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Anthropological Theory and the Alleviation of Anthropogenic Climate Change: Understanding the Cultural Causes of Systemic Change Resistance

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Abstract

In this article I argue that anthropologists are well placed to investigate the role of cultural practices, social contexts and ethical considerations in enabling communities and individuals to respond effectively and humanely to the potentially catastrophic consequences of those global climatic changes most scientists now hold to be inevitable. The aim is to show how culturally mediated moral considerations and habitual behaviour patterns inform community responses regarding the urgent need for climate change mitigation and adaptation. The article proposes a method of systemic cultural critique to raise awareness of destructive behaviour patterns enshrined in the most basic cosmological assumptions of late modern consumer society. 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942, closing words.
AnthropologICAl theory And the AllevIAtIon
o f A n t h r o p o g e n I C ClImAte ChAnge:
understAndIng the Cu lturAl CAuses of
systemIC ChAnge resIstAnCe
Thomas Reuter
Abstract
In this article I argue that anthropologists are well placed to
investigate the role of cultural practices, social contexts and
ethical considerations in enabling communities and individuals to
respond effectively and humanely to the potentially catastrophic
consequences of those global climatic changes most scientists
now hold to be inevitable. The aim is to show how culturally
mediated moral considerations and habitual behaviour patterns
inform community responses regarding the urgent need for
climate change mitigation and adaptation. The article proposes a
method of systemic cultural critique to raise awareness of destruc-
tive behaviour patterns enshrined in the most basic cosmological
assumptions of late modern consumer society.
‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942, closing words.
Anthropology and climate change:
What does culture have to do with it?
In this article, I examine what the discipline of anthropology
may contribute to the worldwide effort to cope with the certain
prospect of substantial and the likely prospect of catastrophic
anthropogenic climate change. What anthropologists do is not
always clear to the public, and even for us, it has become difcult
to remain mindful of the discipline’s overall mission in the wake
8Thomas Reuter
of ever increasing specialisation. I begin by providing a broad
outline of what I believe to be the discipline’s fundamental
concerns and insights, and why these insights are important in
the current struggle to gain broadly based cultural and political
acceptance for incisive climate change mitigation and adaptation
policies.
In anthropology the world’s many diverse cultures are
understood as distinct, cohesive and sometimes very durable
systems of social interaction, communication and knowledge
transfer, without losing sight of the fact that these are also
mutually permeable, internally textured, and historically evolving,
dynamic systems. Cultural anthropologists are the social scientists
most specically trained to evaluate the differentiating impact
of culture – that is, of shared ideas, values, symbols, language,
conditionings and histories of interaction - on human conscio-
usness and behaviour across the world’s many social systems or
‘societies’. This special training of anthropologists consists of
long-term exposure to, and in-depth study and experience of a
second culture other than their own.1 Systematic and voluntary
exposure to a second culture can help us overcome self-righteous
ethnocentric attitudes based on our commitment to our own
culture. This leads us to recognize the particularity of each one
of the many cultural identities and forms of cultural conditioning
found among human populations on this planet, including and
especially our own conditioning. Like sociology, anthropology is
rooted in western intellectual traditions, something many believe
to be an epistemological impediment. We hope to free ourselves
from this historical baggage by realising the ideal of a genuinely
global anthropology, in which every cultural perspective is given
equal recognition, both as a subject and an object position
(Ribeiro and Escobar 2006; Kim 2005).
In their effort to characterise, and compare the world’s diverse
cultural systems and understand the effects of different cultural
1 A discussion of whether ethnographic study of one’s own
society (‘anthropology at home’) yields the same potential benet
of achieving a ‘bi- or multi-cultural awareness’ (Reuter 2006) is
beyond the scope of this article. In my view, however, systemic
patterns and differences have been observed within social elds
on every conceivable scale; between cultures, settlements, cities,
neighbourhoods, work places, organizations and households.
Hence there is little sense in (articially) drawing sharp distinctions
between cultural and sub-cultural differences, just as the distinction
between dialect and language is in essence uid and in theoretical
usage heuristic rather than absolute.
9
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
conditioning on behaviour, anthropologists have long discovered
the tremendous importance of cosmologies. Cosmologies are
not just descriptive models of the world; they are also normative
models, that is, models for action. Part of what such models
describe is thus the social orders we ourselves create, though
individually we may experience it as an objective phenomenon.
Cosmologies, whether they are religious or secular, contain our
most fundamental and important assumptions about the world
and our place as human beings within that world, and about what
constitutes a good, meaningful and worthwhile life.2 In short, they
are not just assumptions but can, and often do constitute genuine
and valuable insights. Nevertheless, because their character is not
certain it is best to treat cosmological premises as assumptions
that need to remain open to critical reection.
While cosmologies may be concerned with fundamental
questions by denition, this does not mean we are fully aware as
individuals of the cosmological premises that guide our decisions
and behaviour as participants in a particular cultural system.
Anthropologists have discovered that we know the basic shared
assumptions of our culture intuitively and in a holistic fashion,
as a gestalt, but may not be fully conscious or able to articulate
what they are (Bourdieu 1971). While there are, of course, cosmo-
logical discourses that often strive to rationalise and articulate
such intuitive cultural awareness, the difculty in articulating the
immense subtleties of our own cultural conditioning is immense.
Cosmologies therefore tend to rely heavily on the symbolic or
metaphoric language of art, ritual and religion to make accessible
to consciousness what is difcult to put into words. In part,
cosmological premises also remain embedded in the non-reexive
embodied experience of habitual everyday action or habitus. We
therefore can, and typically do, acquire many of the core elements
of a cosmology by mimesis or imitation of the behaviour of
others around us, rather than through formal, verbal instruction
or analytical reection. Nevertheless, it is also true that in every
society there tend to be individuals or groups, such as religious
leaders or social critics, who engage in systematic reection and
seek to grasp this tacit cosmology conceptually and to articulate
their conclusions so that they can share them with others. Such
explicit cosmologies are always partial discursive maps or repre-
sentations of culture, and even if they are philosophical rather
2 Like cultures, cosmologies are not bounded entities in any simple
sense, and hence the behaviour of many individuals, especially
in today’s world, is inuenced by multiple cosmologies. Nor are
cosmologies devoid of internal contradictions.
10 Thomas Reuter
than mythological, will often be forced to resort to metaphor or
other poetic devices in order to point at what may be, forever,
beyond words.
Meanwhile, the work of biological anthropologists and human
behavioural ecologists and neuroanthropologists has shown
that fundamental aspects of our behaviour are also rooted in a
complex array of dynamic biological processes. These processes
include our slowly evolving genotypic characteristics as a species
but also environmentally or historically driven epigenetic and
learning processes that are far less conservative (Crawford 2007;
Jablonka and Raz 2009). The latest research shows that the body,
and especially the brain, is shaped by cultural behaviour and
vice versa (Domínguez et. Al 2009), making it difcult to assign
a singular causal direction to these phenomena. Nevertheless,
insofar as there are actual drivers of human behaviour that are
located primarily at the level of genetic coding or epigenetic and
other forms of somatic experience, rather than resulting from
cultural learning, these drivers are likely to be even less subject to
conscious scrutiny and present within our deepest cosmological
assumptions in a highly abstract form only. This may add further
complexities to the task of understanding human nature, or
may simply be expressing the same complexities in a different
discourse. In my opinion, the subject matter of scientic attempts
to map the human cosmos with biological theory (or even with
physics) may prove to be identical with the subject matter of
our more long-established religious and artistic cosmological
imagination, and both methods have the same problem of
running into the limitations of the language-dependent aspect
of our consciousness.
Along a gradient from explicit cosmological discourses, to
cosmological symbolism and innate human tendencies, there is a
decline in the degree of accessibility to conscious awareness, and
a decline also in culturally conditioned variability. Where exactly
we ought to draw the line between nurture and nature, culture and
biology, does not seem to be the important question any more.
Perhaps such dualism has no place at all in the analysis of what
appears to be a single gradient of awareness of a single, though
highly complex reality. Rather, the important practical questions
are, particularly in relation to the climate change challenge we
now face: How can we explain regulated behaviour within a
human social collective, especially such behaviour as would seem
odd or even self-destructive to a detached outside observer not
subject to the same tacit cosmological assumptions? Furthermore,
how can we change such assumptions and collective behaviour
11
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
patterns against the powerful current of habituation that arises
from ‘self-resonance’ with our own past states and experiences
(Sheldrake 1988), whatever the mechanism may be? I would like to
argue that, if climate change and other contemporary challenges
require from us fundamental shifts in behaviour; we must either
strive to increase our awareness through critical reection or
accept the inevitability of hefty Malthusian ‘positive checks’ on
human population numbers (war, disease, famine, etc) in the
near future.
The need for reection is particularly great at this historical
juncture, and there is evidence that such a process has begun.
My own research, and the research of many other colleagues in
the eld of the anthropology of religion, for example, suggests
that religion, which is one form of cosmological reexivity, is
again receiving increased attention within the public sphere after
a period of modernist secularisation. One reason why religious
cosmologies may be resurging is that many of our secular
cosmologies -- such the cosmology of consumer culture and the
cosmology of technological progress-- are very poorly articulated
or poorly developed with regards to ethics and long-term conse-
quences and thus lead to unsustainable practices.
To conclude, one key insight provided by anthropology
(particularly the post-structuralist anthropology of Pierre
Bourdieu and others) is that the shared cultural or cosmological
assumptions that motivate us collectively can be ‘incorrect’, that
is, they do not always contribute to a good life. Such evaluations
are problematic. For now, however, the point to remember is that
collective behaviour is based only in small part on assumptions
that are subject to consistent and in-depth conscious reection,
and largely on other assumptions or drivers that lie more or less
outside the realm of our conscious awareness. If we want to raise
these hidden life assumptions to awareness, and thus acquire the
capacity to change them, we thus need to engage in meta-cultural
reection or ‘cultural critique’.
Anthropology, climate change and
the method of cultural critique
What is cultural critique, and how does it work? Marcus and
Fisher (1986) have famously discussed the process and scope of
cultural critique, as have many other theorists in anthropology, and
I cannot review this debate here. In addition, the idea of achieving
greater awareness though critical reexivity is also familiar from
other disciplines, including psychology and cultural studies. The
12 Thomas Reuter
unique aspect of anthropological critique is that it seeks to raise
cultural, that is, collective awareness, and brings a fundamentally
comparative or ‘intercultural’ approach to the task.
In order to illustrate what I mean by ‘comparative’ or ‘inter-
cultural’ critique of culture, it may be helpful to draw an analogy
with psychological processes at an interpersonal level. Any
undesirable, destructive or irrational aspect of our behaviour
and of the underlying life assumptions we hold as individuals
are frequently and relatively easily laid bare by the tacit or explicit
‘critical’ responses we receive from other individuals, who have
the advantage of seeing us from the perspective of an outside
observer. It is far more difcult if not impossible to achieve the
same degree of critical awareness by engaging in a process of
solitary self-reection. I argue that at a collective or cultural level,
the same principle of ‘greater awareness through inter-subjecti-
vity’ applies. Of course the mechanisms of awareness-raising that
operate among interacting individuals differ from the mechanisms
of intercultural critique, so that an analogous but different inter-
cultural method of critique will need to be outlined.
Collectively shared, cosmological assumptions have a paradig-
matic or ‘epistemic’ character. They tend to be socially sanctioned,
and are rarely challenged by individual participants from within a
culture (Kuhn 1962). Those few who are located somewhere at the
lower end of the normal distribution of levels of commitment to
unconscious life assumptions, and at the high end of the normal
distribution of reexive awareness, the Galileos of this world,
can and sometimes do challenge the assumptions shared within
their own society, often at some risk to themselves. They tend
to be punished, silenced or marginalised for daring to oppose
the direction of the social system’s overall ow of habituation.
Sometimes the proponents of change may themselves contribute
to a lack of popular acceptability of their suggestions because
their awareness is sufcient only to identify the presence of a
destructive collective behaviour, but insufcient to comprehend
the basic life assumptions that drive the behaviour.
Climate scientists often nd themselves in that position
because they lack training in cultural analysis. Without the capa-
city for a very deep cultural critique of behaviour, therefore, the
popular response such whistleblowers will receive may include
ridicule and persecution. It may also include some nods from
bigots who have a similar commitment to simplistic causal
rationalism with regard to the analysis of human behaviour as
do the whistleblowers (‘if you behave in the manner x, the result
will be y’), or who so happen to adhere to the same conscious
13
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
model of morality (eg. ‘as greenies we oppose consumerism’).
Unfortunately, the nodders are likely to go home and continue
the same behaviour regardless of their conscious opposition,
quite despite themselves. Indeed, the same inner inertia in actual
behaviour often applies to the proponents of change themselves.
Even among those few who do practice an alternative, more cons-
tructive behaviour systematically, we may nd that the majority is
motivated by an intuitive understanding of a destructive cosmo-
logical assumptions within their own culture. This intuition may
be sufciently acute to allow them to change their own behaviour,
but not sufciently conscious (in the conventional sense) to allow
them to articulate what the root of the behaviour problem may
be. Finally, even those rare individuals who are aware of the root
causes of major, historical challenges such as climate change, and
are able to clearly articulate them, must contend with the fear,
resistance and denial of the societies in which they live and on
which they depend for their livelihood (see Milton 2007). In the
words of two distinguished climate change researchers:
Changing public opinion and galvanising political
and market action is an art rather than a science, but
an art made all the more complex by the array of
human emotions that discussions like this provoke.
If the message is too soft… people don’t confront
the scale of the challenge… and avoidance is a
welcome escape. However, if the message is too
hard… people normally switch off, and move
into denial, or worse, into resistance (Randers and
Gilding 2009:1).
Anthropologists therefore tend to argue that the best critique of
culture available to us is an inter-cultural critique, rather than a
solitary cultural self-critique. The very existence of other ways
of life reveals that our own is just one among many, arbitrary
and man-made rather than necessary and natural. From the
perspective of another culture, with a set of very different life
assumptions, taken-for-granted patterns of thinking and behaving
within our own culture can become glaringly obvious. They can
then be subjected to questioning and critique. Therein, I would
argue, lies the greatest potential for anthropology to make a special
contribution. An anthropologically informed, critical intercultural
awareness is ideally suited to create an opening for the kind of
fundamental cultural change that is now required of us.
I would be sceptical of the chances of success for such an
intercultural project of critique if the same old difculty of arti-
culating and disseminating path-breaking insights were to remain
14 Thomas Reuter
in place. In the current era of globalisation, however, the project
of intercultural critique is aided at a popular level by the fact that
people everywhere are now subject to essentially ‘ethnographic’
experiences of exposure to other cultures; through increased
mobility, migration and travel, and by what they see on their TV
and computer screens. Fewer and fewer individuals are able to
ignore the presence of cultural alternatives and the arbitrariness
of their own cultural conditioning, though the resurgence of
fundamentalism and ethno-nationalism in many parts of the
world shows that many people still strive to resist this trend. In an
electronically mediated global society, this would seem impossible
in the end. I therefore would suggest that humanity, as a whole,
is approaching an anthropological moment when the awareness-
raising possibilities of intercultural comparison and meta-cultural
reexivity are becoming more widely available, and the message
of anthropology more readily understandable.
When we now look back at the current state of the global
campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the lack of willing-
ness to actually change behaviour -- despite a wealth of scientic
evidence and dire predictions from our climate scientists and a
veritable storm of moral arguments for behaviour change from
political activists and religious groups — may no longer surprise
us. A few lobby groups with special, vested interests aside, most
people now agree that the earth is warming, and that we need to
both mitigate and adapt to climate change urgently. Why then has
the political will to bring about the necessary behaviour change
been so sadly lacking? Is it a capitalist conspiracy led by the fossil
fuel lobby and others who still prot from the abuse of fossil
fuels? Such political explanations abound, but I do not think it
is helpful to view special-interest groups as existing somewhere
outside of our society and culture, in an imaginary realm of
inhumanity. ‘They’ are really a part of ‘us’. If fossil fuel lobbies
continue to succeed in derailing climate change negotiations,
then we must ask how we all make that possible - why it is that
we who nod to the climate science keep returning to the petrol
pump just as often as they do.
Of course, there are all manner of excuses for this resistance
to change, and some of them have merit. Many will say, for
example: ‘I cannot do anything as an individual.’ There is a shared
complicity in this, nonetheless, which begs explanation. From our
earlier discussion, it would seem that this complicity arises from
the fact that the prolic use of fossil fuels is a fundamental and
utterly ‘normalised’ assumption in our culture. Ours is a crude
oil cosmology. The assumptions of this cosmology, and our
15
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
unconscious commitment to it, have deep cultural roots indeed,
and perhaps they may even relate to our basic biological design
as primates.
If that is so, anthropology has an enormous contribution to
make, by laying these roots bare. Climate scientists may be able
to tell us what behaviours we need to change, but they do not
normally reect on how these behaviours are embedded within
a particular culture and cosmology. Economists - who occupy
much of the remainder of the policy debate on climate change
- do consider the wider implications of the required behaviour
change in terms of its ow-on consequences for entire systems
of production and consumption. However, they do not tend
to consider how we might want to revise our fundamental
assumptions of what constitutes a good and worthwhile life.3
Indeed, given that the modern economic system of mass produc-
tion and associated cultures of consumerism and ideologies
of capitalism are responsible for the current crisis, they will
not lend themselves to empowering fundamental changes that
would negate their own core principles. It would be like a goat
pretending to be a gardener. The effect is familiar. Take carbon
emission trading schemes as an example of the amazing solutions
our economic gurus proposing: How would you respond if I
proposed a system for trading ‘speeding certicates’, whereby
you would travel at or below the speed limit, get certicates for
that, and then sell them to me so I can travel at speeds above
the limit?
But, to be fair, how can my alternative proposal, based on
an anthropological critique of culture, be justied in light of
the fact that the discipline has not been all that prominent in
informing and advancing the climate change debate until now
(see Baer 2007 for a review of contributions)? What is stopping
us? Is it the economists, who refuse to listen? Perhaps, but there
is more to it.
For a whole century now, anthropologists have told them-
selves (and the world): ‘judge not your cultural other, lest thou be
judged’, and rightly so. There is a world of difference, however,
between blind ethnocentric prejudice and critical discernment.
Exercising cross-cultural discernment is perhaps a dangerous
course to navigate, with a constant threat of lapsing into one or
another form of intellectual neo-colonialism, especially where
political inequality mars the intercultural dialogue between the
3 Economist Fritz Schuhmacher’s famous work (1999 [1973]) is
one of the few exceptions.
16 Thomas Reuter
parties involved. Let me therefore reassure my colleagues: the
intercultural critique I am thinking of is rst and foremost a
critique directed at a western culture that is now all but hegemonic.
This new ‘world order’ need not be spared from criticism out of
some misguided sense of unconditional respect for all cultures. It
is also the culture and associated economic system (or ‘material
culture’) that is the cause of climate change, the more so for
having spread out to transform other cultures and becoming an
utterly global phenomenon in the process.
A critique of the hegemonic culture of globalisation:
Fossil fuels and the addiction to ‘free’ energy
In the remainder of this article I will make a rst attempt at a
meta-cultural critique of contemporary global culture, focused
specically at our addiction to fossil fuels and our utterly unsus-
tainable way of relating to nature. I could perhaps have presented
a more rigorous and comprehensive epistemological argument
in support of my claim about the essential merit of applying
anthropological knowledge to the problem of climate change.
However, many non-anthropologists would nd this kind of
discussion rather esoteric and remote from the issues at hand,
and I do hope some of them read this journal. Instead, I will now
make a practical attempt at applying the method of intercultural
critique to our current climate change dilemma, and we will simply
see how useful this approach may be.
There are many possible approaches to conducting an anthro-
pological analysis of the climate change crisis other than my own.
I could think of several myself, and some of my colleagues may
well be critical of the specically post-structuralist approach I
am adopting in this article. I therefore encourage vigorous debate
on this and any other, alternative approach that may be available.
While a direct and systematic cross-cultural comparison with
societies still at the fringes of this global system is beyond the
scope of this article, my critique is not just a self-reexive attempt
at pulling-ourselves-out-of-quicksand-by-our-own-hair. It reects
the profound effect on my awareness of the long-term exposure
to four different cultures I have experienced in various capaci-
ties, as an anthropologist but also as a traveller and a migrant.4
Such exposure has left me and, in this era of globalisation, is
leaving an increasing number of human beings with a certain
4 I have experienced long-term exposure to the cultures of
Germany, India, Australia and Indonesia, and have visited more
than 60 other countries.
17
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
degree of detachment from any one particular form of cultural
conditioning.
Why do cultures and cosmological assumptions matter if
our aim is to analyse whether and how communities are able to
respond effectively and humanely to those catastrophic conse-
quences of global climate change most scientists now hold to
be inevitable (Parry et al. 2007). Responses to crises are certainly
driven by economic variables, such as the supply and consumption
of natural resources, and material factors can forcibly raise
awareness by confronting people with a tangible, perhaps even a
deadly challenge, such as environmental and economic meltdown
or war. This is clearly the case now. Nevertheless, there can be no
doubt that cultural predispositions make an enormous difference
in a crisis situation; for example, between nding peaceful, lasting
solutions and short-term knee-jerk responses such as ghting
wars to gain control over dwindling resources (Klare 2001).
Examples of ‘cultural factors’ that impact on our responses to
crises include such cultural practices as natural science, neo-liberal
ideology, democracy, totalitarianism, millenarian movements,
economic theories, consumerism, institutionalised crime, Taoist
philosophy and academic conferences. As we contemplate this
very incomplete list of far ung examples, it is not difcult to
see why culture might have something to do with the causes of
climate change and with its possible mitigation. While I would
not want to dismiss or diminish the value of political economy
approaches, I reject any form of ‘materialist’ reductionism.
Even conservative ‘natural’ scientists and political economists
are now starting to see the need for the humanities to become
involved in the debate. Indeed, genuine conservatives are today’s
ultimate radicals. A pertinent example is a new paper by Jack
Harich on ‘Change resistance as the Crux of the Environmental
Sustainability Problem.’ Therein Harich (2010:9) argues that:
the ‘systemic root cause of improper coupling’ (i.e. Maintaining
a system of human behaviour that is not commensurate with a
sustainable environmental system) are ‘agent goals that conict
with the common good’, a more or less unwarranted ‘fear of
loss’ if associated practices were discontinued, and successful
‘techniques [for] enhancing resistance’. Consequently, ‘known
proper practices’ (i.e. Sustainable practices) are not being adopted.
This begs the question as to the source of such desperate fear and
the object of potential loss, which I will address below.
Post-ecological natural science is perhaps even ahead of
conventional social science in realising that the hoary dualisms of
modernity are dead in the water, that as members of the species
18 Thomas Reuter
homo sapiens sapiens ‘culture’ is indeed our ‘nature’, and that, by the
same token, humanity is fully and irrevocably a part of nature writ
large. It is indeed hard not to be concerned, and to hold on to
our disembodied, mind-identied, pseudo-transcendental attitude
from the perspective of natural science, as we discover ourselves
hurtling through space on a small rock covered with a thin lm
of life, and see our fellow passengers suffering extinction at a
rate almost unprecedented in the history of life on this planet. As
economist Jeffrey Sachs (2008:139) puts it, ‘we are devouring our
very life-support system, and nding excuses along the way not to
care.’ The reason why ‘we’, this particular species of life, is now a
threat to the planet is not because of our physiology and innate
requirements for natural resources. All species of mammals, for
example, have physiological designs and associated ‘resource
needs’ that are quite similar to our own. Perhaps the most basic
need for all animals, and indeed for all life, is the need to secure
a supply of energy sufciently large to support the organism’s
essential somatic functions and its capacity to reproduce. But
while other species too can and do experience environmentally-,
and eventually self-destructive population growth, the problems
posed by homo s. Sapiens are as unique in their quality and scale
as they are disturbing.
In my analysis, it is not our physiology but the historical
transformation of human culture that has increased our overall
population as well as our per capita impact on the natural world
dramatically, and in ways that are not sustainable. More specically,
the current trouble is due to a form of culture we humans were
able to develop quite recently on an evolutionary and even on a
historical time scale. The main steps include: 1) the invention of
large scale agriculture and urbanisation some 10.000 years ago;
2) the scientic revolution since the Renaissance, 3) the industrial
revolution from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and 4) the
rise of a global consumer culture after the end of WW2. This ‘we’,
‘us’ or ‘our’ does not include all previous nor all contemporary
cultures, some of which continue to uphold more sustainable
ways of life. Nevertheless, all contemporary cultures do nd
themselves exposed to the direct or indirect effects of a now
nearly hegemonic world culture, often referred to ‘late’ or ‘liquid
modernity’ (Baumann 2000), and an associated economic system
of consumer capitalism. In this sense only, I am talking about
global ‘we’. In other ways, the responsibility rests more squarely
with ‘us’ in the so-called western, developed world.
I would like to encourage anthropologists especially
colleagues in developing (or ‘exploited’) nations - to study this
19
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
contemporary global culture, wherewith to remove the veils of
unconsciousness created by fear or denial or ignorance or simply
by extreme familiarity or a false sense that there is a lack of alter-
natives or as a matter of malicious manipulation. What we need is
a critical anthropology; more critical than anything we have dared
to contemplate before, and if my earlier argument is correct, such
a critique is most likely to succeed if it is intercultural. The model
of ‘cultural analysis’ I employ is similar to post-structural psychoa-
nalytic models for the treatment of psychological dysfunctions
(neurosis or psychosis) in individuals, and is similarly derived from
a layered model of human consciousness.5 As already discussed,
the aim of this kind of cultural critique is to produce a shift
from a dysfunctional and unconscious toward a more conscious
and constructive behaviour on a societal scale. This is assuming
that dysfunctional behaviour is not based on free and conscious
choice, but is a result of ignorance.
I would dene cultural dysfunction as a basic, cosmological
and hence pervasive tendency to engage in behaviours ‘collecti-
vely’ (all in parallel on their own, or all differently but in concert)
that together are injurious to human life, well-being and dignity,
and to the integrity of the environment. I agree with Jared
Diamond (2005) that the total collapse of societies has been more
often due to a failure to maintain a sustainable mode of collective
behaviour toward the environment than due to internal tensions
brought about by ‘social behaviour’ in the narrower sense. Such
sustainability failures are also the most important dimension
of cultural dysfunction for the purpose of this discussion.
However, this does not mean we should accept ethnocentric
explanations based on reductionist ecological theories. Ecolo-
gical and economic behaviour can and does vary greatly across
different societies operating within similar environments. These
differences arise from variable cultural priorities and associated
habitual behaviours, and also from variable cultural techniques
and technologies of production, distribution and consumption.
Ecology can be a constraint but it does not actually tell us what
to do, nor is our behaviour conned within some simplistic
rational-choice process of prot-maximising. The fate of diffe-
rent social systems in terms of environmental sustainability thus
5 As I earlier observed about culture and language, thinking in terms
of layers or only boundaries is merely a heuristic device and may
have no ultimate reality. In reality, consciousness moves along a
smooth gradient of awareness in ways we are only beginning to
understand. Still, as a heuristic it is very useful to think of different
degrees of consciousness.
20 Thomas Reuter
depends on what one could broadly describe as ‘economic’ or
‘ecological culture’ and ‘material culture’, rather than unfolding
in an imaginary culture-free world of individual rationality or
ecological determinism.
Intercultural analysis is capable of revealing the unconscious
drivers of dysfunctional (harmful) collective patterns of habitual
behaviour within a given culture, behaviours that also include
the use or misuse of specic technologies and resources. One
way of conceptualising and critiquing cultural dysfunctions
relating to the use of resources is to think of them as ‘addictive
behaviours’. I would dene cultural addictions as normalised or
institutionalised collective behaviours that cause serious harm,
but which we nd ourselves unable to discontinue, even though
we may wish to do so, because they arise from unconscious (and
hence unknown) assumptions and drives. Collective addictive
behaviour is thus normalised, ignored or even valued positively
within a society, despite its negative effects. One reason is that
negative effects may take a long time to unfold before they are
strong enough to produce incentives for reexivity (i.e. A crisis).
In addition, negative behaviour patterns are often interdependent
with other patterns of behaviours that together constitute an
integrated way of life. It is thus important to detect the compen-
satory functions of overtly ‘dysfunctional’ behaviours within a
systemic context because they point to the underlying drivers
of the behaviour. Even though a harmful behaviour may not be
justiable by virtue of its compensatory function in any absolute
sense, because it is harmful in its overall net effect, it can have
small positive side effects that are disproportionately valued in
the society concerned. Sudden discontinuation of an addictive
behaviour can also genuinely jeopardize the system as a whole
in cases where the compensation effects and other forms of
systemic integration are signicant considerations. In most cases,
such considerations raise fears that the system is under threat,
and trigger a resistance response. Over time, such spontaneous
resistance responses develop into more highly developed and
effective ‘resistance techniques’.
If we reect on our contemporary societal addictions, the
noxious habit most obviously related to anthropogenic climate
change is our widespread reliance on fossil fuel combustion in
cars, machines and electricity generators, and our dependence
on fossil fuel-based fertilizer production and agriculture (see
also Newell 2000:9; Baer 2008). Ironically, the addictive nature
of the chemical substance ‘petroleum’ – in a more literal sense
- is evident in the practice of petrol-snifng widespread among
21
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
extremely poor, marginal and often indigenous communities,
mirroring the less visible dysfunction and addictive behaviour
patterns of the global mainstream. But what are the hidden
drivers of petrol addiction in mainstream society, where poverty
is not an issue? The attraction seems to lie in the possibility
of articially enhancing the amount of energy or life force we
can command for the purpose of mobility, mechanised mass
manufacturing, food production, etc. An abundant supply of
cheap energy increases our ability to manipulate, control and
consume the objective world and thus articially enhances our
sense of being alive. This additional life force is not authentic,
however, and comes at the cost of alienation. It is borrowed from
petroleum and coal, which are fossilised hydrocarbons produced
by prehistoric plants that have been outside the active carbon
cycle of our planet for millions of years. Our appropriation of
a separate energy source other than food and wood (renewable
energies which are derived from the photosynthesis processes of
living plants) has made it possible for us to entertain cosmologies
that, likewise, portray man as a subject separate from and largely
independent of the life processes of planet Earth. This conclu-
sion - concerning the cosmology that helps to maintain fossil
fuel addiction - is supported by my research on global trends in
cosmological thinking (Reuter 2008). The research suggests that
modernity was characterised by precisely this kind of transcen-
dentalist cosmology, whereas the latest trends indicate a swing
toward earth-based spiritualities with monistic cosmologies that
locate both man and the sacred within nature.
The idea of analysing fossil fuel use as an addiction is not
entirely new. It wasrst put forward (to my knowledge) by progre-
ssives like Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder in the response to the
1970s fuel crisis. Snyder spoke of the distortion in our livelihoods
caused by a one-off ‘fossil fuel subsidy’ and commented on the
addictive nature of the consumerism underwritten by that subsidy
through the medium of modern mass production (Snyder 1980).
Apart from its impact on per-capita consumption, others have
commented on how the fossilised ‘life force’ harnessed from
hydrocarbons has also been a key driver of human population
growth (Sachs 2008), which – along with per-capita consumption
- is a key variable in the overall greenhouse gas emissions rate.
If we were to analyse this energy and consumption addiction by
looking back at our society through the external lens of some of
the cultures I have studied, it would appear that we have developed
a dysfunctional cosmology. The problem arises from the delu-
sional idea that the human ‘part’ stands apart; that it has a trans-
22 Thomas Reuter
cendental character and is thus separate from the natural ‘whole’.
The part then comes to regard the whole as an external object
to be appropriated, controlled and consumed, while gradually
forgetting that it owes its very existence to the whole. This deluded
outlook lies at the heart of the addictive pattern of consumerism,
especially our star-crossed love affair with the motor car, our
need for speed, motion and mobility, obsessions that all count
among the hallmarks of late modernity. This attitude toward life
is deeply entrenched in a dualistic philosophy of modernism that
has created for us a cosmology wherein the holistic embodied
Self has been lost to a process of ever increasing identication
with transcendental mental forms and separation from nature.
This mind-identied pseudo-self pursues material gain in order
to nd itself again within material existence, and is led by this
Sisyphus quest into a perpetual treadmill of desire for more, and
more and still more. The removal of self from the world leaves
a hole in the cosmos, small but large enough to pour the whole
world into – all to no avail. Such insatiability or ‘desensitisation’
is also evident in drug addicted individuals, who will require
ever greater quantities of a particular substance to escape the
realisation that there is in fact a qualitative lack in their lives that
no amount of the substance can ever remedy. Addictive object
relations thus arise from an underlying insanity or dysfunction
in the domain of subject relations.6
From a cultural history perspective, one could also say that
secularisation, the loss of recognition for the sacredness of the
whole in favour of an appropriating attitude towards it, has led
to an objectication of the natural world, including our own
bodies or ‘inner nature’. Ironically, the disembodied, separated,
mind-identied transcendental modern subject is plagued by an
insatiable hunger for material objects classed as consumables
(including human bodies), failing to realise that it is in fact
cannibalising itself in a vain attempt to recover its lost sense of
unity with nature.
Many prominent spokespeople of tribal or more traditional
societies have commented on the madness and alienation of
6 Alice Miller (1979) refers to this endemic dysfunction as narcis-
sistic disturbance, and contrasts it with a healthy state based on
self-acceptance. She comments at great length on the profound
insatiability, and ultimately the fragility, associated with this
common condition.
23
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
modern man.7 In some of the particular cultures and cosmolo-
gies I have studied, the annihilation of the mind-identied self
- which is the primary source of fear in modern man (Reuter 2009)
- is an important project and seen as utterly desirable. Indeed,
the annihilation of the false, illusionary, mind-identied self is
regarded as the main prerequisite for genuine Self-realisation,
and is said to lead to an experience of unity with the sacred,
the whole, the existential ground of Being.8 Identication with
the larger whole is seen as the foundation of all moral conduct
in these and many other non-modern societies, and while not
everyone is expected to feel completely at one with the cosmos,
there are also more modest and achievable intermediate steps,
such as feeling a sense of care and responsibility toward one’s
community or one’s natural environment.
Some of my western colleagues will see other peculiarities
in modern global consumer culture through the lenses of the
other cultures they have studied. Together with local colleagues
and other representatives of these communities themselves,
we can perhaps serve as the eyes of the world, in all its cultural
diversity, turning a critical gaze back upon modernity. A recent
example of such critical consciousness arising from the margins
is the vehement attack launched at the Western world, in view
of its voracious appetite for fossil fuels, by the government of
the Maldives after the failure of the climate change summit in
Copenhagen (Todorova 2010).
I would like to add that some human dysfunctions are so
profound that they cut across many cultures, and the most basic
of all is the attachment we have to cultural conditioning per
se, which contributes to our proclivity for identication with
mental forms. Fortunately, intercultural comparison can lead us
to realise that all such conditioning is relative, and sometimes
arbitrary, though it is undoubtedly also very useful so long as we
understand that. Just as individuals learn and grow in awareness
through inter-subjective experiences with other individuals who
7 An example is ‘Uncle’ Bob Randall, a Yankunytjatjara elder
and a traditional owner of Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) in Australia (see
Randall 2003 [autobiography]). For an interview refer to www.
globalonenessproject.org/interviewee/bob-randall.
8 I am referring here to the well-known concepts of nirvana in
Buddhism and nirvikalpa samadhi in Hinduism, and to the less
well-known concepts manunggal (‘achieving unity’) and awang
uwung (‘the emptiness that is full’, i.e. non-duality) in Javanese and
Balinese mysticism.
24 Thomas Reuter
are different, so cultures must now engage in dialogue to pool
their different resources quickly, in a spirit of mutual respect,
towards averting the global environmental disaster we are facing.
Cultural globalisation based on mutual respect and dialogue is,
I believe, a powerful cure for addictive behaviour. It presents us
all, not with imaginary alternatives to our own cultural addictions
but with real alternatives that have been lived, tried and tested
(see also Maybury-Lewis 1992).
Will this kind of inter-cultural exchange ever happen? Well, to
some degree it is already happening, because cultural globalisation
is essentially a form of knowledge exchange. And then again, no,
it will not happen in the way we may think it should, unless we
actively pursue this goal. Apart from raising global awareness
and reexivity, exposure to the mirror of other cultures through
globalisation can also lead to regressive responses such as the
renewal of exclusive ethnic, nationalist or religious identities we
are now witnessing in many countries. This kind of fear-driven
defensive response may be an obvious option but it is not ‘natural’.
Rather, it is orchestrated and serves as a political tool for some of
the dysfunctional and unscrupulous individuals we allow to pose
as our leaders. Theirs is a kind of globalisation response we could
well do without. On the other hand, there are also movements and
institutions whose members ght consciously and constructively
to defend the right to cultural diversity, and who thus contribute
towards maintaining the potential for equality, global dialogue
and a genuine global consciousness.
In essence, what I propose is that, on the long road to a
global state of freedom from unconscious and dysfunctional
conditioning, one of the best ways to advance is to raise cons-
ciousness through a juxtaposition of different forms of cultural
conditioning. Such a global anthropological dialogue will reveal
the arbitrariness of all conditioning, and the fallacy of the quest
to glean a separate sense of self from one’s own collective or
personal story, in a cosmos that has no walls.
Further suggestions for an anthropology
of climate change
There are of course numerous other possibilities for the anthro-
pology of climate change not yet considered within the model
proposed above. Nevertheless, when we explore some of these
other climate change issues that are suitable as topics for anthro-
pological analysis, we soon nd that they all somehow come back
to the fundamental problem of unconscious conditioning, and
25
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
highlight the need for awareness raising through intercultural
reexivity.
One of these topics is the issue of climate justice. There has
been considerable debate about the ethics of climate change in
negotiations in Kyoto, Bali, and now Copenhagen, particularly in
relation to the rights of developing countries, who do not have
the same historical responsibility as developed nations in terms
of their proportional contribution to rising levels of atmospheric
greenhouse gases and global warming. Another aspect of this
ethical debate is the issue of responsibility toward future gene-
rations. The reason why I may appear not to have said much
about ethics is that, as I understand it, ethical consciousness has
two basic forms. One form arises naturally from awareness. The
other is a mental construct to enhance one’s own self-image based
on the need to think of oneself as right and others as wrong
and morally inferior. The rst can only emerge through insight,
through the kind of awareness work I have outlined above, while
the second is ultimately ineffective because it is deeply embedded
within and part of the dysfunction of identity politics and
unconscious cultural conditioning. Ethical behaviours towards
the natural environment and towards other human beings, as
seen from this perspective, arises only as a consequence of more
appropriate subject relations, namely, from an object perspective
on the Self as part of an all-encompassing whole.
Another important issue that anthropologists will have much
to say about is the inuence of utopian and dystopian thought
on our response to the climate change challenge. The analysis of
futuristic imagination is an important task because such imagi-
nings are forward projections of culture-specic, present-day
cosmologies, and are used to either legitimise or discredit these
cosmologies. For example, dystopian imaginings of a future
world dominated by machines, such as the Terminator series
of movies, can be understood as a critique of our blind faith in
salvation through technological progress. Other literary critiques
use a technique of ‘imagined intercultural juxtaposition’, whereby
the present is contrasted with the alternative ‘culture’ of a more
ideal or ‘utopian’ future society.
Futuristic thought is not restricted to the realm of mere
individual imagination, inuential though that may be in its own
right. Such ideas also help to motivate the rise of new social and
religious movements, some of which I have studied. How will the
millenarian expectations created by such social movements effect
societies over the coming years and decades? Will we succumb
to dystopian expectations, such as the apocalyptic vision of the
26 Thomas Reuter
pre-millennial dispensationalist evangelicals, who regard efforts to
avert catastrophic climate change as a misguided attempt to stop a
prophesised and necessary crisis that will prepare the ground for
the second coming of Jesus Christ; and who have thus supported
reactionary responses such as the US-led war for oil in Iraq? Or
will we be inspired by other imaginings of the future that are more
constructive, in that they explore potentially viable alternative
ways of life, both in theory and in practice? Will we be able to
imagine a future that it is at once desirable and achievable?
Be that as it may, the imagining or active pursuit of alter-
native ways of life always involves a process of intercultural
comparison and critical evaluation. Anthropology and the critical
eco-humanities in general can assist by analysing popular culture,
religious, political and social reform movements, including the
sustainability movement itself. If we chose to do so, however, we
should remember that these experiments are not just interesting
specimen for our buttery collections, they address what is a
genuine cultural crisis of unprecedented proportions; a crisis to
which we too seek the answer urgently, as what time we still have
for conscious action quickly slips through our ngers.
I discussed earlier how people derive an identity from specic
personal or collective experiences and stories - with all their
unique historical traumas and moments of glory. This process
of self-inscription is well known to anthropologists due to the
immense impact textual approaches have had on our discipline.9
And here is another vantage point from where we can begin
to analyse modern consumer culture. Another of our modern
cultural addictions is our voracious appetite for consuming other
people’s stories through television and other media. What is this
entertainment and reality-TV addiction all about? It is most likely
a substitute for dialogue, and seeks to full the need to escape
the insane isolation of one’s own personal story in a world where
community life as we once understood it is no longer available
to many of us.
Again, some of these stories may contain elements of real and
tried life experiences, while others are imaginary or hyper-real. In
either type of story, as in real life dialogue, there are opportunities
for inter-textual comparison and critical reexivity as well as for
ethnocentric judgement or escapist exoticism. Judgement abuses
comparison to feed the dysfunctional self which always needs to
9 Textual approaches are now spreading into other elds. A relevant
example and product of this inuence is the ‘narrative psychology’
movement (Sarbin 1986).
27
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
feel superior in order to alleviate fear, and escapism does little
better because it simply replaces one identication with another
until the other becomes limiting and painful as well. This ultimate
uselessness of the drug of entertainment helps to explain why
there is such an insatiable desire for more and more distraction,
just as there is a desire for more and more material possessions.
Critical reection, however, would lead to the realisation that
stories have no natural boundaries, and that one may consciously
embrace the whole story that is life, rather than clinging to a
particular historicized identity.
Another highly effective contribution anthropologists can
make to assist in the ght against climate-change-producing
human behaviour is to tell the real-life story of the rst victims
of climate change. Storytelling is important for human beings
because it highlights the relativity of our own story and our
interconnectedness with other people in our neighbourhood,
our nation, and our region of the world. Indeed, many stories of
climate change victims are transnational stories, which make us
ever more aware of the global character of this and other sustai-
nability issues. To raise awareness about the effects of climate
change and the need for adaptation, some of the important
stories that need to be told urgently include: 1) How particular
rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and in other
arid parts of the world are experiencing and preparing to face
the multidimensional challenge of adaptation to an even hotter
and drier climate; 2) How Pacic nations are experiencing and
responding to the challenges of displacement in the wake of
rising sea levels (see Rudiak-Gould 2008); 3) How developing
nations are experiencing climate-change related pressures as
well as opportunities such as the new carbon off-set schemes
(REDD) which could alter their policies concerning forestry
and agriculture; 4) How people in developing nations are dealing
with the potential displacement of many millions of people who
live in low-lying coastal cities like Jakarta or prime agricultural
production areas such as the Mekong Delta. Telling these stories,
in as literarily adept and interesting a manner as possible, is one
way in which anthropologists can really bring the reality of climate
change to the awareness of the public. These stories should not
just be fear invoking, however, as Kay Milton (2007) has pointed
out. Climate change stories should also show how people in a
wide range of situations and local cultures manage to adapt and
survive by adopting new ways of living they already had available
in their tool kit, or nding entirely new ways they had never before
thought possible.
28 Thomas Reuter
Anthropologists can also engage more directly and make such
stories happen, as Graeme McRae’s (2008) work in Bali shows,
namely by facilitating inter-cultural knowledge transfer or by
telling the story of such transfers for the benet of encouraging
others (see also MacRae and O’Kane, this issue). By knowledge
transfer I do not mean development. Development is essentially
a fairy tale we in the western world tell ourselves in order to
whitewash what is all too often an export of our dysfunction and
an extension of our greed to other countries, lest they remind us
that it is possible to live by different principles. What I mean by
knowledge transfer is a multi-directional exchange where everyone
is a learner and a teacher. For example, travelling through the
increasingly arid Murray Darling Basin in Australia, I am always
reminded of the way traditional agriculture is practiced in arid
central India and Eastern Turkey. Australian farmers have little
cultural inclination and know-how for producing traditional
dry-land crops that thrive in such conditions. Instead we keep
using enormous amounts of irrigation water to grow cotton and
rice as summer crops, using expensive technology to create the
eeting illusion that this is a wet environment, before the whole
mirage collapses into a heap of salt-logged, sun-cracked soil,
as has already happened with rice in the Riverina region. Such
behaviour is astonishingly suicidal on a collective scale, and this
is sadly reected in the astronomical male suicide rates of rural
Australia today.
29
Anthropological theory and the alleviation of anthropogenic climate change...
Hope. Oil on paper. Rita Reuter (1996)
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... Today's cultural world is not the only possible world; the artifacts we create we can also undo. Anthropology offers a metacultural understanding of how culture shapes our relationship to diverse ecosystems-a relationship that may be sustainable or unsustainable (Reuter 2010). While the conscious design of sustainable "moral ecologies" is difficult, like any system change, and while one size will not fit all, anthropological comparison shows that such ecologies are certainly achievable and, indeed, "normal." ...
... Understanding ecology has implications not only for economics, our means of survival, but also for religion, that is, our understanding of humanity's place and purpose within the cosmos. Religions are experiencing an ecological turn today(Reuter 2011(Reuter , 2015b, as awareness of ecological crisis increases. ...
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... Unfortunately, and of necessity, the most basic cultural narratives that encapsulate our philosophy and way of life are deep-seated, often unconsciously taken for granted and hence rendered largely invisible, unquestionable and change resistant. 15 Cultural core principles do need some gravitas, because they create, and more or less uphold, 'the world' as we understand it, thus guiding our way of inhabiting the world. To 'allow' a major reset of today's globally prevailing cultural narrative and of prevailing orders of practice to happen, therefore, certain special conditions need to be met. ...
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Contemporary economies must undergo a transformation to sustainability if we are to avoid a descent into ecological and socio-political crises of ever escalating severity. In order to achieve such a major reform, principles consistent with sustainable ecosystems and social systems need to be identified and applied systematically. What are these principles in their most fundamental form, how can they become widely accepted, and how can they be applied? To answer these three questions, this article draws on the cumulative insights of anthropology, a bridging science dedicated to the holistic study of humanity across the entire span of our evolutionary development (physical anthropology) and across the full breadth of its cross-cultural diversity (cultural anthropology). This broad and longitudinal anthropological understanding of human societies will be compared with what we now understand about the characteristics of ecosystem, primarily to show that they are fundamentally similar. An alternative cultural outlook and political procedure is then proposed that – if adopted – would deliver a shared global vision for a socially and ecologically sustainable future and lay firm pathways toward that future in the now.
... El Cambio Climático Global despertó el interés de las ciencias sociales por "el clima", convirtiéndolo en un sujeto de investigación. La Antropología ha comenzado a aportar al debate analizando los discursos sobre cambios climáticos y registra antecedentes en materia de eventos científicos y publicaciones que vinculan el clima con las percepciones sociales (Danowski y Viveiros, 2014;De la Soudière y Tabeaud, 2009;Corbin, 2013;Mc Rae, 2010;Milton, 2008;Reuter, 2010). Asimismo, han comenzado a repensarse los discursos arqueológicos sobre eventos ocurridos en el pasado (ver Marconetto y Bussi, 2018). ...
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En el contexto de políticas neoliberales en que está sumergida Sudamérica, parece ser importante el “para qué servimos”. La utilidad parece ser una moneda corriente en estos tiempos, los ataques a la comunidad científica, que sufren particularmente las ciencias sociales al momento de los recortes presupuestarios, se vinculan justamente a la aparente inutilidad en momentos de crisis de las Ciencias Sociales. Una paradoja, por cierto, en caso de urgencias parece que las ciencias que se ocupan de las cosas útiles a los humanos cobran mayor relevancia que aquellas que se ocupan de los humanos en sí. A pesar de esto, la escisión entre las llamadas ciencias naturales y ciencias humanas está quedando cada vez más obsoleta, y en este sentido hay algunas sendas interesantes que han comenzado a explorarse.
... They are trained to study and compare cosmologies and look at their own cultural cosmology from the outside, as one perspective among many, rather than seeing the modernist philosophy and way of life as an inescapable, natural state of affairs. The challenges and opportunities of today's world call for a new metacultural awareness, an evolutionary leap that will enable humanity to become conscious creators of its future and responsible stewards of planet Earth (Reuter, 2010). Anthropology shows that one of the greatest assets of our species is the immense diversity of human knowledge systems, languages, beliefs, social formations and livelihoods. ...
Chapter
This chapter shows that cultural anthropology has always had a professional proximity to the subject of nature and has dealt with the environment in various ways. The causes of the Anthropocene may not be perceived by us as individuals, but the effects will be experienced locally and differently in the long term. The concepts and goals of countermeasures are also local. This shows that the local access and the holistic approach of cultural anthropology opens a fruitful window to understanding the Anthropocene. In this section of the book, I criticize currently dominant approaches to the Anthropocene in cultural anthropology because they avoid scientific findings, obscure the specific geological deep time, and generally provide more artistic contributions. The chapter presents very different anthropological approaches, and I also attempt to do justice to directions and positions that I do not represent based on my scientific assumptions, such as the more-than-human approaches or posthumanism.
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This article points up a very crucial, yet non-political and non-economic issue, involved in the enduring conflict between Islam and the West which, unfortunately, has not been given adequate attention academically. The article highlights debate among Muslim thinkers regarding Muslim's reconstruction of knowledge project that emerged as reaction against the perceived incompatibility between modern knowledge system and the 'Islamic minds'. The project aims at cognitive transformation towards a 'unified systemic worldview' of Islam where no barrier would appear to exist between the sacred and the secular. My argument was made from the perspective of secularization theory and the Perennial Philosophy approach of religion. Accordingly, with the concept of human as spiritual being-a contrast to Western's vantage point in social sciences in which human is perceived to struggle only for economic gain and power-this article explains Muslim's reconstruction of knowledge project as reaction against cognitive dissonance inasmuch as inconsistencies appear between one's belief, cognition and action. This proposition runs counter to the often cited Foucault's 'power/knowledge' explanation in which Muslim's resistance to modern knowledge system appears as merely anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggles. The paper ultimately suggests the need of ontological and epistemological pluralism to exist, to make the dialogue between Islam and the West possible. Keywords: Reconstruction of Knowledge, Cognitive Dissonance, Islamic system of thought, Ontological-Epistemological pluralism
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This article points up a very crucial, yet non-political and non-economic issue, involved in the enduring conflict between Islam and the West which, unfortunately, has not been given adequate attention academically. The article highlights debate among Muslim thinkers regarding Muslim's reconstruction of knowledge project that emerged as reaction against the perceived incompatibility between modern knowledge system and the 'Islamic minds'. The project aims at cognitive transformation towards a 'unified systemic worldview' of Islam where no barrier would appear to exist between the sacred and the secular. My argument was made from the perspective of secularization theory and the Perennial Philosophy approach of religion. Accordingly, with the concept of human as spiritual being-a contrast to Western's vantage point in social sciences in which human is perceived to struggle only for economic gain and power-this article explains Muslim's reconstruction of knowledge project as reaction against cognitive dissonance inasmuch as inconsistencies appear between one's belief, cognition and action. This proposition runs counter to the often cited Foucault's 'power/knowledge' explanation in which Muslim's resistance to modern knowledge system appears as merely anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggles. The paper ultimately suggests the need of ontological and epistemological pluralism to exist, to make the dialogue between Islam and the West possible.
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This article explores the roots and paths of changing discourses about the natural environment and marine resources in the seascape of Kihnu, Estonia. The ontology of the seascape is never static, being subjected to constant transformation, as local experiences and understandings collide with external influences, regulations and constraints. By focusing on the indeterminacies of agency, and human encounters and environmental events, I show how Soviet pasts and perceptions, shifting scientific paradigms and practices, the dynamics of local-global articulations, and unforeseen transformation in the marine environment have progressively contributed to new understandings of the seascape, seals and other marine resources. These changing perceptions fundamentally challenge previously-held notions that humans and nature belong together. A traditional seal hunt had endured in the Baltic Sea for centuries, but the decline of the seal population in the 1970s was widely understood as anthropogenic, related to overfishing, large scale seal hunts and pollution. While most Baltic Sea coastal waters have remained closed to any type of seal hunting for more than 40 years, many fishers and marine scientists agree that grey seal population has recovered and some Baltic Sea countries have lifted the ban on hunting grey seal. While the seal hunt and meat used to have great cultural importance, there was also commercial value in seal skin and fat for many coastal communities. Several representatives of fishery-dependent coastal communities in Estonia now publicly express a view that seals now compete with fishers. Consequently the seal has lost its cultural importance and is considered as an intruder to Kihnu cultural space. I argue that making sense of the concerns and uncertainties that presently surround the question of knowing about and managing marine ecosystems, requires paying close attention to the ways in which access to the seascape and its resources have been enforced and altered over time.Key Words: Estonia; small-scale fisheries; seascape approach; ontology; local knowledge
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Abstrac: As recently highlighted by Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2014), global climate change is feared in the modern West as the largest and most certain threat to the world. To open possibilities of reflection in the face of this current context, it is necessary to attend to other “ends of the world” that anthropology is able to bring to the discussion. “Collapse” and “climate change ” are not new topics in archaeological debates. We seek to explore possible intersections between archaeology and ethnography from our particular research. Our reflection is based on the archaeological studies, using paleoenvironmental data, of the “end of the Aguada occupation” in the Ambato Valley (Catamarca, Argentina) and on an ethnographic study among current residents of the area. We will take from the ethnographic study the native notion of “seca”, understood as a state of constant reduction of the intensities of diverse spheres of local life, and its implications for archaeology.
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Drawing on the work of Fromm and Tolle, this paper is a fundamental critique and reinterpretation of the utopian impulse. In his famous work, To Have and to Be, Eric Fromm described two fundamentally different ways of constructing a relationship to the world and to other people. Drawing on psychoanalysis, critical theory and Eastern philosophy, he argued a case for 'being' rather than remaining confined, as many of us are much of the time, within an egoic sense of self that is based on mental identification with material or symbolic possessions. Eckhart Tolle has since looked more closely at this psychological state of ego-identification. One characteristic feature thereof, which he identifies, is the perpetual tendency to escape the Present, either by living in the past or by reaching for an imaginary and idealized future that is forever receding and out of reach. Can we ever arrive at such a "u-topia" (no-place)? Could it be that we have already arrived? To address these questions, I will reinterpret the utopian impulse as a misapprehended desire for something that is not in the future but much closer to home and yet alludes us.
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Anthropological genetics is a field that has been in existence since the 1960s and has been growing within medical schools and academic departments, such as anthropology and human biology, ever since. With the recent developments in DNA and computer technologies, the field of anthropological genetics has been redefined. This volume deals with the molecular revolution and how DNA markers can provide insight into the processes of evolution, the mapping of genes for complex phenotypes and the reconstruction of the human diaspora. In addition to this, there are explanations of the technological developments and how they affect the fields of forensic anthropology and population studies, alongside the methods of field investigations and their contribution to anthropological genetics. This book brings together leading figures from the field to provide an introduction to anthropological genetics, aimed at advanced undergraduates to professionals, in genetics, biology, medicine and anthropology.