The Anthropology of Climate Change An Historical Reader

by Dove, Michael R.

• ISBN13: 9781118383001
• ISBN10: 1118383001
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-02-10
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This timely anthology 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
• 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

Author 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, Deputy Director of the Climate and Energy Institute, and Curator of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, Yale University.  His interests include the cultural and political aspects of natural hazards and disasters; political dimensions of resource degradation; indigenous environmental knowledge; and the study of developmental and environmental institutions, discourses, and movements. He is author of The Banana Tree at the Gate: The History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo (2011), co-editor of Complicating Conservation: Beyond the Sacred Forest (2011) and Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader (Blackwell, 2008), and editor of Southeast Asian Grasslands: Understanding a Folk Landscape (2008).

Table of Contents

Original Sources

Preface

Acknowledgments

I. INTRODUCTION

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

II. CONTINUITIES

‘Climate Theory’

1. Airs Waters Places
Hippocrates

2. Of Laws in Relation to the Nature of the Climate
Charles de Secondat Montesquieu

Beyond the Greco-Roman Tradition

3. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History
Ibn Khaldûn

4. The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: an Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine
Francis Zimmermann

Ethno-Meteorology

5. Concerning Weather Signs
Theophrastus

6. Gruff Boreas, Deadly Calms: A Medical Perspective on Winds and the Victorians
Vladimir Jankovic

III. SOCIETAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

Environmental Determinism

7. The History of Mankind
Friedrich Ratzel

8. Environment and Culture in the Amazon Basin: An Appraisal of the Theory of Environmental Determinism
Betty J. Meggers

Climate Change and Societal Collapse

9. Management for Extinction in Norse Greenland
Thomas H. McGovern

10. What Drives Societal Collapse?
Harvey Weiss and Raymond Bradley

Climatic Events as Social Crucibles

11. Natural Disaster and Political Crisis in a Polynesian Society: An Exploration of Operational Research
James Spillius

12. Drought as "Revelatory Crisis": An Exploration of Shifting Entitlements and Hierarchies in the Kalahari, Botswana
Jacqueline Solway

IV. VULNERABILITY AND CONTROL

Culture and Control of Climate

13. Rain-Shrines of the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia
Elizabeth Colson

14. El Niño, Early Peruvian Civilization, and Human Agency: Some Thoughts from the Lurin Valley
Richard L. Burger

Climatic Disasters and Social Marginalization

15. The Disaster and Its Doubles
Nancy Scheper-Hughes

16. ‘Nature’, ‘Culture’ and Disasters: Floods and Gender in Bangladesh
Rosalind Shaw

V. KNOWLEDGE AND ITS CIRCULATION

Emic Views of Climatic Perturbation/Disaster

17. Typhoons on Yap
David M. Schneider

18. The Politics of Place: Inhabiting and Defending Glacier Hazard Zones in Peru's Cordillera Blanca
M. Carey

Coproduction of Knowledge in Climatic and Social Histories

19. Melting Glaciers and Emerging Histories in the Saint Elias Mountains
Julie Cruikshank

20. The Making and Unmaking of Rains and Reigns
Todd Sanders

‘Friction’ in the Global Circulation of Climate Knowledge

21. Transnational Locals: Brazilian Experience of the Climate Regime
Myanna Lahsen

22. Channeling Globality: The 1997-1998 El Niño Climate Event in Peru
Kenneth Broad and Ben Orlove