Climate, Capitalism and Communities An Anthropology of Environmental Overheating

About this book

Until now, the growing body of work on environmental anthropology has largely ignored the unavoidable impact of global capitalism on the environment and the extent to which capital itself is a key driver of climate change.

Climate, Capitalism and Communities focuses explicitly on that nexus, examining the injustices and inequalities – as well as the activist responses – that have arisen as a result, and the contradictions between the imperatives of exponential economic growth, and those of environmental sustainability, and society as a whole.

Bringing an innovative, ethnographic toolkit to bear on a crisis that is at once global and highly localised, the authors shift attention away from the consequences of climate change, to a focus on the social relations and power structures that continue to prevent effective action.

Contents

Introduction - Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Astrid B. Stensrud

1. The Political Economy of the Great Acceleration, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - Anna Tsing
2. The Triple Burden on Forest Peoples in the Global South: Extractive Capitalism, Climate Change, and Climate Mitigation Regimes Framed by Capitalist Logic - Harold Wilhite
3. Globalisation and Climate Change: Vulnerability Under 'Actually Existing' Capitalism in Mongolia - Andrei F. Marin
4. A Community on the Brink of Extinction: Ecological Crises and Ruined Landscapes in Northwest Greenland - Kirsten Hastrup
5. Climate Change, Oceanic Sovereignties and Maritime Economies in the Pacific - Edvard Hdving
6. Puzzling Pieces and Situated Urgencies of Climate Change and Capitalism in the High Arctic - Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen
7. Ecological Transformations in a Peruvian Watershed: the Intersections of Climate Crisis, Large-Scale Infrastructure and the 'Free Market' - Astrid B. Stensrud
8. Something Out There in the Water: Seismic Surveys, Climate Change and the Middle Ice - Mark Nuttall
9. The Intricacies of Justice: Environmental and Health Emergencies in Northern Loreto, Peru - Maria A. Guzman-Gallegos
10. Islands of Hope and Despair: Scaling the Collapses and the Collapse of Scales - Frank Sejersen
11. From a Virtual Community to Concrete Actions: Climate Advocacy in the Digital Age - Ben Orlove, Kerry Milch, and Laura Uguccioni

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Biography

Astrid B. Stensrud is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, where she is part of the Overheating research project. She has published articles on climate change, neoliberalism and water politics in the journals, Ethos, History and Anthropology, Latin American Perspectives and Latin American Research Review, as well as chapters in edited volumes, Waterworlds: Anthropology in Fluid Environments (2016) and Identity Destabilised (2016).

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and former President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He is the author of numerous classics of anthropology, including Small Places, Large Issues - 4th Edition (Pluto, 2015) and What is Anthropology? - 2nd Edition (Pluto, 2017).