气候:拮抗剂

IF 1.7 1区 社会学 Q1 ANTHROPOLOGY
Catherine Kearns
{"title":"气候:拮抗剂","authors":"Catherine Kearns","doi":"10.1111/aman.28102","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Pugilistic or militaristic metaphors are everywhere in conversations on environmental crises, not least in the perceived trenches of climate change. The “fight like hell” that Solnit incites belongs to a broader semantic field of agonistic conflict and “war talk” on the rise in public discourse about impending climate-related changes and political decision-making (e.g., Mangat and Dalby <span>2018</span>).1 This battle rhetoric is provocative, but often elliptical: whom or what is the fight against? Whose battles? Many who deploy this language in relation to climate change mitigation, like Solnit, are really depicting a fight against fossil fuel company executives and agents, neoliberal leaders, private equity firms, and capitalist institutions who block progressive policies for reducing global carbon emissions to the mystical “net-zero.” War talk like this thus often targets the figures or apparatus responsible for <i>anthropogenic</i> climate change (Moore and Antonacci <span>2023</span>; see e.g., Mann <span>2021</span>) (Figure 1).</p><p>But for many publics, it slips into a fight <i>against</i> climate, pitting the survival of humanity against material phenomena like weather events or quantified CO<sub>2</sub> levels, and aims to marshal a range of tactics—from reducing everyday meat consumption to lobbying for renewable energies. In doing so, the language converts what many might rightly recognize as a multiscalar and political problem, like climate or climate change, into a reified, singular antagonist. Such metaphors are deemed important for rallying publics to the cause of fighting for present and future conditions, and for regrouping people away from the ranks of defeatism or doomism. At another more historical register, they belong to a wider “renaturing” turn toward biopolitics and environmental determinism by those who would see human history as a series of human-nature conflicts driving civilizational rise and fall (on determinism and renaturing, see e.g., González-Ruibal <span>2018</span>; Arponen et al. <span>2019</span>). With all due disrespect to Jared Diamond (<span>2005</span>).</p><p>If climate or climate change is akin to an oppositional battle “out there,” it can be compartmentalized and categorized in distinction from other kinds of agency. Such a move reinforces our long-lived, persistent Western binary of nature versus culture. That rhetorical division is not just intellectually insufficient but has real material effects, as policymakers can claim that they are tackling the “climate problem” reified and quantified as carbon emissions, not the neoliberal capitalist relations and problems of social and environmental justice that oppress many communities, especially in the Global South (Sultana <span>2022</span>).</p><p>That move also implies that we all agree on what “climate” is and how to quantify it, as if it is a universal, a familiar linguistic trick of the Global North. But universality is constructed and created with the authority of some—standard Anglophone definitions of climate, for instance, refer to an average of temperature and precipitation over a region, usually based on meteorological records.2 As others note, such universality tends to obscure the scalar complexities and grounded particularities that condition how humans engage with the world around them, from local experiences to varied and structurally uneven encounters with regional, global, and even planetary systems (see Masco <span>2010</span>; and the ideas of Gilheany, Barnett, Stewart, and Hunter in this forum).</p><p>Is climate, in the way this sort of rhetoric normatively conceptualizes it, a universal construction? Is it transhistorical? Is it rather a blend of folk concepts, science, and political frameworks? And for some of the questions posed by this forum—how should archaeologists write and talk about climate? Do deep histories of something we could call climate matter, in these fraught conversations and in an age of deepening anxiety, of risk, of insecurity, in which the militarization of nature has already shaped our understandings of planetary crisis (Masco <span>2010</span>)?</p><p>They do matter, but we ought to be aware of the momentum of agonistic rhetoric in conversations that offer deeper histories as relevant material for our current experiences or desires for mitigation. We are in an age of grand narratives, macroscalar and nearly always masculinist projections of human history as a progressivist story of winning or losing <i>against</i> climate. Recent calls for thinking with planetary scales of history or “earth systems humanities” contribute to this wave of abstraction, reinvoking debates on the merits of smaller or larger scales of historiography (e.g., Chakrabarty <span>2021</span>). We are seeing a return to systems thinking, for example, in the increasingly varied and often vague use of terms like resilience and sustainability (e.g., Jacobson <span>2022</span>). Agonistic histories thus find audiences. They promote normative values of climate change in the past: “Bad” climate changes collided with human practices and created Malthusian tipping points that fueled or triggered societal collapse. That green arithmetic not only poorly constrains our historiographical lens to only look for crisis and catastrophe in the past, but equally has tended to reinforce a myopia of climate crisis as we strain to predict and imagine presents and futures (Hulme <span>2011</span>; see also Hunter in this forum).</p><p>Archaeologists have been working diligently to call out macroscalar determinism and functionalism for their inherent weaknesses in explaining historical processes and in accounting for the messiness and diversity of human agency. Take, for example, many of the wonderful critiques of the historiographical problem of the proposed (and now voted-down) Anthropocene epoch: Archaeologists rightly point out the dimensionality of human-environment relationships across millennia, the complex and unexpected scales of exploitation and extraction of resources associated with empires and colonialism in the shift toward industrialization, and the political and cultural variability of decision-making in settlement and land use practices (e.g., Morrison <span>2018</span>). A billion Black anthropocenes or none, as Kathryn Yusoff (<span>2019</span>) has put it. And we are positioned well to highlight the incredible particularism and contingencies of these interrelationships as well as their unevenness and fitfulness: how choices in what and how to consume, produce, or discard are made by some at the expense of others; how human-environment relationships are imagined and made, and equally make complex societies at varying interrelated scales (see Stewart Gilheany this forum).</p><p>While there has been growing pushback to the flatness of the Anthropocene, climate change remains, in the rhetoric of the Global North, reified. We can also see this in archaeological applications that aim to study how climate changes triggered economic and political developments (e.g., Weiberg and Finné <span>2018</span>) or in newly branded fields, like the “history of climate and society” (Degroot et al. <span>2021</span>). Climate changes—from wet to dry or from hot to cool—populate these histories as the antagonists or oppositional structures to human societal action. There are several trajectories behind formulations like this, especially something like the bias toward (or the real preference for) the seemingly objective, scientific reconstruction of ancient climates done by paleoclimate scientists who use regional proxies to describe material conditions. What is also at stake is the reification of natural records <i>as</i> climate, rather than as proxies for particular phenomena—lake sediment formation, pollen accumulation, subsurface hydrologies—records that are made via all sorts of methodological compromises and statistical estimations. What results is only, at best, a sketch of trends, not <i>climate</i>.</p><p>The reification of past climates works to create an abstraction that can be measured according to certain agreed-upon standards between various kinds of disciplines, all of which are up for debate, and relevant and valid for certain kinds of research. But in the context of relentless economic growth and progressivist stories of accumulation and capitalism, we have also started to fetishize a modern, Western, scientifically identifiable climate (Moore and Antonacci <span>2023</span>). This kind of reification obscures the political and social relations that generate, reproduce, or alter environmental changes as well as further instantiates the idea of universal climate change (Sultana <span>2022</span>; Whyte <span>2020</span>). Climate is a complex construct that mediates human-environment relationships, with historically contingent politics and cultural dynamics, in often uneven ways (Kearns <span>2023</span>). It, in other words, has sociohistorical structures that form through material and immaterial relations, a mediation emerging from engagements with the world that come to structure how humans think about weather and environments through norms, habits, and practices. When we turn to trying to understand diverse human-environment dynamics, we should not take those relations for granted but should make them the primary focus of analysis through the lens of political ecology (e.g., Morehart et al. <span>2018</span>): How did those relations reproduce social difference? Whose climate relations are we telling or historicizing, and whose are omitted?</p><p>Archaeologists could intervene in discourses that aim to galvanize diverse publics precisely through our investigations on the uneven relations and scalar formations that forge environmental and climate changes, such as the relentlessly deteriorating crises enacted through capitalism and progressivist fundamentalism. As archaeologists and historians, we are responsible for revealing the messiness, variability, and dimensionality of human-environment relationships throughout Earth's history, especially those prior to or outside capitalism; by fracturing Western binaries or convenient rise and fall histories; by resisting the universality imposed on normative concepts like climate; by bearing witness to histories of structural inequalities (see Hauser et al. <span>2018</span>). Archaeologists are well suited not only to attend to the material mediations of human relations with nonhuman worlds and to introduce theoretical challenges to the reification of past phenomena but also to help others examine the past on its own terms (e.g., Cabral and Gaggioli this forum). That move entails raising caution about the nostalgia of past climates and an abstracted “danger” of future ones. We can contribute not just to building better models of the present and future by drawing on rich archaeologies of land use history (e.g., the LandCover6K project, Morrison et al. <span>2021</span> and this forum), but also by using multiscalar investigations to weaken assumptions about how prevailing regional climatic conditions would have antagonized human groups. In my own fieldwork on the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, for example, intergenerational practices of water and soil management in semiarid watersheds reveal diverse localized orientations to the politics of resource use during the Iron Age (Kearns and Georgiadou <span>2021</span>; Kearns <span>2023</span>). What would appear as “risky” or unstable land, for example, in the highly gypseous and weather-dependent soils west of the nonperennial Vasilikos River, became places for community rootedness and gathering. Such records provide counternarratives to commonly held ideas that Mediterranean microclimates acted in the same ways as external triggers to productivity and suggest instead how humans construct and perceive climates of their own making.</p><p>The consensus of Western science is neither encompassing of global humanity nor historiographically adequate. And as a neoliberal and imperialist project, it is obfuscating and self-serving. The war talk that aims to preserve the commons by enlisting publics against fossil fuel executives is not in itself necessarily problematic, but in its abstractions of climate, it can risk perpetuating the same kinds of hegemonic discourse that promote agonistic histories of climate and society concurrent with late-stage capitalism (see Hutchings and La Salle <span>2015</span>). We should study struggles, for example, in the uneven politics of class, race, and gender driving human-environment interactions, while continuously asking to and for whom we are accountable (Cameron <span>2012</span>; Shaw <span>2016</span>; Stahl <span>2020</span>). We should, then, challenge the idealist metaphor of “history as justice” in popular discourse about environmental crises, such as Pope Francis's admonition in 2017 that “history will judge our decision” about denying the realities of climate science, or a letter penned by youth activists Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate that warns the global media that their decisions today will be adjudicated by “history.”3 Our discipline might know better than others that we cannot romanticize nor turn to an abstract “capital H” history to act as judge of our decisions or to defer moral action now. We, as archaeologists, produce our archives and narratives of the past (Hauser et al. <span>2018</span>). As we have seen over the last decade especially, archaeologists are epistemically confronting the problems of scale—human and nonhuman—exploring futurity, temporality, and horizons of possibility across material and immaterial relations (e.g., Yao <span>2019</span>). The ethics of doing archaeology and environmental history today should involve eschewing militaristic binaries by studying and uplifting other forms of situated knowledge and by highlighting the dangers of yielding to progressivist or providential time or to abstractions of externalized, antagonistic climates.</p>","PeriodicalId":7697,"journal":{"name":"American Anthropologist","volume":"127 3","pages":"645-648"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7000,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28102","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Climate the Antagonist\",\"authors\":\"Catherine Kearns\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/aman.28102\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>Pugilistic or militaristic metaphors are everywhere in conversations on environmental crises, not least in the perceived trenches of climate change. The “fight like hell” that Solnit incites belongs to a broader semantic field of agonistic conflict and “war talk” on the rise in public discourse about impending climate-related changes and political decision-making (e.g., Mangat and Dalby <span>2018</span>).1 This battle rhetoric is provocative, but often elliptical: whom or what is the fight against? Whose battles? Many who deploy this language in relation to climate change mitigation, like Solnit, are really depicting a fight against fossil fuel company executives and agents, neoliberal leaders, private equity firms, and capitalist institutions who block progressive policies for reducing global carbon emissions to the mystical “net-zero.” War talk like this thus often targets the figures or apparatus responsible for <i>anthropogenic</i> climate change (Moore and Antonacci <span>2023</span>; see e.g., Mann <span>2021</span>) (Figure 1).</p><p>But for many publics, it slips into a fight <i>against</i> climate, pitting the survival of humanity against material phenomena like weather events or quantified CO<sub>2</sub> levels, and aims to marshal a range of tactics—from reducing everyday meat consumption to lobbying for renewable energies. In doing so, the language converts what many might rightly recognize as a multiscalar and political problem, like climate or climate change, into a reified, singular antagonist. Such metaphors are deemed important for rallying publics to the cause of fighting for present and future conditions, and for regrouping people away from the ranks of defeatism or doomism. At another more historical register, they belong to a wider “renaturing” turn toward biopolitics and environmental determinism by those who would see human history as a series of human-nature conflicts driving civilizational rise and fall (on determinism and renaturing, see e.g., González-Ruibal <span>2018</span>; Arponen et al. <span>2019</span>). With all due disrespect to Jared Diamond (<span>2005</span>).</p><p>If climate or climate change is akin to an oppositional battle “out there,” it can be compartmentalized and categorized in distinction from other kinds of agency. Such a move reinforces our long-lived, persistent Western binary of nature versus culture. That rhetorical division is not just intellectually insufficient but has real material effects, as policymakers can claim that they are tackling the “climate problem” reified and quantified as carbon emissions, not the neoliberal capitalist relations and problems of social and environmental justice that oppress many communities, especially in the Global South (Sultana <span>2022</span>).</p><p>That move also implies that we all agree on what “climate” is and how to quantify it, as if it is a universal, a familiar linguistic trick of the Global North. But universality is constructed and created with the authority of some—standard Anglophone definitions of climate, for instance, refer to an average of temperature and precipitation over a region, usually based on meteorological records.2 As others note, such universality tends to obscure the scalar complexities and grounded particularities that condition how humans engage with the world around them, from local experiences to varied and structurally uneven encounters with regional, global, and even planetary systems (see Masco <span>2010</span>; and the ideas of Gilheany, Barnett, Stewart, and Hunter in this forum).</p><p>Is climate, in the way this sort of rhetoric normatively conceptualizes it, a universal construction? Is it transhistorical? Is it rather a blend of folk concepts, science, and political frameworks? And for some of the questions posed by this forum—how should archaeologists write and talk about climate? Do deep histories of something we could call climate matter, in these fraught conversations and in an age of deepening anxiety, of risk, of insecurity, in which the militarization of nature has already shaped our understandings of planetary crisis (Masco <span>2010</span>)?</p><p>They do matter, but we ought to be aware of the momentum of agonistic rhetoric in conversations that offer deeper histories as relevant material for our current experiences or desires for mitigation. We are in an age of grand narratives, macroscalar and nearly always masculinist projections of human history as a progressivist story of winning or losing <i>against</i> climate. Recent calls for thinking with planetary scales of history or “earth systems humanities” contribute to this wave of abstraction, reinvoking debates on the merits of smaller or larger scales of historiography (e.g., Chakrabarty <span>2021</span>). We are seeing a return to systems thinking, for example, in the increasingly varied and often vague use of terms like resilience and sustainability (e.g., Jacobson <span>2022</span>). Agonistic histories thus find audiences. They promote normative values of climate change in the past: “Bad” climate changes collided with human practices and created Malthusian tipping points that fueled or triggered societal collapse. That green arithmetic not only poorly constrains our historiographical lens to only look for crisis and catastrophe in the past, but equally has tended to reinforce a myopia of climate crisis as we strain to predict and imagine presents and futures (Hulme <span>2011</span>; see also Hunter in this forum).</p><p>Archaeologists have been working diligently to call out macroscalar determinism and functionalism for their inherent weaknesses in explaining historical processes and in accounting for the messiness and diversity of human agency. Take, for example, many of the wonderful critiques of the historiographical problem of the proposed (and now voted-down) Anthropocene epoch: Archaeologists rightly point out the dimensionality of human-environment relationships across millennia, the complex and unexpected scales of exploitation and extraction of resources associated with empires and colonialism in the shift toward industrialization, and the political and cultural variability of decision-making in settlement and land use practices (e.g., Morrison <span>2018</span>). A billion Black anthropocenes or none, as Kathryn Yusoff (<span>2019</span>) has put it. And we are positioned well to highlight the incredible particularism and contingencies of these interrelationships as well as their unevenness and fitfulness: how choices in what and how to consume, produce, or discard are made by some at the expense of others; how human-environment relationships are imagined and made, and equally make complex societies at varying interrelated scales (see Stewart Gilheany this forum).</p><p>While there has been growing pushback to the flatness of the Anthropocene, climate change remains, in the rhetoric of the Global North, reified. We can also see this in archaeological applications that aim to study how climate changes triggered economic and political developments (e.g., Weiberg and Finné <span>2018</span>) or in newly branded fields, like the “history of climate and society” (Degroot et al. <span>2021</span>). Climate changes—from wet to dry or from hot to cool—populate these histories as the antagonists or oppositional structures to human societal action. There are several trajectories behind formulations like this, especially something like the bias toward (or the real preference for) the seemingly objective, scientific reconstruction of ancient climates done by paleoclimate scientists who use regional proxies to describe material conditions. What is also at stake is the reification of natural records <i>as</i> climate, rather than as proxies for particular phenomena—lake sediment formation, pollen accumulation, subsurface hydrologies—records that are made via all sorts of methodological compromises and statistical estimations. What results is only, at best, a sketch of trends, not <i>climate</i>.</p><p>The reification of past climates works to create an abstraction that can be measured according to certain agreed-upon standards between various kinds of disciplines, all of which are up for debate, and relevant and valid for certain kinds of research. But in the context of relentless economic growth and progressivist stories of accumulation and capitalism, we have also started to fetishize a modern, Western, scientifically identifiable climate (Moore and Antonacci <span>2023</span>). This kind of reification obscures the political and social relations that generate, reproduce, or alter environmental changes as well as further instantiates the idea of universal climate change (Sultana <span>2022</span>; Whyte <span>2020</span>). Climate is a complex construct that mediates human-environment relationships, with historically contingent politics and cultural dynamics, in often uneven ways (Kearns <span>2023</span>). It, in other words, has sociohistorical structures that form through material and immaterial relations, a mediation emerging from engagements with the world that come to structure how humans think about weather and environments through norms, habits, and practices. When we turn to trying to understand diverse human-environment dynamics, we should not take those relations for granted but should make them the primary focus of analysis through the lens of political ecology (e.g., Morehart et al. <span>2018</span>): How did those relations reproduce social difference? Whose climate relations are we telling or historicizing, and whose are omitted?</p><p>Archaeologists could intervene in discourses that aim to galvanize diverse publics precisely through our investigations on the uneven relations and scalar formations that forge environmental and climate changes, such as the relentlessly deteriorating crises enacted through capitalism and progressivist fundamentalism. As archaeologists and historians, we are responsible for revealing the messiness, variability, and dimensionality of human-environment relationships throughout Earth's history, especially those prior to or outside capitalism; by fracturing Western binaries or convenient rise and fall histories; by resisting the universality imposed on normative concepts like climate; by bearing witness to histories of structural inequalities (see Hauser et al. <span>2018</span>). Archaeologists are well suited not only to attend to the material mediations of human relations with nonhuman worlds and to introduce theoretical challenges to the reification of past phenomena but also to help others examine the past on its own terms (e.g., Cabral and Gaggioli this forum). That move entails raising caution about the nostalgia of past climates and an abstracted “danger” of future ones. We can contribute not just to building better models of the present and future by drawing on rich archaeologies of land use history (e.g., the LandCover6K project, Morrison et al. <span>2021</span> and this forum), but also by using multiscalar investigations to weaken assumptions about how prevailing regional climatic conditions would have antagonized human groups. In my own fieldwork on the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, for example, intergenerational practices of water and soil management in semiarid watersheds reveal diverse localized orientations to the politics of resource use during the Iron Age (Kearns and Georgiadou <span>2021</span>; Kearns <span>2023</span>). What would appear as “risky” or unstable land, for example, in the highly gypseous and weather-dependent soils west of the nonperennial Vasilikos River, became places for community rootedness and gathering. Such records provide counternarratives to commonly held ideas that Mediterranean microclimates acted in the same ways as external triggers to productivity and suggest instead how humans construct and perceive climates of their own making.</p><p>The consensus of Western science is neither encompassing of global humanity nor historiographically adequate. And as a neoliberal and imperialist project, it is obfuscating and self-serving. The war talk that aims to preserve the commons by enlisting publics against fossil fuel executives is not in itself necessarily problematic, but in its abstractions of climate, it can risk perpetuating the same kinds of hegemonic discourse that promote agonistic histories of climate and society concurrent with late-stage capitalism (see Hutchings and La Salle <span>2015</span>). We should study struggles, for example, in the uneven politics of class, race, and gender driving human-environment interactions, while continuously asking to and for whom we are accountable (Cameron <span>2012</span>; Shaw <span>2016</span>; Stahl <span>2020</span>). We should, then, challenge the idealist metaphor of “history as justice” in popular discourse about environmental crises, such as Pope Francis's admonition in 2017 that “history will judge our decision” about denying the realities of climate science, or a letter penned by youth activists Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate that warns the global media that their decisions today will be adjudicated by “history.”3 Our discipline might know better than others that we cannot romanticize nor turn to an abstract “capital H” history to act as judge of our decisions or to defer moral action now. We, as archaeologists, produce our archives and narratives of the past (Hauser et al. <span>2018</span>). As we have seen over the last decade especially, archaeologists are epistemically confronting the problems of scale—human and nonhuman—exploring futurity, temporality, and horizons of possibility across material and immaterial relations (e.g., Yao <span>2019</span>). The ethics of doing archaeology and environmental history today should involve eschewing militaristic binaries by studying and uplifting other forms of situated knowledge and by highlighting the dangers of yielding to progressivist or providential time or to abstractions of externalized, antagonistic climates.</p>\",\"PeriodicalId\":7697,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"American Anthropologist\",\"volume\":\"127 3\",\"pages\":\"645-648\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":1.7000,\"publicationDate\":\"2025-07-15\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aman.28102\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"American Anthropologist\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"90\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.28102\",\"RegionNum\":1,\"RegionCategory\":\"社会学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q1\",\"JCRName\":\"ANTHROPOLOGY\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American Anthropologist","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.28102","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

摘要

在关于环境危机的对话中,好战或军国主义的隐喻无处不在,尤其是在气候变化的壕沟中。索尔尼特煽动的“像地狱一样的战斗”属于一个更广泛的语义领域,即激烈的冲突和“战争言论”,这是关于即将到来的气候相关变化和政治决策的公共话语的兴起(例如,Mangat和Dalby 2018)这种战斗修辞具有挑衅性,但往往是隐晦的:与谁或什么作斗争?谁的战争?许多使用这种语言来缓解气候变化的人,比如索尔尼特,实际上是在描绘一场与化石燃料公司高管和代理人、新自由主义领导人、私募股权公司和资本主义机构的斗争,这些机构阻碍了将全球碳排放减少到神秘的“净零”的进步政策。因此,像这样的战争言论经常针对人为气候变化的数字或设备(Moore and Antonacci 2023;参见Mann 2021)(图1)。但对许多公众来说,它滑向了一场对抗气候的斗争,将人类的生存与天气事件或量化的二氧化碳水平等物质现象对立起来,并旨在制定一系列策略——从减少日常肉类消费到游说可再生能源。在这样做的过程中,语言将许多人可能正确认识到的多尺度和政治问题,如气候或气候变化,转化为一个具体化的,单一的对手。这样的隐喻被认为是很重要的,它可以把公众团结到为现在和未来的状况而战的事业中来,也可以把人们从失败主义或世界末日论者的行列中重新组织起来。从另一个更历史的角度来看,它们属于更广泛的“自然”转向,转向生物政治和环境决定论,这些人将人类历史视为一系列推动文明兴衰的人与自然冲突(关于决定论和自然,参见González-Ruibal 2018; Arponen et al. 2019)。无意冒犯贾里德·戴蒙德(2005)。如果气候或气候变化类似于“在那里”的一场对立的战斗,那么它可以被划分和分类,以区别于其他类型的机构。这样的举动强化了我们长期存在的西方自然与文化的二元对立。这种修辞上的分歧不仅在智力上不够充分,而且具有实际的物质影响,因为政策制定者可以声称他们正在解决的“气候问题”具体化并量化为碳排放,而不是新自由主义资本主义关系以及压迫许多社区的社会和环境正义问题,特别是在全球南方(Sultana 2022)。这一举动还意味着,我们都同意“气候”是什么,以及如何量化它,就好像它是一个普遍的、熟悉的北半球语言技巧一样。但是,普遍性是在一些标准的英语国家对气候的定义的权威下建立起来的,例如,指的是一个地区的平均温度和降水,通常是基于气象记录的正如其他人所指出的那样,这种普遍性往往会掩盖标量的复杂性和基础的特殊性,这些复杂性和特殊性决定了人类如何与周围的世界互动,从当地的经历到与区域、全球甚至行星系统的不同和结构上的不平衡(参见Masco 2010;以及Gilheany、Barnett、Stewart和Hunter在这个论坛上的想法)。气候,以这种修辞规范概念化的方式,是一种普遍的建构吗?它是超越历史的吗?它是民间概念、科学和政治框架的混合体吗?对于这个论坛提出的一些问题——考古学家应该如何书写和谈论气候?在这些令人担忧的对话中,在一个焦虑、风险、不安全日益加深的时代,在这个时代,自然的军事化已经塑造了我们对地球危机的理解,在这个时代,我们可以称之为气候的深刻历史是否重要?它们确实很重要,但我们应该意识到,在对话中,敌对言辞的势头会为我们当前的经历或缓解的愿望提供更深刻的历史作为相关材料。我们正处在一个宏大叙事、宏观尺度的时代,而且几乎总是男性主义地把人类历史预测成一个进步主义者对抗气候的输赢故事。最近呼吁以行星尺度思考历史或“地球系统人文”的呼声助长了这一抽象浪潮,重新引发了关于更小或更大尺度史学优点的辩论(例如,Chakrabarty 2021)。我们正在看到系统思维的回归,例如,在弹性和可持续性等术语的日益多样化和往往模糊的使用中(例如,Jacobson 2022)。因此,激烈的历史找到了听众。 他们提倡过去气候变化的规范价值观:“糟糕的”气候变化与人类活动相冲突,创造了马尔萨斯临界点,助长或引发了社会崩溃。这种绿色算术不仅拙劣地限制了我们的史学镜头,使我们只关注过去的危机和灾难,而且在我们努力预测和想象现在和未来的时候,同样也倾向于加强对气候危机的短视(Hulme 2011;参见本论坛中的Hunter)。考古学家一直在努力指出宏观决定论和功能论在解释历史进程和解释人类能动性的混乱和多样性方面的内在弱点。举个例子,许多对提出的(现已被否决的)人类世时代的史学问题的精彩批评:考古学家正确地指出了几千年来人类与环境关系的维度,在向工业化转变的过程中,与帝国和殖民主义相关的资源开发和提取的复杂和意想不到的规模,以及定居和土地使用实践中决策的政治和文化可变性(例如,Morrison 2018)。正如凯瑟琳·尤索夫(Kathryn Yusoff)(2019年)所说,10亿个黑人人类世,或者没有。我们可以很好地强调这些相互关系中令人难以置信的特殊性和偶然性,以及它们的不均匀性和时代性:在消费、生产或丢弃什么和如何消费、生产或丢弃的选择是如何由一些人以牺牲其他人为代价做出的;人类与环境的关系是如何被想象和创造出来的,以及如何在不同的相互关联的尺度上创造复杂的社会(见斯图尔特·吉尔希尼本论坛)。尽管越来越多的人反对人类世的扁平化,但在全球北方的言辞中,气候变化仍然是具体化的。我们也可以在旨在研究气候变化如何引发经济和政治发展的考古应用中看到这一点(例如,Weiberg和finn<s:1> 2018),或者在新品牌领域,如“气候和社会史”(Degroot等人,2021)。气候变化——从潮湿到干燥或从炎热到寒冷——作为人类社会行为的对抗者或对立结构,在这些历史中占据了重要地位。这样的表述背后有几个轨迹,尤其是对古气候科学家使用区域代用物来描述物质条件的古气候科学家所做的看似客观、科学的古代气候重建的偏见(或真正的偏好)。同样受到威胁的是自然记录作为气候的物化,而不是作为特定现象的代用物——湖泊沉积物形成、花粉积累、地下水文——这些记录是通过各种方法妥协和统计估计得来的。结果充其量只是趋势的草图,而不是气候。对过去气候的物化创造了一种抽象的概念,可以根据不同学科之间商定的某些标准来衡量,所有这些标准都有待讨论,对某些类型的研究都是相关和有效的。但在无情的经济增长和关于积累和资本主义的进步主义故事的背景下,我们也开始崇拜一种现代的、西方的、科学上可识别的气候(Moore and Antonacci 2023)。这种物化模糊了产生、再现或改变环境变化的政治和社会关系,并进一步实例化了普遍气候变化的想法(Sultana 2022; Whyte 2020)。气候是一个复杂的结构,它以不平衡的方式调解人类与环境的关系,具有历史上偶然的政治和文化动态(Kearns 2023)。换句话说,它具有通过物质和非物质关系形成的社会历史结构,这是一种通过规范、习惯和实践来构建人类如何看待天气和环境的与世界的接触所产生的调解。当我们转向试图理解不同的人类环境动态时,我们不应该认为这些关系是理所当然的,而应该通过政治生态学的视角(例如,Morehart等人,2018)将它们作为分析的主要焦点:这些关系如何再现社会差异?我们在讲述谁的气候关系或将其历史化,又忽略了谁的气候关系?考古学家可以通过我们对造成环境和气候变化的不平衡关系和标量形成的调查,比如资本主义和进步主义原教旨主义造成的无情恶化的危机,来干预旨在激励不同公众的话语。 作为考古学家和历史学家,我们有责任揭示整个地球历史上人类与环境关系的混乱、可变性和维度,尤其是那些在资本主义之前或之后的时代;通过打破西方的二元对立或方便的兴衰历史;通过抵制强加于气候等规范性概念上的普遍性;通过见证结构性不平等的历史(见Hauser et al. 2018)。考古学家不仅适合于研究人类与非人类世界关系的物质中介,并对过去现象的物化提出理论挑战,而且还适合于帮助其他人以自己的方式检查过去(例如,卡布拉尔和Gaggioli这个论坛)。这一举措需要提高人们对过去气候的怀旧情绪和对未来气候的抽象“危险”的警惕。我们不仅可以通过利用丰富的土地利用历史考古(例如,LandCover6K项目,Morrison等人2021年和本论坛)为建立更好的现在和未来模型做出贡献,而且还可以通过多标量调查来削弱关于当前区域气候条件如何对抗人类群体的假设。例如,在我自己对地中海东部塞浦路斯岛的实地考察中,半干旱流域的水资源和土壤管理的代际实践揭示了铁器时代资源利用政治的不同本地化方向(Kearns和Georgiadou 2021; Kearns 2023)。例如,在非多年生瓦西里科斯河以西的高度石膏质和依赖天气的土壤中,那些看起来“危险”或不稳定的土地,变成了社区扎根和聚会的地方。这些记录反驳了人们普遍持有的观点,即地中海小气候的作用方式与生产力的外部触发因素相同,并表明人类是如何构建和感知自己制造的气候的。西方科学的共识既不包括全球人类,也不符合历史。作为一个新自由主义和帝国主义的项目,它是令人困惑和自私自利的。旨在通过动员公众反对化石燃料高管来保护公地的战争言论本身并不一定有问题,但在其对气候的抽象中,它可能会使同样类型的霸权话语永永化,这种话语促进了与后期资本主义同时发生的气候和社会的斗争历史(见Hutchings和La Salle 2015)。我们应该研究斗争,例如,在阶级、种族和性别的不平衡政治中推动人类与环境的相互作用,同时不断地问我们对谁负责,对谁负责(Cameron 2012; Shaw 2016; Stahl 2020)。因此,我们应该挑战关于环境危机的流行话语中“历史即正义”的理想主义隐喻,比如教皇方济各(Pope Francis)在2017年关于否认气候科学现实的警告,即“历史将评判我们的决定”,或者青年活动家格蕾塔·通伯格(Greta Thunberg)和凡妮莎·纳卡特(Vanessa Nakate)写的一封信,警告全球媒体,他们今天的决定将受到“历史”的裁决。我们的学科可能比其他学科更清楚,我们不能把历史浪漫化,也不能求助于抽象的“大写H”历史来评判我们的决定,也不能推迟现在的道德行动。作为考古学家,我们制作了我们的档案和对过去的叙述(Hauser et al. 2018)。正如我们在过去十年中所看到的那样,考古学家在认知上面临着尺度问题——人类和非人类——探索未来、时间性和跨越物质和非物质关系的可能性视野(例如,Yao 2019)。今天研究考古学和环境史的伦理应该包括通过研究和提升其他形式的情境知识来避免军国主义的二元对立,并强调屈服于进步主义或天意时间或外化、敌对气候的抽象的危险。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。

Climate the Antagonist

Climate the Antagonist

Climate the Antagonist

Climate the Antagonist

Climate the Antagonist

Climate the Antagonist

Pugilistic or militaristic metaphors are everywhere in conversations on environmental crises, not least in the perceived trenches of climate change. The “fight like hell” that Solnit incites belongs to a broader semantic field of agonistic conflict and “war talk” on the rise in public discourse about impending climate-related changes and political decision-making (e.g., Mangat and Dalby 2018).1 This battle rhetoric is provocative, but often elliptical: whom or what is the fight against? Whose battles? Many who deploy this language in relation to climate change mitigation, like Solnit, are really depicting a fight against fossil fuel company executives and agents, neoliberal leaders, private equity firms, and capitalist institutions who block progressive policies for reducing global carbon emissions to the mystical “net-zero.” War talk like this thus often targets the figures or apparatus responsible for anthropogenic climate change (Moore and Antonacci 2023; see e.g., Mann 2021) (Figure 1).

But for many publics, it slips into a fight against climate, pitting the survival of humanity against material phenomena like weather events or quantified CO2 levels, and aims to marshal a range of tactics—from reducing everyday meat consumption to lobbying for renewable energies. In doing so, the language converts what many might rightly recognize as a multiscalar and political problem, like climate or climate change, into a reified, singular antagonist. Such metaphors are deemed important for rallying publics to the cause of fighting for present and future conditions, and for regrouping people away from the ranks of defeatism or doomism. At another more historical register, they belong to a wider “renaturing” turn toward biopolitics and environmental determinism by those who would see human history as a series of human-nature conflicts driving civilizational rise and fall (on determinism and renaturing, see e.g., González-Ruibal 2018; Arponen et al. 2019). With all due disrespect to Jared Diamond (2005).

If climate or climate change is akin to an oppositional battle “out there,” it can be compartmentalized and categorized in distinction from other kinds of agency. Such a move reinforces our long-lived, persistent Western binary of nature versus culture. That rhetorical division is not just intellectually insufficient but has real material effects, as policymakers can claim that they are tackling the “climate problem” reified and quantified as carbon emissions, not the neoliberal capitalist relations and problems of social and environmental justice that oppress many communities, especially in the Global South (Sultana 2022).

That move also implies that we all agree on what “climate” is and how to quantify it, as if it is a universal, a familiar linguistic trick of the Global North. But universality is constructed and created with the authority of some—standard Anglophone definitions of climate, for instance, refer to an average of temperature and precipitation over a region, usually based on meteorological records.2 As others note, such universality tends to obscure the scalar complexities and grounded particularities that condition how humans engage with the world around them, from local experiences to varied and structurally uneven encounters with regional, global, and even planetary systems (see Masco 2010; and the ideas of Gilheany, Barnett, Stewart, and Hunter in this forum).

Is climate, in the way this sort of rhetoric normatively conceptualizes it, a universal construction? Is it transhistorical? Is it rather a blend of folk concepts, science, and political frameworks? And for some of the questions posed by this forum—how should archaeologists write and talk about climate? Do deep histories of something we could call climate matter, in these fraught conversations and in an age of deepening anxiety, of risk, of insecurity, in which the militarization of nature has already shaped our understandings of planetary crisis (Masco 2010)?

They do matter, but we ought to be aware of the momentum of agonistic rhetoric in conversations that offer deeper histories as relevant material for our current experiences or desires for mitigation. We are in an age of grand narratives, macroscalar and nearly always masculinist projections of human history as a progressivist story of winning or losing against climate. Recent calls for thinking with planetary scales of history or “earth systems humanities” contribute to this wave of abstraction, reinvoking debates on the merits of smaller or larger scales of historiography (e.g., Chakrabarty 2021). We are seeing a return to systems thinking, for example, in the increasingly varied and often vague use of terms like resilience and sustainability (e.g., Jacobson 2022). Agonistic histories thus find audiences. They promote normative values of climate change in the past: “Bad” climate changes collided with human practices and created Malthusian tipping points that fueled or triggered societal collapse. That green arithmetic not only poorly constrains our historiographical lens to only look for crisis and catastrophe in the past, but equally has tended to reinforce a myopia of climate crisis as we strain to predict and imagine presents and futures (Hulme 2011; see also Hunter in this forum).

Archaeologists have been working diligently to call out macroscalar determinism and functionalism for their inherent weaknesses in explaining historical processes and in accounting for the messiness and diversity of human agency. Take, for example, many of the wonderful critiques of the historiographical problem of the proposed (and now voted-down) Anthropocene epoch: Archaeologists rightly point out the dimensionality of human-environment relationships across millennia, the complex and unexpected scales of exploitation and extraction of resources associated with empires and colonialism in the shift toward industrialization, and the political and cultural variability of decision-making in settlement and land use practices (e.g., Morrison 2018). A billion Black anthropocenes or none, as Kathryn Yusoff (2019) has put it. And we are positioned well to highlight the incredible particularism and contingencies of these interrelationships as well as their unevenness and fitfulness: how choices in what and how to consume, produce, or discard are made by some at the expense of others; how human-environment relationships are imagined and made, and equally make complex societies at varying interrelated scales (see Stewart Gilheany this forum).

While there has been growing pushback to the flatness of the Anthropocene, climate change remains, in the rhetoric of the Global North, reified. We can also see this in archaeological applications that aim to study how climate changes triggered economic and political developments (e.g., Weiberg and Finné 2018) or in newly branded fields, like the “history of climate and society” (Degroot et al. 2021). Climate changes—from wet to dry or from hot to cool—populate these histories as the antagonists or oppositional structures to human societal action. There are several trajectories behind formulations like this, especially something like the bias toward (or the real preference for) the seemingly objective, scientific reconstruction of ancient climates done by paleoclimate scientists who use regional proxies to describe material conditions. What is also at stake is the reification of natural records as climate, rather than as proxies for particular phenomena—lake sediment formation, pollen accumulation, subsurface hydrologies—records that are made via all sorts of methodological compromises and statistical estimations. What results is only, at best, a sketch of trends, not climate.

The reification of past climates works to create an abstraction that can be measured according to certain agreed-upon standards between various kinds of disciplines, all of which are up for debate, and relevant and valid for certain kinds of research. But in the context of relentless economic growth and progressivist stories of accumulation and capitalism, we have also started to fetishize a modern, Western, scientifically identifiable climate (Moore and Antonacci 2023). This kind of reification obscures the political and social relations that generate, reproduce, or alter environmental changes as well as further instantiates the idea of universal climate change (Sultana 2022; Whyte 2020). Climate is a complex construct that mediates human-environment relationships, with historically contingent politics and cultural dynamics, in often uneven ways (Kearns 2023). It, in other words, has sociohistorical structures that form through material and immaterial relations, a mediation emerging from engagements with the world that come to structure how humans think about weather and environments through norms, habits, and practices. When we turn to trying to understand diverse human-environment dynamics, we should not take those relations for granted but should make them the primary focus of analysis through the lens of political ecology (e.g., Morehart et al. 2018): How did those relations reproduce social difference? Whose climate relations are we telling or historicizing, and whose are omitted?

Archaeologists could intervene in discourses that aim to galvanize diverse publics precisely through our investigations on the uneven relations and scalar formations that forge environmental and climate changes, such as the relentlessly deteriorating crises enacted through capitalism and progressivist fundamentalism. As archaeologists and historians, we are responsible for revealing the messiness, variability, and dimensionality of human-environment relationships throughout Earth's history, especially those prior to or outside capitalism; by fracturing Western binaries or convenient rise and fall histories; by resisting the universality imposed on normative concepts like climate; by bearing witness to histories of structural inequalities (see Hauser et al. 2018). Archaeologists are well suited not only to attend to the material mediations of human relations with nonhuman worlds and to introduce theoretical challenges to the reification of past phenomena but also to help others examine the past on its own terms (e.g., Cabral and Gaggioli this forum). That move entails raising caution about the nostalgia of past climates and an abstracted “danger” of future ones. We can contribute not just to building better models of the present and future by drawing on rich archaeologies of land use history (e.g., the LandCover6K project, Morrison et al. 2021 and this forum), but also by using multiscalar investigations to weaken assumptions about how prevailing regional climatic conditions would have antagonized human groups. In my own fieldwork on the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, for example, intergenerational practices of water and soil management in semiarid watersheds reveal diverse localized orientations to the politics of resource use during the Iron Age (Kearns and Georgiadou 2021; Kearns 2023). What would appear as “risky” or unstable land, for example, in the highly gypseous and weather-dependent soils west of the nonperennial Vasilikos River, became places for community rootedness and gathering. Such records provide counternarratives to commonly held ideas that Mediterranean microclimates acted in the same ways as external triggers to productivity and suggest instead how humans construct and perceive climates of their own making.

The consensus of Western science is neither encompassing of global humanity nor historiographically adequate. And as a neoliberal and imperialist project, it is obfuscating and self-serving. The war talk that aims to preserve the commons by enlisting publics against fossil fuel executives is not in itself necessarily problematic, but in its abstractions of climate, it can risk perpetuating the same kinds of hegemonic discourse that promote agonistic histories of climate and society concurrent with late-stage capitalism (see Hutchings and La Salle 2015). We should study struggles, for example, in the uneven politics of class, race, and gender driving human-environment interactions, while continuously asking to and for whom we are accountable (Cameron 2012; Shaw 2016; Stahl 2020). We should, then, challenge the idealist metaphor of “history as justice” in popular discourse about environmental crises, such as Pope Francis's admonition in 2017 that “history will judge our decision” about denying the realities of climate science, or a letter penned by youth activists Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate that warns the global media that their decisions today will be adjudicated by “history.”3 Our discipline might know better than others that we cannot romanticize nor turn to an abstract “capital H” history to act as judge of our decisions or to defer moral action now. We, as archaeologists, produce our archives and narratives of the past (Hauser et al. 2018). As we have seen over the last decade especially, archaeologists are epistemically confronting the problems of scale—human and nonhuman—exploring futurity, temporality, and horizons of possibility across material and immaterial relations (e.g., Yao 2019). The ethics of doing archaeology and environmental history today should involve eschewing militaristic binaries by studying and uplifting other forms of situated knowledge and by highlighting the dangers of yielding to progressivist or providential time or to abstractions of externalized, antagonistic climates.

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来源期刊
American Anthropologist
American Anthropologist ANTHROPOLOGY-
CiteScore
4.30
自引率
11.40%
发文量
114
期刊介绍: American Anthropologist is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, reaching well over 12,000 readers with each issue. The journal advances the Association mission through publishing articles that add to, integrate, synthesize, and interpret anthropological knowledge; commentaries and essays on issues of importance to the discipline; and reviews of books, films, sound recordings and exhibits.
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