The Anthropology of Climate Change An Historical Reader

About this book

This timely anthology The Anthropology of Climate Change brings together for the first time the most important ancient, medieval, Enlightenment, and modern scholarship for a complete anthropological evaluation of the relationship between culture and climate change.

- Brings together for the first time the most important classical works and contemporary scholarship for a complete historical anthropological evaluation of the relationship between culture and climate change
- Covers the historic and prehistoric records of human impact from and response to prior periods of climate change, including the impact and response to climate change at the local level
- Discusses the impact on global debates about climate change from North-South post-colonial histories and the social dimensions of the science of climate change.
- Includes coverage of topics such as environmental determinism, climatic events as social catalysts, climatic disasters and societal collapse, and ethno-meteorology

The Anthropology of Climate Change is an ideal text for courses in climate change, human/cultural ecology, environmental anthropology and archaeology, disaster studies, environmental sciences, science and technology studies, history of science, and conservation and development studies.

Contents

Acknowledgments to Sources   viii
About the Editor   x
Preface   xi
Acknowledgments   xiv

Introduction: The Anthropology of Climate Change
Six Millennia of Study of the Relationship between Climate and Society / Michael R. Dove   1

Part I Continuities   37
Climate Theory
      1 Airs, Waters, Places  / Hippocrates   41
      2 On the Laws in Their Relation to the Nature of the Climate  / Charles de Secondat Montesquieu   47
Beyond the Greco-Roman Tradition
      3 The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History / Ibn Khaldûn   55
      4 The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine  / Francis Zimmermann   67
Ethno-climatology
      5 Concerning Weather Signs  / Theophrastus   83
      6 Gruff Boreas, Deadly Calms: A Medical Perspective on Winds and the Victorians  / Vladimir Jankoviæ   87

Part II Societal and Environmental Change   103
Environmental Determinism
      7 Nature, Rise, and Spread of Civilization  / Friedrich Ratzel   107
      8 Environment and Culture in the Amazon Basin: An Appraisal of the Theory of Environmental Determinism  / Betty J. Meggers   115
Climate Change and Societal Collapse
      9 Management for Extinction in Norse Greenland  / Thomas H. McGovern   131
      10 What Drives Societal Collapse?  / Harvey Weiss and Raymond Bradley   151
Climatic Events as Social Crucibles
      11 Natural Disaster and Political Crisis in a Polynesian Society: An Exploration of Operational Research  / James Spillius   157
      12 Drought as a “Revelatory Crisis”: An Exploration of Shifting Entitlements and Hierarchies in the Kalahari, Botswana  / Jacqueline S. Solway   168

Part III Vulnerability and Control   187
Culture and Control of Climate
      13 Rain-Shrines of the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia  / Elizabeth Colson   191
      14 El Niño, Early Peruvian Civilization, and Human Agency: Some Thoughts from the Lurin Valley  / Richard L. Burger   201
Climatic Disasters and Social Marginalization
      15 Katrina: The Disaster and its Doubles  / Nancy Scheper-Hughes   217
      16 “Nature”, “Culture” and Disasters: Floods and Gender in Bangladesh  / Rosalind Shaw   223

Part IV Knowledge and its Circulation   235
Emic Views of Climatic Perturbation/Disaster
      17 Typhoons on Yap  / David M. Schneider   239
      18 The Politics of Place: Inhabiting and Defending Glacier Hazard Zones in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca  / Mark Carey   247
Co-production of Knowledge in Climatic and Social Histories
      19 Melting Glaciers and Emerging Histories in the Saint Elias Mountains  / Julie Cruikshank   261
      20 The Making and Unmaking of Rains and Reigns  / Todd Sanders   276
“Friction” in the Global Circulation of Climate Knowledge
      21 Transnational Locals: Brazilian Experiences of the Climate Regime  / Myanna Lahsen   301
      22 Channeling Globality: The 1997–98 El Niño Climate Event in Peru  / Kenneth Broad and Ben Orlove   315

Index  335

Customer Reviews

Biography

Michael R. Dove is the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Director of the Tropical resources Institute, and Curator of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, Yale University.