1st Edition
Building the Critical Anthropology of Climate Change Towards a Socio-Ecological Revolution
This book applies a critical perspective to anthropogenic climate change and the global socio-ecological crisis. The book focuses on the critical anthropology of climate change by opening up a dialogue with the two main contending perspectives in the anthropology of climate change, namely cultural ecological perspective on climate change and the cultural interpretive perspective on climate change. Guided by these perspectives, the book takes a firm stance on the types of changes that are needed to sustain life on Earth as we know it. Within this framework, it explores issues of climate and social equity, the nature of the current era of Earth’s geohistory, the perspectives of the elite polluters driving climate change, and the regrettable contributions of anthropologists and other scholars to climate change. The book also engages with the sociology, political science and geography of climate change; by exploring these various approaches to thinking about and responding to the existential threat of an ever warming climate, the authors lay the foundation for a brave new sustainable world that is socially just, highly democratic, and climatically-safe for humans and other species. This book will be of interest to researchers and students in Environmental Anthropology, Climate Change, Human Geography, Sociology, and Political Science.
Introduction
1. Climate change, climate science, and anthropology
2. Conflicting anthropological perspectives: Cultural ecological/ecological anthropological, cultural interpretive, and critical anthropology perspectives of climate change
3. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or whatever: Rethinking our era of climate change production
4. Social inequality and climate change
5. Planetary health: A critical health anthropological perspective
6. Toward a critical anthropology of climate refugees
7. Can ecological modernization contain climate change? How the rich and powerful seek to address the ecological crisis
8. The scholarly elephant in the sky: How can anthropologists and other scholars grapple with their heavy reliance on flying in the era of ecocrisis
9. Two genres of the climate movement: Climate action vs climate justice
10. Towards a critical anthropology of the future: Climate change and future scenarios
11. Eco-socialism as the ultimate climate change mitigation strategy
Epilogue
Biography
Hans A. Baer is Principal Honorary Research Fellow, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Merrill Singer is Professor Emeritus in Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut
