“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, January 1, 2011

Wow, just wow

This just in: Anthropology needs a speculative turn, and fast. I wondered why it was the Anthro types who gave me the most flak at Johns Hopkins recently. They think that studying climate change means something like being value neutral about competing stories. And they're using Stengers to back them up.

"Should Anthropologists Believe in Climate Change?" (my emphasis). Wow. Just wow.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would have expected you to pick up on the speculative in my post. Thus I wrote:

The solution – it seems to me – to the analytical puzzle is to point out that the experience of climate change is one of threat/opportunity before an uncertain future.

All of climate science is organized around a problem of anticipating an uncertain future. Hence it plays into the quasi-apocalyptic fears ...

...an implication is that lots of people take climate change as an opportunity, and this opportunism is threatening.

Timothy Morton said...

Hi Jerome—I did. I'm referring to your sense of anthropology's stance on this.