ANTHROPOLOGY AND CLIMATE CHANGE:
 Replies to Eriksen AT36(1)

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 36 NO 2, APRIL 2020 community to Maningrida in Arnhem Land. But this was no ‘straightforward’ repatriation; rather, it became a meditation on the role of photographs in cross-cultural histories, on memory and identity. The different strands of history were realized through brilliant book design that made it possible to follow different narratives – local, Axel’s, hers – through intersecting histories. If Professional savages used photographs as a springboard for a restitutive narrative, Encounter brought them into the very heart of historical and anthropological method as carriers, conduits and enablers of intersecting histories, memories and identities. It established methodologies and protocols for innumerable scholars in the field, even those unaware of their source. Perhaps her work never quite got the recognition it deserved in either anthropology or history. Maybe it was too raw, too experimental, too emotionally invested. If that is so, it was ahead of its time, for anthropologies and histories of affect, emotion and experience are everywhere now. In one sense, she was an overlooked prophet in the anthropological landscape. Although she was awarded the Patron’s Medal of the RAI, it was her alma mater, University of Sydney, which bestowed an honorary doctorate on her in 2006, something that pleased her greatly. During her latter years, scholars, writers, artists, musicians and activists passed through her flat near the British Museum as she dispensed hospitality (she was a great cook), intellectual exploration and wicked humour in large doses. She spent much time ensuring her and Axel’s work endured to form a permanent legacy, above all for Aboriginal people. Axel’s photographs now form part of the collections at the National Library of Australia. Scholars in so many places and in so many fields owe her a huge debt, because she opened up the possibility of an open, politically engaged historical visual anthropology and made it respectable scholarship, in that working with historical photographs was both ‘real anthropology’ and ‘real activism’ that made a difference in people’s lives. l Elizabeth Edwards Oxford ejmedwards10@gmail.com

community to Maningrida in Arnhem Land. But this was no 'straightforward' repatriation; rather, it became a meditation on the role of photographs in cross-cultural histories, on memory and identity. The different strands of history were realized through brilliant book design that made it possible to follow different narratives -local, Axel's, hers -through intersecting histories. If Professional savages used photographs as a springboard for a restitutive narrative, Encounter brought them into the very heart of historical and anthropological method as carriers, conduits and enablers of intersecting histories, memories and identities. It established methodologies and protocols for innumerable scholars in the field, even those unaware of their source.
Perhaps her work never quite got the recognition it deserved in either anthropology or history. Maybe it was too raw, too experimental, too emotionally invested. If that is so, it was ahead of its time, for anthropologies and histories of affect, emotion and experience are everywhere now. In one sense, she was an overlooked prophet in the anthropological landscape. Although she was awarded the Patron's Medal of the RAI, it was her alma mater, University of Sydney, which bestowed an honorary doctorate on her in 2006, something that pleased her greatly.
During her latter years, scholars, writers, artists, musicians and activists passed through her flat near the British Museum as she dispensed hospitality (she was a great cook), intellectual exploration and wicked humour in large doses. She spent much time ensuring her and Axel's work endured to form a permanent legacy, above all for Aboriginal people. Axel's photographs now form part of the collections at the National Library of Australia. Scholars in so many places and in so many fields owe her a huge debt, because she opened up the possibility of an open, politically engaged historical visual anthropology and made it respectable scholarship, in that working with historical photographs was both 'real anthropology' and 'real activism' that made a difference in people's lives. l Elizabeth Edwards Oxford ejmedwards10@gmail.com

Replies to Eriksen AT36(1)
The editorial by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (AT 36,1) is a passionate plea for more anthropological engagement in public debates about global warming. His focus is on knowledge -'what we can say' and storytelling -'how can we say it?' His hope is that anthropologists can find ways to intervene more effectively in political debate. I agree and would add that to do so, we need to be willing to take sides, and draw on our anthropological and historical understanding of resistance, social movements and the mechanics of social change (Armbruster & Laerke 2008;Lindisfarne 2010). And in the case of global warming, there is one utterly compelling way to take Eriksen's plea for action further.
Responding to the great threat of global warming means first and foremost reducing greenhouse gas emissions on a scale far beyond the unenforceable promises of the international agreements and as swiftly as possible. To do this requires the Keynesian determination of Roosevelt when he took the US into the Second World War. Within three short months, the assembly lines in Detroit were turning out aeroplanes and produced no more cars until the end of the conflict. Roosevelt did this to win a war. And what he did was also done in Britain, in Germany, the Soviet Union and Japan. From this, we know that complex economies can be rapidly radically reshaped, that money can be found, jobs reconfigured and comprehensive regulation put in place to orchestrate the process. This is what the One Million Climate Jobs Campaign in the UK and South Africa (AIDC 2016;Neale 2014), the Bridge to the Future in Norway (Ytterstad 2015 Six things are crucial in any climate jobs or green jobs campaign. These six points also imply their opposites and can serve as a guide to what will impede or derail these campaigns and lead to do-nothing despair or promote active climate denial.
First, we have the technology now to make the changes we need, and postponing action to await future wisdom will be disastrous.
Second, the campaigns do not depend on sacrifice, degrowth or austerity, but on the exact opposite. They are about growing a different, carbon-free economy.
Third, these campaigns do not depend on the market, as the market -simply, but categorically -cannot do what is required (Sweeney & Treat 2017).
Fourth, because they are government-led projects, they can guarantee that workers in the carbon industries will be retrained and found a new living wage, pensionable jobs in sustainable energy, in the public transport sector or in housing rehab (to name the three areas of central importance in the UK).
Fifth, establishing a climate/green jobs programme in any one country would serve as a model, as the welfare state model did in the UK after the Second World War. Think of the success of the NHS (National Health Service) as a model for a national climate service.
Sixth, the carbon corporations are a formidable enemy, and authoritarian politics and divide and rule policies are how they keep governments and ordinary people in thrall. But the atmosphere and climate are also global phenomena. Sustaining a habitable planet will require the collective determination and commitment of ordinary people on every continent -so here, for sure, thinking globally while acting locally is completely appropriate. Saying this makes climate and green jobs familiar, and plausible, and offers a politics of hope. It is a politics I would hope many anthropologists can embrace. The article in Nature by Jessica Barnes et al. that Eriksen cites, goes further than he indicates in drawing attention to the expansion of anthropological study to include (in their words) 'institutional centres of power' and 'diverse research subjects ranging from nongovernmental organizations to policymakers, scientists, international agencies and corporations' (Barnes et al. 2013: 542). This has been one of the keynotes of work by Douglas and her associates since her influential lecture 'Environments at risk' (Douglas [1970(Douglas [ ] 1975. Their ideas have inspired analyses of the cognitive bias that affects how citizens react to scientific evidence on societal risks of every kind: 'people endorse whatever position reinforces their connection to others with whom they share important commitments' (Kahan 2010: 296). More specifically, it has been argued that the small but significant minority of scientists who question anthropogenic climate change are motivated not only by financial interests and conservative values but by 'their epistemologies and worldviews and by the meanings attached to their membership in particular scientific communities' (Barnes et al. 2013: 542;Lahsen 2013). 1 An updated variant of Douglas' 'grid-group analysis' -sometimes known as 'cultural theory', but perhaps more rigorously seen as a working tool -has been formulated by Michael Thompson and others, and can be applied to the environmental movement. There are, according to them, four basic types of cultural orientation which coexist in industrialized societies. To simplify greatly, positionalists or hierarchists (high-group, high grid -i.e. with both a high level of group coherence and a high level of role prescription) want to rely on accredited experts and regulate the environment from the top down, if possible through international authorities and through strict adherence to laws. Individualists or competitors (low group, low grid) admire such qualities as independence, dynamism and the pursuit of wealth and power: markets will find optimal solutions, whereas subsidies merely reward inefficiency. Enclavists, sectarians or egalitarians (high group, low grid) have a preference for charismatic leadership and are suspicious of outsiders. They favour back-tonature activism from the bottom up, blaming the reckless selfishness of the industrialized nations for the global ecological crisis. Finally, isolates or fatalists (low group, high grid) are the most vulnerable category in any social system -not only those separated from others by literal space, but also marginal or alienated city dwellers. They think nature is arbitrary, conspiracies are everywhere and concerted action is useless. But their negativism can have the positive effect of putting a damper on enthusiastic but badly thought out schemes, and they have a marked presence in journalism and on the Internet. Marco Verweij and Michael Thompson (2006) call for 'clumsy solutions', whereby these orientations influence and correct one another, rather than the 'elegance' that is essentially optimizing around the definition of a problem and silencing other voices. 2 In a challenging interpretation of Douglas' thought as a coherent theoretical system, Perri 6 and Paul Richards give only muted approval to the notion of 'clumsy solutions'. They stress the potential of her ideas for the containing and abating of conflicts, by throwing light on how 'the performative business of everyday, mundane ritual interaction is what drives confrontation and compromise, not argumentation over ideas' (6 & Richards 2017: 207). 3 'People do not typically begin with a fully specified general worldview and then proceed to act in ways that implement those beliefs; rather, they make sense of what they are doing or have done by appealing to available beliefs, which they then deploy in more or less coherent ways' (ibid.: 208). Douglas' central insight, they write, is 'that to explain human thought is to explain human conflict' (ibid.: 213).
The campaign to mitigate global warming has generated an arena of conflict between many interest groups, and between short-term, medium-term and very long-term priorities. Douglas' work may help in achieving the ambition expressed by Barnes et al. that 'anthropology could play a central role … by offering methods to access the social, cultural and political processes that shape climate debates' (2013: 543).
As for Alan Macfarlane, he has always stood out from fashion in anthropology, and Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) has long been one of his maîtres à penser. He is not the only contemporary scholar who has given a generally sympathetic account of this much misunderstood thinker (Macfarlane 2013;cf. Mayhew 2014). Malthus' original mathematical formula -asserting that populations expand geometrically while resources expand only arithmetically -seems to have been more or less valid for agrarian economies. Macfarlane argues that the 'Malthusian trap' catches any society with the threat of war, famine and new forms of disease, after a sharp rise in population such as is made possible by a fall in mortality. During the 20th century it seemed that new technologies and fossil fuels could help industrial societies to escape the trap, inverting the laws of early Malthus: populations could grow slowly, resources exponentially. But now we are faced with enhanced risks: pollution, crowding in cities, the ability of microorganisms to outpace human medicine -and perhaps most seriously of all, climate change, which will probably exacerbate the other risks. Macfarlane concludes that the only way to escape the trap is to stabilize and probably reduce population levels through rational control of fertility.
Upward mobility encouraging contraceptive practices, and anti-natalist policies such as those promoted in China, have moderated the world's population growth, but it is still projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, 4 and about two-thirds of the present population still live in varying degrees of hardship. Leaving aside the real threat posed by weapons of mass destruction, we are advised by Macfarlane not to bet on the prospect of fusion energy, genetically modified crops and new superdrugs, but to resolve to 'use our gifts of reason to avoid the blind Darwinian imperatives which constrain all species and lead them to competition and final extinction' (Macfarlane 2013: 129).
Macfarlane's neo-Malthusian position is out of favour among anthropologists, but it was broadly shared by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Loyer 2015: 394-396;Stoczkowski 2015) and it is shared today by David Attenborough, that inspired exponent of ecstatic naturalism, who was a student of Raymond Firth's and has probably done more as a television presenter and author than anyone else to convince new audiences of the danger of a 'tipping point' resulting in irreversible and catastrophic climate change.
Whereas Douglas is brilliant but often hard to keep up with, Macfarlane possesses an obdurate clarity of expression. Saving the planet is not guaranteed; neither of these anthropologists' books are likely to be found in the libraries of the White House or 10 Downing Street, but both of their intellectual legacies might help anthropology in different ways to improve its 'impact factor'. l Jonathan Benthall University College London jonathanbenthall@hotmail.com

DECOLONIZING EUROPEAN ANTHROPOLOGY?
The meeting of the EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) network for race and ethnicity took place in Leiden from 27-28 June 2019, welcoming participants to question and discuss if anthropology as a discipline could ever meaningfully decolonize. The programme began with a guided tour through the city, with a focus on the Netherlands' history in the transatlantic slave trade. This walk gave conference participants a better understanding of how Leiden's quaint and wealthy appearance today was generated from a deeply exploitative and racialized colonial legacy. It was followed by two days of panels, workshops and a keynote that all explored how anthropology and its controversial role in universities reproduces the same set of power and capitalist inequalities predicated on race as those depicted in the walking tour.
Many discussions highlighted how coloniality still pervades institutions, research methods and teaching practices. The alleged political neutrality of anthropology departments that distance themselves from colonial critiques and controversies was problematized, and strategies and open questions about decolonization were shared. How can decolonization be taught if the teacher is the colonizer? How do colonial hierarchies, particularly in classrooms with diverse students and teachers, restrict education to a unidirectional flow of ideas that delegitimize students' experiences of racism as external to knowledge production? The role of departments, often characterized by discriminatory practices and structural exclusions, was stressed with respect to their responsibility in redistributing anthropological knowledge and broadening access to employment, as well as ensuring that academia doesn't incentivize extractive relationships with local communities.
These questions led participants to explore how the neo-liberalization of the university creates precarity and reinforces a consumerist approach to education -that students are entitled to this service to secure employment -emphasizing exam preparation over critical knowledge production. To prevent this problem from worsening, participants addressed the need for tenured staff to recognize and share their privileged position, and leverage their relative power within institutions to fight for structural change. Presenters expressed disappointment over how decolonization, like many other progressive academic movements, has been disproportionately led by students and precariously employed lecturers. Unequal power distribution was addressed explicitly and space was created for emotionality to be taken seriously and valued as a crucial aspect to foster knowledge production and institutional change.
Reminding themselves that colonialism is not a distant historical project, but a very contemporary reality in which anthropology is complicit, participants discussed the importance of researching with, rather than about, people, and how to do that with modesty and humility, beyond just self-reflexivity or, at worst, narcissism. How can anthropologists, many of whom have been trained to scientifically study difference, use ethnography for collaborative and liberatory purposes, avoiding 'othering' or objectifying interlocutors? What possibilities for alliance and solidarity does anthropological analysis offer? But also, what instances of complicity in colonial power dynamics and co-optation of struggles can it expose?
The conference's keynote lecture was given by Professor Fatima El-Tayeb (University of California, San Diego) on 'queering ethnicity' and the specifics of racialization in the US and Europe. She focused on the urgent need for anti-racist coalitions in response to the global rise of neo-nationalism and ethnic essentialism. One of her more salient points, many of which outlined the histories of racism and marginalization in Europe, was the fleeting nature of coalitions against white supremacy and how to find inspiration, rather than anguish, from these temporary bonds.
Another strand of presentations addressed decolonization from the perspective of identity, positionality and hierarchies of knowledge and othering. Participants addressed subjectivity and identity but also the responsibilities we have as anthropologists. The discussion ranged from looking at the distinct manifestations of race in post-apartheid South Africa and 'colour-blind' post-reunification Germany, to the importance of intersectionality and caste in the decolonial anthropology of India, to the specificities of decolonization in a settler colonial context like New Zealand.
Questions of epistemology and methodology were debated. The ways in which epistemes become canonized by Western institutions was critiqued in an interdisciplinary contribution which included insights from psychology. Beyond the coloniality of hegemonic modes of knowing, participants also discussed modes of expression. Addressing the relationship between anthropological theory and the bodily experiences of everyday life, the emphasis on writing in ethnographic production and assessment methods was problematized as a colonial documentation tool. Dance and other sensorial performances were introduced as powerful alternatives for more inclusive research and presentation methods.
Reflecting on past achievements and failures, some presenters prompted discussants to ponder whether decolonization is currently 'stuck', or in a waiting phase. Metaphors of piracy were used to juxtapose the similar experiences of precarity and captivity junior academics face today. Contextualizing the conference in its locale, discussants also critically reflected on the roll-out of LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other) rights by the Netherlands in the global South, and how pinkwashing is another contemporary form of colonization being reproduced through a rhetoric of enlightenment ideals. Overall, it was found that anthropologists are well equipped to connect this diverse and provocative set of issues through larger structural patterns of exclusion that continue to reproduce inequalities and symbolic colonial hierarchies.
The conference concluded with a stirring discussion on intersectional praxis -with disability being taken into consideration and teachers being held accountable to their disabled, racialized or otherwise marginalized students -and how to integrate intersectionality with a feminist ethics of care. Teachers and students shared how their intimate experiences of the university are physically and emotionally embodied. Participants were reminded that assumptions of care and emotional labour implicitly rely on women and people of colour, prompting discussants to question the role of universities and departments in providing care, especially in cases of classroom (micro)aggressions. While the conference highlighted many intellectually and emotionally draining issues, ending with such an optimistic orientation towards a more empathetic future inspired participants to imagine the possibilities of anthropology in the important decolonizing movement. Participants considered what kinds of practices need to emerge for a caring and supportive environment to be enabled, and wrapped up the meeting with many new insights and strategies to take back to their respective departments and activist movements. l Lucilla Lepratti & Nadav Wall nadav.wall@gmail.com lucillalepratti@yahoo.com conferences