Nature(s) are in uproar and humankind as a whole is responsible for its upheavals. More or less, this is the tenet of a widespread interpretation of the Anthropocene. Since its first apparition, the term proposed in 2000 by chemist Paul J. Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000) has undoubtedly gone a long way. Yet, as historian Jason W. Moore (2016) pointed out, the unifying narrative of the Anthropocene is quite ambiguous: where the geological debate about the anthropogenic alterations of the environment ends, there it begins the popularized version of the story—a misleading representation of the Human-Nature crisis and its origins. Social sciences in particular have been concerned with the burning issues of responsibility and historicity: what about colonialism, imperialism, and the market economy? Whatever happened to the global expansion of capitalism and neoliberalism?
Fig.1 – Dried-up river Po, April 2021 © Getty Images / Total fossil fuel emissions of Marion County, Indiana, USA, 2002 © AR5 – Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change (IPCC)
Whether we call it Capitalocene (Moore 2016), Chthlucene (Haraway 2016), or Meghalayan Age, many scholars at the intersection of Natural Sciences and Humanities—as if the distinction still made sense—have acknowledged the need for a more nuanced approach to environmental accelerated changes (Van Aken 2020) taking place all around the weather-world (Ingold 2010). Where grand narratives fail to account for contextual specificities, interdisciplinary perspectives that reconnect the global and the local seem to be the way to go for many researchers involved in climate change issues and mitigation-adaptation policymaking. However, one should not be surprised that the great divide between the cultural and the physical is far from being outdated. As a matter of fact, outright and fierce critics of the Anthropocene have arisen mostly from new theoretical framings, whose main concerns might be summarized in a very short question: what the hell is the Anthropos? As trivial as it may sound, this gives a totally different flavor to the term Anthropocene, doesn’t it? The geological epoch affected by human activities and the age of intra-specifical uncertainty.
By and large, Cultural Anthropology has played a major role in deconstructing the deeply rooted opposition between Nature and Culture (Descola 2013; Viveiros de Castro 2012; Ingold 2000). Bruno Latour (2005), in particular, has had a prominent influence on the development of a theoretical framework that actually recognizes and makes visible the agency of the non-human: the Actor-Network Theory builds upon the hypothesis that social facts emerge from symmetrical interactions between an undetermined number of actors—whether they are human or non-human, animate or inanimate. In the last two decades, symmetry and relationality have fertilized the grounds for Neo-Marxist approaches to a dialectic history of the Anthropocene, such as Moore’s attempt, and for the so-called Relational Ontologies proposed by Post-Humanist or New Materialist scholars—a fancy formula for the renewed interest in ecology shared by many researchers crisscrossing philosophy, cultural studies, geography, as well as anthropology. Sympoiesis (Haraway 2016), Perspectivism (De Castro 2012), Attentiveness (Ingold 2011), Semiotic Agency (Kohn 2013), Assemblages (Tsing 2015); all of these conceptualizations have been trying to clean up the anthropocentric traits of the ecological discourse, giving back Nature its freedom, along with its many voices, subjects, and disturbances. Moreover, they clearly challenge either conventional or cartesian dichotomies that have historically shaped the western notion of Anthropos—a bipolar singularity trapped between the realms of Nature and Culture.
Unfortunately, Climate Change as a global phenomenon is yet to be freed from the technocratic and reductionist models of the natural sciences. Although there has been clear progress in interdisciplinary work coming from the above-mentioned perspectives, the issues of scales (Bougleux 2015) of the Anthropocene remain and the gap between the social and the physical is far from being bridged. As Ariane Conty puts it, the challenge is twofold:
"Since moral issues can no longer be separated from biological concerns, and politics can no longer be separated from nature, addressing the Anthropocene entails the dissolution of the nature/culture divide, but also of the disciplinary divide between natural and human sciences" (Conty 2018: 91).
Once again, anthropologists seem to be at the forefront of a debate that is as righteous as necessary, for it may be decisive in steering politics, ethics, and social change across the layered scales of the Anthropocene. Ethnographic research in the context of localized environmental changes has clearly shown the importance of recognizing the cultural implications of Climate Change as well as the controversies arising from the lack of dialogue between local knowledges, scientific models and experts’ oriented policymaking (Dove 2014; Crate 2011; Roncoli et al. 2009). Moreover, multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) has been identified as the preferable methodological framework for an Anthropology of Climate Change which is as focused on the contextual specificities as it is on the complex systems they’re embedded in (Crate & Nuttall 2016; Crate 2011; Krauss 2009). Anyway, granted that anthropological fieldwork at the time of the Anthropocene has been blurring the lines between critical and applied stances, either as operational research or as advocacy interventions, much effort has still to be made to develop a cross-disciplinary perspective which is able to unravel—and re-weave—the cultural entanglement of Climate Change.
Fast-paced environmental transformations are taking place all over the world: direct and indirect impacts of global climatic alterations, along with their physical and structural causes, are at the heart of the scientific framing of the issue. Nevertheless, many mitigation and adaptation strategies stemming from top-down approaches have been failing at tackling local conditions of vulnerability and marginality, and on some occasions, they have been aggravating the struggles of many communities. Cultural and semiotic aspects of environmental change have been constantly overshadowed by reductionist explanatory models based on causal relations, either they assess socio-ecological shifts or adaptive responses to disasters. But why is that? Climate Change is real, there is no doubt about that. But taken as an objectified and inescapable truth, it simply doesn’t work. Bachelard (1970 [1931-32]) would remind us that scientific facts result from a process of construction—a phenomenotechnique—and not from one of uncovering. More practically, science produces a multitude of discourses and representations that are dialectically embedded in historical, economic, and political layers and threads. And that’s where causality ceases to make any sense as a leading principle. Disasters, migrations, urbanization processes, and relocations do not happen because of Climate Change; they happen within Climate Change. Once we acknowledge the multifaceted ontology of the entanglement, we realize that a new epistemology is urgently needed. Arguably the call for a cross-scales dialogical perspective poses new questions to anthropological fieldwork: how can we retrace the trajectories of global discourses and representations at the local level? What are the interactions that materialize specific environmental and social changes? How contextual knowledge and agency is negotiated—or silenced—and by whom? Last but not least, how Climate Change is enacted by localized practices and actions? Thus, multi-sited ethnography at present-day seems to require movements in often unexplored directions, across space, time, ontologies, disciplines, and tools.
The tide is turning, literally! And similarly, after so many turns, cultural anthropology seems to be wandering in the no man’s land—should I say sea?—of uncertainty. Good news: it looks like biologists, chemists, geologists, physicists (and the list goes on) are getting lost too. Somehow, as sarcastic as it may sound, we’re all together on the same boat. With no compass at hand. And the sea waves don’t look very friendly. Out of the metaphor, it is clear that the Anthropos—once at the center of the anthropological discourse—has been displaced and disseminated in unusual sites and configurations. Concerns around social and political aspects of the Anthropocene have largely contributed to this unexpected process of redistribution of the human. Boundaries are fading, but one should look closely to understand that we’re not facing epistemological disintegration (Latour 2014). Instead, we’ve been offered the opportunity to produce narratives that foster new responsibilities as well as regenerative possibilities. This is not to say that individual expertise should be abandoned to the advantage of a miraculous theoretical framework that blends together social and natural sciences. It’s quite the reverse! It is all about acknowledging the interstices existing between mutual questions and understandings, for it is there that new forms of relationality may arise—both in terms of knowledge, politics, and ethics. Anthropologists are well accustomed to going beyond the familiar, but today’s challenge is even trickier: are we ready for an Anthropology that goes beyond Anthropology itself?
References:
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Tsing, A.L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
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Viveiros De Castro, E. (2012) "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere", in HAU Masterclass Series, Vol. 1, 2012.
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