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Lives with Others: Climate Change and Human-Animal Relations*

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Lives with Others: Climate Change and Human-Animal Relations* AN41CH02-Cassidy ARI 16 August 2012 12:31 Lives With Others: Climate Change and Human-Animal Relations∗ Rebecca Cassidy Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London, London SE14 6NW, United Kingdom; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012. 41:21–36 Keywords First published online as a Review in Advance on anthrozoology, perspectivism, applied anthropology, climate politics June 28, 2012 by Roskilde University on 05/29/13. For personal use only. The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at Abstract anthro.annualreviews.org This review assesses the contribution that a holistic, multisited, and mul- This article’s doi: tiscalar anthropology can make to the investigation of climate change Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:21-36. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org 10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145706 and its impact on various human-animal assemblages. Anthropologists Copyright c 2012 by Annual Reviews. have a long-standing interest in animal management under changing All rights reserved environmental conditions. I focus on recent material that investigates 0084-6570/12/1021-0021$20.00 the impact of anthropogenic climate change on human-animal rela- ∗This article is part of a special theme on tions using ethnography from Africa, Amazonia, and the circumpolar Climate Change. For a list of other articles in rim. I argue that the value of juxtaposing work in diverse settings and this theme, see this volume’s Table of Contents. across various scales is to highlight the asymmetry of encounters be- tween different perceptions of climate change and the responses they require. Anthropology’s critical, holistic approach is especially valuable in places where people, animals, landscapes, the weather, and indeed cli- mate change itself are aspects of an undifferentiated, spiritually lively, animate environment. 21 AN41CH02-Cassidy ARI 16 August 2012 12:31 INTRODUCTION1 understanding of the variety of local contexts in which climate change occurs and is produced Anthropologists have recently begun to engage but also to open the black box of regional and Adaptation: with climate change as a global process in- international debate, which frames the problem adjustments in forming our understanding of every field site, (Lahsen 2010, Marino & Schweitzer 2009). ecosystems that whether at the core, where climate change is ameliorate the harm Early anthropological engagements with the produced, or on the periphery, where many caused by, or make use effects of climate stress on human-animal re- of its effects are experienced (Crate 2011). of, actual or expected lations focused particularly on animal man- changes in climate Changes in human relationships with animals agement and social organization in semiarid have been one of the key drivers for the in- Applied and arid regions of Africa. More recently, an- anthropology: the creased attention paid to climate change in thropologists have used political ecology and use of anthropological many regions, but particularly in the Arctic, applied anthropology to interrogate climate approaches to solve where reindeer herders occupy the front line problems change as an instantiation of global inequality (Anderson & Nuttall 2004, Hovelsrud & Smit and to advocate for change. Others have ex- Perspectivism: 2010, Vitebsky 2005), and among the island and the idea that humans, plored the perspectivist ethnographic record in coastal fishing communities, whose very exis- animals and sprits see order to expose the capitalist logic embedded in tence is under threat (Kelman & West 2009, themselves differently climate discourses and to imagine how climate depending on the body Rudiak-Gould 2009). change might appear from within other-than- they inhabit The anthropology of climate change is capitalist cosmologies. This approach com- currently exploring two different paths. The bines the latest approaches in human-animal re- first catalogs the adaptation of vulnerable lations, including multispecies ethnographies, communities. The second explores climate with the longer tradition of holistic anthro- change as a process that is generated by an pology, which considers people and animals, exploitative set of world historical relationships weather, and landscape as elements of a single between people, the effects of which are environment (Bateson 1972, Ingold 2000). experienced unequally. Its purpose is to expose these inequalities in order to change them and save the world (Connor 2010, Lindisfarne CHANGING CLIMATE AND 2010). The first approach is epitomized by HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONS articles that invite us to learn from “Siberian In 1928, Vere Gordon Childe argued that the Nomads’ Resilience,” for example (Kalaugher drying of the climate in North Africa at the end 2010). Kalaugher’s article describes adapta- of the Pleistocene led to the concentration of by Roskilde University on 05/29/13. For personal use only. tions to climate change and industrialization people and animals around oases and created by the Yamal Nenets but is silent about the the necessary conditions for the beginnings production of these conditions or how they of agriculture. This hypothesis, known as might be changed. Warming temperatures, Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:21-36. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org the oasis theory, was criticized by Braidwood the incursions of oil and gas companies, and who argued that earlier warming periods had the accompanying degradation of rivers and not led to domestication (1951) and also that lakes are challenges overcome by “avoiding conditions in Iraqi Kurdistan had changed disturbed and degraded areas” (p. 1). A critical little during the transition from the Pleistocene environmental approach, on the contrary, to the Holocene (1960). Although archaeol- considers climate change and environmental ogists have continued to describe the effects degradation as global political/ecological phe- of changing climate on prehistoric cultural nomena. It requires us not only to increase our systems (Burroughs 2005, Hunter-Anderson 2010), grand schema have been rejected in favor of local explanations, which use a variety 1The article is based on the current consensus that the climate is changing and that this is likely to be as a result of human of methods to assess multiple kinds of evidence actions and inactions (IPCC 2007). to explain localized, temporally limited events 22 Cassidy AN41CH02-Cassidy ARI 16 August 2012 12:31 (Maher et al. 2011). In North West Europe, predates the recognition of anthropogenic cli- for example, a combination of archaeological, mate change. This interest was developed paleoecological, and paleoclimatic data has among pastoralists in arid and semiarid regions Anthropogenic been employed to suggest that changes in in Africa during the 1950s and 1960s (for a climate change: climate contributed to the emergence of a review of this material, see Dyson-Hudson & changes in the climate Neolithic mixed farming economy from a Dyson-Hudson 1980). In these studies, the sig- caused by human Mesolithic hunting-and-gathering economy nificance of relations with animals is found in activity based primarily on fishing (Bonsall et al. 2002). their impact on human social arrangements. Human-animal The most studied of the prehistoric climate The “seasonal dichotomy” between flood and assemblage: a coolings is the so-called 8.2 ka event, which drought, for example, was the dynamic at the particular instantiation of fluid and responsive took place when the North Atlantic currents center of Evans Pritchard’s (1940) structural relationships among shifted and the Northern Hemisphere experi- functionalist study of the Nuer (p. 272). His people, animals, and enced a short dry and cold spell. The impact characterization of the Nuer as “deeply demo- the environment of this cold snap on human-animal relations is cratic and easily roused to violence” was based the focus of a study at Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria on their conflicts with the Dinka over the “con- conducted by a team from Leiden University. trol of pastures” and “annexation of grazing Akkermans et al. (2010) analyzed 15,000 animal grounds” (1940, pp. 16, 48) during times of bones and found that, in this location, 8.2 ka ecological stress. Subsequent studies of the re- coincided with a change from pig to cattle lationship between the Nuer and the Dinka husbandry. Milk traces in pottery and spindles suggest that conflict was exacerbated by the also appeared suddenly; the secondary products expansion of the Ethiopian empire and colo- of sheep and goats are easy to store and may nial invasion, rather than an inevitable result of have been particularly useful during a time of competition for grazing land ( Johnson 1981). climatic stress (Russell 2010). In addition to a Spencer’s (1973) work with Rendille camel focus on sites such as Tell Sabi Abyad, where herders and Sambru cattle herders in Kenya, the archaeological record straddles significant who formed a symbiotic relationship based on and relatively well-defined climatic events, the complementary properties of their respec- an approach that concentrates on the impact tive charges, supported the idea that scarcity of climate changes on particular species has of resources can prompt cooperation as well as emerged. Santangelo (2011), for example, conflict. focuses exclusively on the hamsi or Black Sea anchovy. Ogilvie et al. (2009) have explored by Roskilde University on 05/29/13. For personal use only. relationships between seals, ice, and climate POLITICAL ECOLOGY change in medieval Norse Greenland,
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