Anthropology of Social Change: Margins, Performances, Publics (S0E08a)

2019-2020

Section A. Setting the scene

Part 3. This course’s urgency:

anthropology in times of climate change

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A. Setting the scene: introduction to the course and its urgency

Part 3

Reading assignment (1 DN):

• Latour, Bruno. 2017. "Anthropology at the time of the anthropocene: a personal view of
what is to be studied." Pp. 35-49 in The anthropology of sustainability: beyond
development and progress, edited by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
• Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2016. "Overheating: the world since 1991." History and
Anthropology 27(5):469-87.

Subthemes: engaging with ‘publics’, ‘performances’ and ‘margins’ in the context of post-2008
global ‘rebellions’; how anthropologists handle ‘accelerated change’ and ‘the Anthropocene’;
how anthropology is changing.

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Further reading
• Bateson, Gregory. 1987 (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in
anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson.
• Crate, Susan Alexandra. 2011. "Climate and culture: Anthropology in the era of
contemporary climate change." Annual Review of Anthropology 40:175-94.
• Hann, Chris. 2016. "Overheated underdogs: civilizational analysis and migration on the
Danube-Tisza interfluve." History and Anthropology 27 (5):602-616.
• Haraway, Donna, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing, and Nils
Bubandt. 2016. "Anthropologists are talking – about the anthropocene." Ethnos
81(3):535-64.
• Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism: Durham: Duke
University Press.
• Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. 2007. "The anthropocene: Are humans
now overwhelming the great forces of nature?" Ambio 36(8):614-21.

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Audiovisual
• Riahi, Arash, and Arman Riahi. 2013. "Everyday rebellion: The art of change." Berlin: Rise
& Shine.
• Thomas Hylland Eriksen. 2017 “We Are Overheating” TEDxTrondheim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivjXlRu_3aQ
• “The Anthropocene: The age of mankind” (VPRO documentary - 2017).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW138ZTKioM
• ‘The Anthropologist’ (2015; Seth Kramer, Daniel Miller) on Margaret Mead, anthropology
and climate change.

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Contents:

1. Introduction
2. The Anthropocene
3. Overheating
4. Anthropology, fieldwork and climate change: an introduction
5. Outlook

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Introduction
The Anthropologist… introduces:
- Climate Change
- History of anthropology through Margaret Mead & Gregory Bateson
Bateson: focus on dynamic equilibria – systems in constant change but self-controlled,
restrained (see also Gluckman, coming weeks) [remember what Mary Catherine Bateson
about a motionless body]
Forms of dynamic equilibria: solidarity, redistribution, ‘healthy’ competition
Unrestrained dynamics = schismogenesis (progressive differentiation): radicalisation,
polarisation, etc. [see: ‘Overheating’]
Balinese = ‘non-schismogenic people’; constant ‘plateaus of intensity’ in social life
Back to climate change: almost exemplary form of (sets of) schismogenesis. How?
Film highlights three key dimensions of how this course analyse ‘change’:
- From the margins: Pacific, Siberia, etc.
- Accommodating/enacting change through performances
- Publics: ‘public anthropology’, yes or no ‘publicity’ (cfr. Priest – Andes) &
mobilisation
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2. The Anthropocene

Three excerpts from “The Anthropocene: The age of mankind” (VPRO documentary - 2017).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW138ZTKioM

1st Excerpt: 0 – 6:21

What is ‘the Anthropocene’? Where does the term come from?

From the editorial introducing the new journal ‘The Anthropocene Review’:
“… after the start of the Industrial Revolution the imprint [of humans] has evolved into
a major force impacting many global biogeophysical cycles to the point of becoming a
strong, integral and, in some respects, dominating force in the Earth System” (Oldfield
et al. 2014, 4)

‘Controversy’: when did it start?

Oldfield et al (2014): two stages: 1850 and 1950

Steffen et al (2007): three stages + Prelude: 8000 years ago

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1. Industrial Era (1800-1945)

“Industrial societies as a rule use four or five times as much energy as did agrarian ones,
which in turn used three or four times as much as did hunting and gathering societies.”
(Stephen et al. 2007: 616)

2. The Great Acceleration (1945-2015)

“The Great Acceleration took place in an intellectual, cultural, political, and legal
context in which the growing impacts upon the Earth System counted for very little in
the calculations and decisions made in the world's ministries, boardrooms, laboratories,
farmhouses, village huts, and, for that matter, bedrooms.” (ibid.: 618)

3. The third stage (2015 - )

Growing awareness. Three attitudes: (a) business-as-usual, (b) Mitigation, (c) Geo-
engineering.

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Latour: it is a term from outside social sciences but with enormous impact on the position of
‘the human’

Already in his We have never been modern (1991)

1989: ‘The Year of Miracles’
- Fall of the Berlin Wall
- “But the triumph is short-lived. In Paris, London and Amsterdam, this same glorious year
1989 witnesses the first conferences on the global state of the planet. […] for some
observers they symbolize the end of capitalism and its vain hopes of unlimited conquest
and total dominion over nature. By seeking to reorient man's exploitation of man toward
an exploitation of nature by man, capitalism magnified both beyond measure. The
repressed returns, and with a vengeance: the (a) multitudes that were supposed to be
saved from death fall back into poverty by the hundreds of millions; (b) nature, over
which we were supposed to gain absolute mastery, dominates us in an equally global
fashion, and threatens us all.”
- “It is a strange dialectic that turns the slave into man's owner and master, and that
suddenly informs us that we have invented ecocides as well as large-scale famine.”
(1991: 8)

Footnote: there were conferences before: Thomas (1956): show

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Second excerpt: 10:55 - 13:50

Latour: evokes an ‘infrastructural inversion’ of foreground – background (cf. ‘Mobius strip’)
Becoming aware of the vital importance of the ‘critical zone’
The Critical Zone (CZ) = ‘the face of the earth: “foregrounding the thin, porous and
permeable layer where life has modified the cycles of matter by activating or catalyzing
physical and chemical reactions. Those complex biogeochemical reactions generate a
kind of skin, a varnish, a biofilm whose reactivity and fragility have become the central
topics of multidisciplinary research around the disputed concept of the Anthropocene.”
(Arènes, Latour and Gaillardet 2018)
Project: re-imagining the earth with the CZ at the centre.
Also: on this repositioning very interesting paper: Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the
Anthropocene (Palsson et al. 2013)
P5 “The Anthropocene ‘strata’ form part of our surrounding environment because we,
for example, live in and drive on anthropocenic ‘rock’ constructions that we call houses
and roads.”
P6 “The environment must be understood as a social category and efforts must be
made to integrate the humanities and social sciences more fully into our understanding
of the environmental. Simultaneously, it is important to further encourage the ongoing
‘environmental turn’ in the humanities and social sciences.”
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- human and non-human!

Again: in We have never been modern (1991)
Modernity resides in ‘purification’: “the distinction between two ontological zones: that of
the human beings on the one hand; that of the nonhumans on the other” (p11)

Third excerpt: 19:00-20:43

Latour: Reflection on limits

This is the postcolonial moment:

“The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their
ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save
their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and
reducing its peoples to abject poverty.” (1991: p9)

Reflections:
- “Global” appears as the ultimate externalisation. Explain: (re)produce by using external
resources which cannot be replenished
- Yet, also deep doubts about the success of the modern

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Lessons learnt: ‘Anthropology’ and ‘the social’

Latour (2017) on the Anthropocene as a ‘gift’ for anthropology

What are the big ideas?

1. Human agency: central

2. Physical and cultural anthropology will have to join forces
3. Questions what is common and what is specific in the various ways we inhabit the earth.
One unified ‘Anthropos’ (see eg ‘capitalocene’)
4. Pushes anthropology to the centre stage: analysing, explaining, ‘redistributing agency’
Towards a ‘contemporary’ anthropology: (as distinct from ‘modern’)

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Social – society: human & non-human

see Latour (2005): Reassembling the social

“There is nothing wrong with this use of the word [social] as long as it designates what
is already assembled together, without making any superfluous assumption about the
nature of what is assembled.” (p1)

“redefining sociology not as the ‘science of the social’, but as the tracing of associations.
In this meaning of the adjective, social does not designate a thing among other things,
like a black sheep among other white sheep, but a type of connection between things
that are not themselves social.” (p5)

Different ontology:
“Organizations do not have to be placed into a ‘wider social frame’ since they
themselves give a very practical meaning to what it means to be nested into a ‘wider’
set of affairs.”

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2. Overheating (Thomas Hylland Eriksen)

Profile: well-known, ‘classic’, work on globalization and creolization, etc.

Screening:
Thomas Hylland Eriksen. 2017 “We Are Overheating” TEDxTrondheim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivjXlRu_3aQ

- ERC ‘Advanced’ Project : very prestigious

- Overheating as ‘accelerated change’
- Three domains of overheating: ecology, economy, politics
- Turn: 1989-1991
- Anthropological tools: diverse (Wolf, Goody, Bateson)
- Outcome?

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ERC ‘Advanced’ Project : very prestigious

Wants to address: crisis in three domains: encompassing, multidimensional, forward-looking
“these research projects are large-scale, collaborative endeavours that transcend
disciplinary boundaries and to engage in critical conversations with natural scientists,
economists, and others, which anthropologists have often shied away from.” (Eriksen
and Schober 2016, 4)
 
Overheating as ‘accelerated change’
Based on friction, intensified interconnectivity
 
Three domains of overheating: ecology, economy, politics 
1. climate/environment : material
2. finance/economics : trust in abstract systems, efficacy in production, material survival and
social justice
3. culture/identity : cognitive, emotional, relational and political;

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Turn: 1989-1991 ‘new world’

• Geopolitical turbulence: end of the Cold War, India and China, end of Apartheid, violent
dismantling of Yugoslavia
• Internet, mobile technologies, laptop, tourism, international trade, energy use, etc.
• Political: Salman Rushie affair, Gulf war, identity politics
• Economy: deregulation, flexibility, financial high-tech, fast capitalism
 
Anthropological tools: diverse (Wolf, Goody, Bateson)
Against Claude Lévi-Strauss & Clifford Geertz – the disappearance of ‘the other’ (‘one world’);
Instead:
• Wolf: (1982): world history outside the centre. See: (Hann 2016)
• Goody: (2012) & Mintz (1986): mining and sugar as global drivers of change. See: (Pijpers
2016)

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• Bateson: (1987 (1972)): key-terms such as

Already mentioned:
• Schismogenesis
“This schismogenesis, unless it is re-strained, leads to a progressive unilateral
distortion of the personalities of the members of both groups, which results in
mutual hostility between them and must end in the break-down of the system.”
(1987: 78)
“The progressive changes of schismogenesis may reach climactic discontinuities and
sudden reversals.” (ibid.: 331)
• ‘plateau’ versus ‘climax’ (ibid.: 122)
Other concepts:
• double-bind (=zero sum game, e.g. between economic growth and sustainability),
• flexibility: do not push things (Spaceship Earth, civilisation) to its limits. Flexibility
and readiness to react, to restrain, to compensate rely on “uncommitted
potentiality for change” (ibid.: 502)

+ multidisciplinary challenges: statistics, history, macrosociology, etc.

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Outcome?
Key anthropological instrument: scale
• “multiscalar analysis connecting local realities with large-scale processes, as well as
analysing social change comparatively” (2016: 477)
• “scale simply refers to the scope and compass of a phenomenon – whether it is small or
big, short term or long term, local or global” (ibid.: 481)

Pedigree in geography, globalization studies, etc. (see e.g. Marston et al. 2005)

Also
- size and complexity (number of roles, statuses, necessary to reproduce a system
- awareness of connectivity
- geographical scale: ‘local’
- temporal scale: long-term and short-term changes/developments

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‘Change’ ? Not a homogenous, global process: glocal, multiscalar, fragmented and frictional…

“Different parts of societies, cultures and life-worlds change at different speeds and
reproduce themselves at different rhythms, and it is necessary to understand the
disjunctures between speed and slowness, change and continuity in order to grasp the
conflicts arising from accelerated globalization.” (ibid.: 472)

“The significant change was that the world had, almost in its entirety, been transformed into
a single – however bumpy, diverse and patchy – moral space, while many anthropologists
had made themselves busy looking the other way, often inwards.” (ibid.: 479)

“The disjunctures between scales and temporalities are arguably where the main sites of
conflict, and perhaps germs of historical change, are to be located currently. […]
… slowdowns (or cooling down) in the economic sector can lead to an acceleration (and
heating up) in identity politics, and accelerated change in one geographical area may
marginalize another, leading to mass unemployment and impoverishment.” (ibid.: 485)

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Break-out group assignment:

Concerning Latour’s Anthropocene & Eriksen’s Overheating
- Which are, for you, the big similarities and differences between both approaches to
ongoing drastic social change? Explain & illustrate
- Compare how both approaches address inequality?
- How do both approaches provide leverage for activism around the issues of the
Anthropocene and Overheating?

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Case studies:
Hann (2016): Hungary since late 19th century
• Overheating during late communism, particularly in rural areas. Cfr ‘specialist
cooperative’; also ‘involution’ (Cfr Geertz): inward-looking (potentially xenophobic)
• Cooling down after 1990;
• Frustration, hence “agrarian populism” (Viktor Orbán, Fidesz), cfr Migrant crisis of 2015.
Identity overheating (rural versus urban)

Arnaut (ongoing): The story of Andrei (Rumania)

Next week
We will start addressing change within the same mood of global crisis that the Anthropocene
and ‘overheating’ are signalling.
First: anthropology as a discipline in ongoing crisis
Then: margins as spaces of unrelenting crisis

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4. Outlook

Next week: back in time – different models of looking at

time/change/progress/etc.

So far: progressive time, next week: alternative models: stasis, circular, degressive,
etc.

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