ‘the only’ path of its genesis.

At its most basic, resilience describes the ability to recover quickly from unexpected shocks and crises through, for example, adaptation, resistance, or robustness. One can think of it both as a process and an action, deriving partly from the Latin word resilire (re–salire) which means to recoil, to leap back.^{^[1]} Resilire, thus, describes the action of rebounding or swinging back to a stable status quo of existence. The underlying idea of responding to outside influence via ‘feedback’ harkens back to early cybernetics, a field of research that studied ‘control and communication’ of complex systems, be they biological, ecological, technological, or social (Wiener [1961] 2019). In the field of ecology, the concept of resilience developed prominently in the 1970s. The Canadian ecologist Crawford S. Holling (1973) hallmarked resilience as bound to environmental change. He emphasised the inherent capacities of ecological systems to absorb change, that is, to remain in their original state of functioning despite unexpected threats (Gunderson, Allen and Holling 2010). The concept of ‘social-ecological resilience’ then understands complex systems as adaptive, persistent, or transformable to their environment. That means that resilience includes adaptability, given that entities are expected to ‘bounce back’, as well as transformability, when they ‘bounce forward’ to create a ‘fundamentally new social-ecological system’ (Folke 2006, 262; Gibson-Graham et al. 2016).

Outside of academia, resilience is especially well known as a policy term that seeks to address the impacts of climate change globally. This is true for resilience programmes of the United Nations Human Settlement Programme, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and of governments and development organisations around the world. Resilience as a policy tool and concept has been often criticised for being overly technocratic and ultimately detached from the socio-cultural specificities of peoples’ lives. That said, there have also been resilience interventions in the realm of disaster management and post-conflict settings that paint a less negative picture. Resilience-oriented policies have helped foster the integration of situated knowledge and complex situations into governance and have provided an opportunity to govern complexity locally (Chandler and Reid 2019; Chandler 2018; Chandler 2014a). An example of ‘best practice’ here is the policy endeavours of international organisations such as the Stockholm Environment Institute^{^[2]} that explicitly aim to integrate local knowledge into resilience strategies. The concept can thus make governance more responsive to people’s needs, as it foregrounds adaptation and learning from past interventions. It may even serve an ‘affirmative biopolitics of adaptation’ (Grove 2014, 198) that goes beyond programmes that only superficially help the vulnerable or that even perpetuate neoliberalism and social insecurity.

However, as ways of fostering resilience come often in the form of non-participatory policy interventions, technological fixes, and ‘authoritative examinations’ (Eriksen 2021), they risk being based on forms of knowledge and visions of the world that are tacitly imbued with deep-rooted power hierarchies and social inequalities. Resilience-oriented policies can thus have their roots in (post-)colonial thought and practice. They often enough maintain prevailing views from countries of the Global North, and they tend to postulate resilience as inherently positive (e.g. Ferguson [1994] 2009; Escobar 1995; Bollig 2014), thus risking perpetuating existing inequalities (e.g. Oliver-Smith 2017; Barrios 2016; Hastrup 2009a). This raises the question of who actually gets to participate in the definition, management, and governance of resilience. Given that even in governance theory and practice neither the concept nor its application are unified, the aim to foster communities’ capacity to deal with disaster risks often opposes divergent worldviews and ways to realise them (Schuller 2016; Barrios 2017a; Faas 2016).

For example, resilience-based policies presuppose knowledge of the nature of disasters and the likelihood of future shocks. They perpetuate claims of knowing how to ‘best’ to deal with disasters that are used to exercise power over communities, countries, and regions by framing them as insecure and unable to tackle adversities in their own ways (e.g. Evans and Reid 2014; Eitel 2022b). Given that resilience policies usually adhere to the Sustainable Development Goals, they often foster the well-known and long-entrenched hegemony of existing power systems. They seem to shift responsibilities to subjects ‘equally’, but in fact disregard their structural oppression and exploitation. Critiques of resilience policies—similar to those of ‘sustainability’— note that the regulation of the subject via resilience policies does not come only from the top down (from government to citizens), but that climate responsibilities are distributed in many different ways, for example along aid initiatives or global movements (e.g. Eitel 2022a). Resilience-based policies may also enable the production of a suffering ‘other’, putting responsibility on the shoulders of those who are not the main producers of climate disasters, for example (cf. Todd 2014).

While anthropological interest in resilience as a policy or an analytic concept is relatively recent, the discipline has long been concerned with the question of human adaptation as a driver of social change (e.g. Barth 1967; Ervin 2015). How societies adapt to their environment, and whether they are thereby capable of dealing with adversity, has been a focus of anthropological research for a long time. Social adaptation theories can thus be seen as the antecedent of today’s thinking around resilience. At the same time, adaptation is today understood as an essential feature of resilience.

In anthropology, resilience has developed through three research streams since the 1950s: first, cybernetics created the basis upon which complex systems, be they technical, ecological, social, or psychological, were understood. Cybernetics argued that it was important to think of a circular relationship between units and their ‘outer’ disturbances. Secondly, research on resilience has drawn from the interdisciplinary study of disasters, which scrutinises human responses to ‘catastrophic’ events, from research on psychological responses to shocks, and from Indigenous and local practices of resilience. Lastly, as anthropology begins to study the relations between humans and other species, it illustrates that we must pay greater attention to how human and non-human forms of agency intersect.

This history of anthropological research on resilience shows that we may need to widen our scope when it comes to studying the ‘subjects’ of resilience. Studies of urban resilience that focus on the strategies of entire cities to cope with climate shocks run side-by-side with research on multispecies resilience and studies of small-scale and rural communities. Simultaneously, the field of resilience remains interdisciplinary, drawing mainly on ecology (e.g. Folke 2016); human geography (e.g. Coaffee and Lee 2016; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013; Sakakibara 2017); and international relations (e.g. Chandler 2014a; 2014b; Chandler and Reid 2019). Although the focus of this entry lies with the achievements of anthropological scholarship, these are frequently subject to interdisciplinary influence and contemporary discourse. Ethnographic research, which relies on participant observation, is particularly well placed to uncover situated knowledge and practices of resilience in different times and places. The situated nature of resilience is not just determined by social groups but also derives from specific social and historical contexts and an interplay of human and non-human actors (cf. Haraway 1988).

It is worth mentioning that the study of resilience is more than a theoretical exercise. It is part of ‘bringing about [a] transformative epoch via [anthropology’s] unique capacity to identify, track, describe, interpret, and communicate the human predicament’ (Crate 2011, 188). Studying resilience does not just show that different biologically-, socially-, and culturally-informed practices of adapting and responding to disturbances exist. It also tries to ensure that future social change occurs as a result of a reflective and decolonised way of collaborating across different lifeworlds. In doing so, it systematically takes power asymmetries and their roots into account.

Cybernetic studies of adaptation

Resilience as a concept was strongly influenced by cybernetic thinking, which views the world as a set of interlocking systems that are responsive, adaptive, and related to their environments. Cybernetics, which began to develop in the 1950s as a precursor of systems theory, saw itself as an interdisciplinary effort to capture the complexity of the world through a single ‘metalanguage’. Its goal was to create a universal canon of terms and concepts throughout all academic disciplines, aiming to support greater dialogue between them. Cybernetics thus studied technological, ecological, psychological and social systems by using the same terms. Realised as the research field of control and communication theory, cybernetics emphasised the importance of ‘feedback mechanisms’ (Wiener [1961] 2019, 18). Feedback ensures that any complex system maintains itself by adapting to its environment. ‘Systems’ were understood to comprise a diversity of ‘elements’, or components, which together enacted a functional unit that could either be ‘simple’ and predictable or ‘complex’ and thus self-organised and unpredictable. Systems were always held to stay in equilibrium, despite ’outer’ disturbances. What was astonishingly new and compelling about cybernetics were its attempts to understand such mechanisms of technological, environmental, psychological, and human organisation as non-linear and as being important beyond the individual.

Cybernetics included people from all disciplines, especially from physics, mathematics, biology, medicine, sociology, psychology, and economics as well as anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Roy Rappaport. Cybernetically-informed anthropological theories of adaptation differed from older adaptation theories rooted in the social Darwinian notion of ‘survival of the fittest’, whose evolutionary conception declared societies successful—in the sense of survival—when they practised the best rational management of resources. Here, adaptation was often considered to be a form of advancement on an evolutionary ladder (e.g. Herzfeld 2006) and the development of cultural practices, such as subsistence activities and rituals, was interpreted as a response to the environment. Cybernetics, on the other hand, focuses on relations between culture and environment as self-regulating and self-maintaining complex systems. In this regard, cybernetics-informed anthropologists were more interested in the ways that systemic adaptation takes place, through acts of communication, under changing environmental conditions. They were less interested in evolutionary hierarchies or single adaptation processes.

Cybernetic thinking was criticised early on for failing to capture ‘social reality [which] could never be simulated in all its complexity’ (Rodin et al. 1978, 747) and for being too focused on adaptation and ‘elements’ rather than flesh and blood humans (Geertz [1963] 2000). Yet, many anthropologists were intrigued by the thought of social phenomena as systems, regulated by circular interactions. An awkward example from these times, which also exemplified cybernetics’ mathematical and mechanical underpinnings, was the example of a thermostat that regulates itself according to its surroundings. The term ‘system’ derives from Greek systēma, meaning a whole composed of several different members or parts (Liddell and Scott 1940). This fit quite well with the predominant understanding of cultures during the mid-twentieth century, which were deemed to be relatively isolated entities. Margaret Mead’s and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics-related work had a tremendous influence on communication science, psychology, and subsequent research on psychological trauma (e.g., Wesley-Esquimax 2007, 2009; Kim et al. 2019). For example, Bateson showed how people suffering from schizophrenia were confronted by the dilemma of a double bind—a phenomenon in which people receive conflicting and paradoxical messages or signals and do not know how to respond to them.

During the sixties, a student of Bateson called Ray A. Rappaport was the first to conduct an encompassing field study of adaptation mechanisms among the Tsembaga Maring, an Indigenous subgroup of Maring-speakers living in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Rappaport held that cultures were instrumental for the satisfaction of people’s needs, be it through religious, economic, or kinship practices. He therefore argued that Tsembaga rituals were not merely expressive, but helped regulate the group’s population and their relation to the environment (Rappaport 1968, 1971). His argument was backed by the fact that the Tsembaga engaged in the regular ritualistic slaughter of large parts of their pig populations to offer them to the spirits of their ancestors. Such pig sacrifice was associated with the absence of war and with overcoming illness and injury. It was also regulated by ecological factors such as the availability of pig fodder and the given number of pigs. Ecological factors, Rappaport argued, were thus driving ritual activity, which in turn governed peace, war, and human populations.

Consequently, cultures could be seen as systems that self-regulate and adapt to ecological stresses via long-term ritual cycles. In this way, rituals actively reduced the number of possibilities for the system (culture), by limiting the number of fights between different Maring-speaking groups, while ensuring the distribution of surplus pig meat (1971, 60; 1968). In this context, Rappaport defined adaptation as a process ‘by which organisms or groups of organisms, through responsive changes in their own states, structures, or compositions, maintain homeostasis in and among themselves’ (1971, 60). Adaptation took place through ‘enormously complex sets of interlocking feedback loops’ (Rappaport 1971, 75, footnote 9). Yet, ritualistic homeostasis (or balance) was absent in increasingly technological societies and feedback loops were eventually in need of being accurately recognised, monitored, or redirected in order to avoid maladaptation. This is not unusual, as a system is always embedded in its wider socio-ecological context, which can either promote or constrain effective coping (Torry 1979).

Rappaport’s work raised the question of how exactly adaptation to the environment became part and parcel of people’s culture (Steward 1972, 328). Julian Steward demonstrated that cultural change is not just dependent on adaptation practices that emerge, for example, through ritual activity, but also on knowledge and technologies that social groups acquire over time. Thus, Steward, who is also known as the founder of the field of ‘cultural ecology’, argued that arid climates and a need for irrigation tended to lead to increased social stratification and, eventually to the development of the state. Environmental adaptation, according to Steward, ultimately resulted in stable ‘core features’ of different cultures. What Rappaport and Stewart share with much early anthropological work on adaptation is the argument that humans adapted to ecological adversities in highly complex and recursive ways, ultimately to ensure the survival of the community as a whole. Second, cybernetically-informed theories of adaptation focused on how people maintain or reverse states of equilibrium that give different cultures their unique ‘core’ characteristics.

Eventually, the early cybernetics-informed adaptation studies were mainly criticised for assuming a stable state of equilibrium to which complex systems automatically bounce back after environmental disturbances. Holling (1973), for example, pointed out that socio-ecological stability is rather dynamic as it maintains the different properties of systems that enable survival. These properties, including stability, variability, persistence, or resistance, may change in different ways and times to maintain other properties. One such property that is of special interest is resilience, a ‘measure of persistence’ and the ‘ability to absorb change and disturbance’ (Holling 1973, 14). Interestingly, resilience can be very high because of the instability of an overall system. For example, the budworm, i.e. a common pest on all kinds of crops, was so persistent in Canada because its population was able to dissolve into smaller parts during disturbances, before re-building in even more adaptive ways than previously. Contrary to Rappaport, who saw homeostatic stability as a desired aim of adaptation after disturbances, Holling understood stability and resilience as distinct from each other and adaptation as one part of resilience. Anthropological insights that communities tend to change dynamically over time further contradicted the assumption of a prior state of stability to which communities are thought to leap back after an environmental shock. The obvious pitfall in considering the ‘adaptive capacities’ of communities is thus to assume from the start that their change serves a certain purpose.

Cybernetics scholarship was also criticised for perceiving cultures as systems that automatically remove marginalised groups from history. Indeed, analysts themselves may contribute to such processes as ‘the actual consequences of their own politics of representation’ (Blaser 2009, 881). Cybernetics often seemed one-dimensional and apolitical because it represented the interests of only one, usually dominant, group and did not take cultural diversity sufficiently into account (e.g. Mandler 2009; Fabian [1983] 2002). Its endeavour to work with a metalanguage and the idea of ‘mechanisms’ that could be found everywhere eventually failed as its findings were hard to generalise. Comparing the organisation and communication of ants with that of Indigenous communities or mechanical-electrical system, for example, meant radically reducing the complexity of humans, non-human life forms, and objects under study. Mathematical models that were frequently used to measure and analyse situations could neither sufficiently illustrate nor anticipate how environmental and social processes interacted (Vayda and McCay 1975).

On the upside, cybernetics was one of the first truly interdisciplinary research fields, pre-figuring contemporary game theory, new materialism, systems theory, and much psychological and cognitive work (e.g., Maturana and Varela 1987). However, its failures may be why cybernetically-informed anthropological studies have been largely neglected, even though they contributed significantly to the further development of environmental and ecological anthropology (Hagner, Hörl and Pias 2008). Its approaches to adaptation and resilience assumed a relatively stark dichotomy between systems and their environment, as was common in much of the twentieth century, and one of its main controversies lay in whether nature or culture determined socio-cultural behaviour. As anthropologists learned that cultures were less and less ‘closed entities’ (if ever they had been), they shifted their focus from the question of ‘how’ adaptation works in a scheme of sequential cultural development toward the question of ‘to/for what’ and ‘for whom’ it works. Such questions were investigated in great depth in the interdisciplinary research field of disaster studies that began to develop in particular during the 1970s.

Resilience and disaster studies

Contemporary work on resilience is greatly inspired by the interdisciplinary research on disasters. Here disasters, risks, and catastrophes tend to be understood as part of larger social and historical processes that reveal certain groups to be more vulnerable than others (e.g. Faas 2016). The anthropologist Roberto E. Barrios, for example, defines catastrophes as

the end result of historical processes by which human practices enhance the materially destructive and socially disruptive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological malfunctions, and communicable diseases and inequitably distribute disaster risk according to lines of gender, race, class, and ethnicity (2017b, 151).

In this sense, disasters are not isolated events but socio-material phenomena that result from larger and longer processes such as the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, neoliberalism, or (post-)colonialism (e.g. Barrios 2016; Oliver-Smith 2016, 2017; Schuller and Button 2020; Hsu, Howitt and Miller 2015). Anthropological research on disaster response thus focuses on how vulnerability is produced in the first place, and how this vulnerability interacts with disaster risk reduction, response, recovery, and relief (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman [1999] 2020; Hoffman 2017). It has shown that top-down resilience measures can reify a moral canon that defines what and who is worthy to be considered to survive in the Anthropocene. During post-earthquake reconstruction in Haiti, for instance, the NGO-run humanitarian aid system was based on a (post-)colonial politics of vulnerability that portrays people and entire nations as victims in order to legitimise a ‘lack of resilience’ that requires action (Schuller 2016, see also Evans and Reid 2014).

Resilience and vulnerability thus often work together, as vulnerability refers to ‘the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard’ (Wisner et al. 2004, 11). When China's Sichuan province was hit by a devastating earthquake in 2008, for example, government recovery plans for the Qiang Indigenous community helped perpetuate their political subordination, turning people into ‘passive gift recipients’ (Zhang 2016, 92). The management of disasters by government agencies and recovery experts can thus reinforce vulnerabilities and even create new ones. Moreover, as US government neglect in the recovery of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina has shown, communities also need to adapt emotionally to catastrophes and recovery programmes. Feelings are critical to people's experiences of both disaster and recovery, but are all too often left out of planned recovery and post-disaster programs (Barrios 2015, 4), which thereby, again, risks increasing vulnerability.

Neoliberalism plays an important role in co-constructing vulnerability through disaster management. Environmental managers and government actors in a climate vulnerable coastal area in Maryland, for example, considered inhabitants of the Deal Island Peninsula communities to be ‘liabilities’ rather than people maintaining livelihoods in their historic homeland (Johnson et al. 2017; Johnson 2016). As a result of ‘disaster capitalism’, in which environmental crises are used to serve the interests of capital (Faas 2018, 32; Klein 2007), these ‘liabilities’ are subject to programmes that promote entrepreneurship as successful disaster response (Faas 2018). The production of capitalist subjects in the form of entrepreneurs, or ‘petit capitalists’, exposes the limits of much contemporary institutional thinking, which remains unable to go beyond neoliberal disaster response. Capitalist subjects are here produced along with disaster capitalism through an initiation into business management that is intended to contribute to regional recovery. Ultimately, dominant interests provoke visions of the future and ambitions that appear to be local but are imbued with the goals of the neoliberal state. Resilience policies can thus reinforce and perpetuate the vulnerability of groups whilst simultaneously maintaining the very same capitalist dynamics that are responsible for anthropogenic climate change and socio-ecological disasters (cf. Wakefield, Grove and Chandler 2020)

Studying the concrete impacts that resilience policies have on particular sites draws attention to the questions: ‘When is resilience achieved for whom?’ and ‘To what extent is it achieved?’ Ethnographic studies have answered these questions by providing insights into lived experiences, strategies, and narratives that circulate ‘on the ground’ and are used, changed, and adapted in relation to environmental changes that require a response (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2006, 69; Ingold 2011). Analysing local responses offers fruitful and complementary perspectives to prevailing normative and development-informed visions of resilience (e.g., Rival 2009; Hastrup 2009b; Vium 2009). In the Pacific, for example, people’s political resistance has been shown to be a form of resilience as well as a way of contesting state-led resilience strategies (Dousset and Nayral 2019). Ethnographic research in two East African communities has further identified response diversity as a key driver of resilience. The Ngisonyoka, nomadic herders in Africa’s Great Rift Valley, for example, respond to social and environmental threats through a variety of mechanisms, including group mobility, livestock diversification, and the creation of broad social networks. This variety of activities drives response efficacy, allows social groups to persist, and enables them to limit their impact on the environment (Leslie and McCabe 2013, 128). Lived resilience thus seems to require respect for a variety of practices and voices of people living in climate-prone areas (Barrios 2016).

Resilience, therefore, is not static but is rather a result of social learning from previous crises that may become integral to patterns of cultural knowledge. Coping with an individual hazard or disaster, on the other hand, implies short-term decisions in (relatively) new situations. These may or may not be adopted into a cultural canon and manifested in long-term adaptation strategies (Smith 2017; Bennett 1995). Adapting to something or somebody is tangible both in daily practice and in the space in which it is embedded, for example when regions face severe droughts and dwellers alter their practices of wayfinding through these changed landscapes (Vium 2009). Adapting for something or somebody can imply a mode of care for another future, and care for individual or collective well-being today. Let us now turn toward the small field of anthropological research on psychological resilience.

Psychological resilience

How people cope with disasters and crises at a psychological level is a subject of study in interdisciplinary research on psychological resilience, often with roots in Gregory Bateson’s ideas of the mind ([1972] 2000; [1979] 2002), and in development psychology (e.g., Garmezy 1971, 1991). Psychologists deal with resilience as a personal defence mechanism that can be strengthened and enhanced. The relatively small field of the anthropology of psychological resilience evolved^{^[3]}, concentrating on people’s individual life trajectories and on the way communities cultivate resilience as a means to respond more or less successfully to adversities (Wexler 2014, Wexler et al. 2014; Zraly et al. 2011; Obrist and Büchi 2008). These studies often include a focus on political and economic forces of oppression and violence (e.g. Cox 2015; Eggerman and Panter-Brick 2010; Zraly and Nyirazinyoye 2010).

Anthropological scholarship has unveiled, moreover, the insight that resilience in daily life is often reliant upon broader collective memories and histories (e.g. Ungar 2008; Foxen 2010; Lewis 2013, 2018, 2019; Kirmayer et al. 2011; Mullings and Wali 2001). For example, comparative work on trauma diagnosis and treatment among survivors of the 2006 July War in Lebanon and that of Syrian refugees post-2011 shows that suffering is more than just an internalised psychic condition. Instead, suffering can be understood as a constantly shifting subject position in a social context like Lebanon, where violence and aid economies continuously change its nature. Here, the local concept sumud, which can be translated as psycho-political steadfastness, patience, and resistance, reflects the social contingency of suffering and resilience, as sumud is subject to constant politically-inflected re-interpretation. Indeed, sumud can be interpreted as both a form of psychological resilience and ‘a postcolonial tool of resistance, a political movement and an everyday embodied practice’ (Moghnieh 2021, 6). In Afghanistan, resilience is also collectively enacted, and in this case bound to values of living an honourable life. Cultural values such as kinship and family honour are essential to maintain ‘a sense of order, hope, and meaning to life’ (Panter-Brick 2014, 442; Eggerman and Panter-Brick 2010). Anthropological studies have thus shown that resilience, tied to wellbeing and health, is undergirded by processes that are far-reaching, harking back to long-gone periods of oppression, such as colonialism, whilst also taking current power structures into account.

In this way, resilience can even be grounded in toxic entanglements between people and chronic economic and political instability. Residents of Mexico City’s working class neighbourhood Colonia Periférico, for example, have been shown to be particularly resilient and maintain power as they decide what ‘outer’ disturbance gets ‘inside’ the body and the mind (Roberts 2017). They may decide to consume sugary and highly processed sodas, some of them traffic drugs and consume marijuana and a glue solvent called activo, and all of them live with the stench of the neighbourhood’s air pollution. Health workers consider the local consumption of toxic substances to signal the absence of resilience. To them, resilience is grounded in the impermeability of the body. Yet, Elizabeth Roberts (2017) provides an alternative interpretation, showing that people's toxic entanglements with their environment provides them with moments of social pleasure and care whilst keeping health workers and the police at bay. The neighbourhood’s reliance on toxic consumption may thus be the source of its resilience.

The link between trauma and resilience has been of particular interest to anthropologists. The study of people in post-apartheid Cape Town and in Brazilian favelas has shown that people are capable of much higher degrees of resilience than citizens of the affluent parts of the Global North may imagine (Scheper-Hughes 2008). People are capable of resisting even chronic ‘states of emergency’ and the resulting traumas through survival strategies that include developing values such as strength, toughness, asceticism, stoicism, and even the postponement of motherly love until children are likely to survive (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 25). Our psychological response to too much death and loss may be that of ‘patient resignation’, subduing both outrage and deep sorrow over human tragedy. In this way, human frailty is compounded by a ‘possibly even bio-evolutionarily derived, certainly historically situated, and culturally elaborated capacity for resilience’ (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 52). It seems that those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and who live through constant crises and terror may normalise suffering as part of building resilience (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 52).

Laying a cornerstone for an understanding of resilience as a feature of daily life based on cultural values and long histories of suffering, many ethnographic studies shifted the attention toward structural inequalities that determine who ‘is required to survive and even thrive’ (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 37) in times of catastrophic events. The idea that resilience is manifold is also demonstrated by a recent study of cancer patients in Soweto, South Africa. The study focuses on ‘idioms of resilience’, understood as the ‘means of experiencing and expressing positive adaptation and well-being in the midst of adversity’ (Kim et al. 2019, 1). It reveals that idioms of resilience in crisis-ridden Soweto may result in different forms of acceptance (or ukwamukela in isiZulu). Such acceptance allows people to shift their attention away from their own problems to focus on family, neighbours, and religious life (Kim et al. 2019).

In many of the examples above, resilience is more than a result of historical contingencies. It needs to be understood as a capacity to continue life (Wesley-Esquimaux 2007, 2009). In studying First Nations people in the Americas, the First Nation woman Cynthia Wesley-Equimaux notes that colonisation, discrimination, and marginalisation resulted in the ‘intergenerational transmission of historic trauma’ (Wesley-Esquimaux and Smolewski 2004, iii). These traumatic recollections entered people’s collective memory and were enacted through cultural symbols, rituals, and habits, for example through stories about terror. Eventually, the traumatic experiences became culturally embedded, resulting in repressed feelings of emptiness, depression, and numbness, which in turn led to a gradual dissolution of people’s collective identity. First Nation women in particular struggle with these negative, intergenerational experiences as they still strive to do good for their families and communities.

Local knowledge that reflects social realities and historical contingencies provide a more positive angle of viewing resilience as empowerment. Rather than resilience, Wesley-Equimaux (2009, 26) calls for an emphasis on resiliency, meaning to ‘rebound from challenges one encounters in daily life’. Resiliency refers here to a form of flexibility that enables the reframing of trauma and life narratives by situating them in sociocultural contexts so as to make them ‘re-readable’. Emphasising the positive forces of the term, resiliency avoids seeing people only as ‘suffering subjects’ and as related to deficits but rather as potentially empowering. This approach chimes with what the Māori scholar Mason Durie (2006, 8) claims to be a form of ‘Indigenous resilience’, that is, ‘a reflection of an innate determination by Indigenous peoples to succeed’. His take on resilience provides a viewpoint that does not depict Indigenous people as suffering ‘others’ or negating their historic disadvantages, but that ‘allows the Indigenous challenge to be reconfigured as a search for success rather than an explanation of failure’ (2006, 8). Here and in Wesley-Equimaux’s example, resilience and resiliency have positive connotations, focusing on success, strengths, and empowerment that enable social transformations toward healthier and better futures.

In sum, anthropological research has shown that the ordinariness of suffering cannot be adequately understood without taking into account associated cognitive processes, collective experiences, and traumatic embodiments (cf. Kim et al. 2019). Studying resilience can foreground suffering, but it may also illustrate how humans create ‘well-being rather than survival, salutogenesis rather than pathology, and the promotion of human dignity rather than mere alleviation of human misery’ (Panter-Brick 2014, 438). Because psychological resilience is a necessary precondition for groups to cope well with disturbances, stresses, and violent contingencies such as trauma, it fruitfully ties in with other forms of resilience research (cf. Bollig 2014). However, looking at human responses and adaptation processes is only one way to understand how people and communities respond to threats. A more removed anthropological approach to resilience, which sees communities neither moving ‘back’ nor ‘forward’ to a state of stability, focuses on how prevailing normative notions of resilience themselves are brought about and circulate (e.g. Rose and Lentzos 2017).

More-than-human resilience

The divide between nature and culture played a crucial role in the development of early anthropological theories of adaptation. Cybernetic thinking about enclosed elements and systems that were held to be distinct from their outer environments frequently opposed cultures to outside nature. Yet, recent scholarship has demonstrated that the environment is also produced, shaped, and enacted by culture (e.g., Scoones 1999; Ingold 1990; Escobar 1999). Culture and the environment always reproduce each other, for example when biotechnology enables the creation of ‘new’ versions of nature that in turn impact sociocultural processes (Scoones 1999). Given that authors such as Bruno Latour (1993) and Donna J. Haraway (1987) have established that nature and culture are always intertwined as ‘naturecultures’, anthropology has had to rethink the notion of resilience by asking for whom nature exists (Haraway 1987) and through which worldviews it is enacted (Blaser 2013; Jensen 2015).

By focusing on the production of knowledge and technology, the interdisciplinary research field of science and technology studies (STS) questions, for example, how knowledge about flood resilience results from the interplay of many kinds of human and non-human actors, such as mangroves and satellite images. This connectedness of actors across boundaries of nature and culture means that multispecies studies of resilience have become more important. Ethnographic research now focuses on humans as much as animals, plants, and technologies and their interferences with each other to understand how resilience is enacted (e.g., Chao 2022; Willerslev 2009). The indigenous Yanyuwa of Northern Australia, for example, remain resilient in the face of postcolonial and other forms of violence by building a myriad of relationships. They ‘keep company’ with the land, with non-human species, and with their ancestors to deal with adversity (Kearney 2022). They create resilience by practising ‘a multidimensional art of relating’, despite postcolonial and on-going violence. The Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska are also able to survive in a difficult environment marked by climate change through resiliency that is grounded in deep knowledge about entities and species on land, in water, and in the sky (Sakakibara 2020). They have developed an intimate, spiritual, and intense relationship with bowhead whales, mythical creatures that have a decisive impact on their social lives. Storytelling, dancing, drumming, and political engagement linked to the whales all help the Iñupiat foster notions of reciprocity and respect and respond to climate change in a constructive manner (see also Herman 2016).

Focusing on ontologies is particularly fruitful when studying resilience, whether these are culturally specific and relational, as in the Yanyuwa and the Iñupiat examples above, or more practical in nature (Gad, Jensen and Winthereik 2015; Jensen 2021). The practical ontologies of floods, for instance, uncovers different worldviews by different actors at stake in flood protection: policy actors may perceive flood protection as an opportunity to form urban space and implement technological mega-projects; fish may identify it as a danger given that submerging the sediment that causes floods reduces their living space; while dwellers of the affected region may consider it as a mundane situation, and nothing to get stressed about.

STS-inspired anthropological scholarship has illuminated that technologies based on a ‘modern’ ontology marked by a belief in progress and the human domination of nature play a significant role in how resilience is imagined and implemented. This ontology lies at the heart of technological fixes as the single solution to combat climate change. In south-west Bangladesh, for example, climate-smart houses are meant to protect inhabitants against cyclones and flooding while supporting an efficient use of water and energy (Cons 2018). While such techno-fixes turn out to be inherently exclusionary for most of the population, they tend to gain praise in policy circles around the world. In this instance, resilience policies produce new patterns of exploitation and expropriation by holding locals in climate-insecure places (Cons 2021).

Conceiving of resilience as a more-than-human endeavour, and paying close attention to spatially and temporally wide-ranging relationships, enables researchers to see the concept in a new light, without thereby losing sight of important existing inequalities and discriminations along the lines of class and ethnic groups. At the same time, anthropological scholarship demonstrates ‘alternative’ ways of dealing with crises that are either based on long-established relationships to the environment, histories of oppression and suffering, or on approved methods for coping with crises. The question of whether a community ‘possesses’ or ‘obtains the capacity’ for resilience often gives way to deciphering multiple existing modes of resiliency. Given that the impacts of climate change, even if not locally caused, are unfolding locally, more-than-human resilience must be also considered in relation to land, heritage, and experiences of oppression and discrimination.

Conclusion

Contemporary resilience research is rooted in the fields of cybernetics, disaster studies, and psychology as well as in STS and multispecies research. Anthropologists understand resilience primarily relationally as a practice and as historically and culturally situated. Much ethnographic work on resilience shows that it is dynamic in character and multiple in form, as well as being shaped by constantly shifting socio-material circumstances and multiple power constellations.

Studies of resilience based on anthropological research have provided significant insights for understanding socio-ecological phenomena and human-environment relationships. They show that people’s everyday coping practices can transform into adaptive strategies developed in relation to highly specific environmental situations. They also foreground the diversity of thoughts, worldviews, rituals, relations, and practical skills required by communities to deal with hazards, creeping environmental change, and psychological disasters. Ethnographic studies of lived resilience tend to challenge prevailing notions of how to deal with adversities by including alternative, situated definitions to the vocabulary of anthropogenic disaster. Examining lived resilience should be as much the focus of future study as examining prevailing knowledge formations that emerge through resilience policies or prevention and recovery programs.

Anthropology’s critical stance vis-à-vis state- and market-friendly resilience policies and programs stems from the insight that local resilience practices emerge as much in reaction to shocks and ‘slow disasters’, as they do in response to political and socioeconomic interventions along hegemonic and postcolonial lines. Everyday resilience reveals systematic subjugation and discrimination, for example through disaster aid programs that perpetuate vulnerability. It points to imposed politics of vulnerability, disaster capitalism, and invisible violence that run along demarcation lines of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. In this way, everyday resilience frequently includes and creates more-than-human lifeworlds that span across multiple timeframes, spaces, and sociocultural areas.

One question for future research may then be not what resilience is, but when and how it is socioculturally produced. To what does it refer—as a way of dealing with historical legacies, current adversities, and future uncertainties–and for what is it used? Is resilience built to deal with unexpected shocks (e.g., earthquakes), expected situations (e.g., droughts or floods), or also potential futures (e.g., hurricanes or pandemics)? Is resilience capable of coping with perfectly unexpected disasters that might ‘break in’? These are questions that need to be further explored, accompanied by an interest in practices of care and relationality that benefit not only human beings but also their companion species and wider environments. Anthropology shows that resilience is not inherently grounded in deficits and suffering but that it also illustrates an astounding degree of agency and creativity that humans and nonhumans who strive to remain resilient display in the process. As such, the study of resilience has the potential to unpack multiple forms of responses to adversity. Something we can all learn from.

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Note on contributor

Kathrin Eitel is a cultural anthropologist and feminist STS scholar whose ethnographic research is pivoting around environmental disasters such as the exuberant occurrence of synthetic waste in urban Cambodia and the recurrences of floods in lower Vietnam. She is interested in situated resilience practices and the impact of worldviews that circulate along deeply rooted infrastructures of power, materialising in development policies and technological fixes. Eitel is the author of Recycling infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, waste, and urban life in Phnom Penh (2022, Routledge).

Kathrin Eitel, Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Email: kathrin.eitel@posteo.de, Website: www.kathrineitel.com, ORCID: 0000-0001-8200-9495.

[1] Oxford English Dictionary. 2022. “resilience, n.”. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/163619?redirectedFrom=resilience.

^{^[2]} Stockholm Environment Institute. “About.” https://www.sei.org/about-sei/

^{^[3]} For an extensive overview, see Panter-Brick (2014).

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.

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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’).