Indigenous Perceptions of the End of the World

Creating a Cosmopolitics of Change

Rosalyn Bold

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030138592
• eBook ISBN: 9783030138608
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited volume constructs a 'cosmopolitics' of climate change, consulting small-scale sustainable communities on whether the world is ending and why, and how we can take action to prevent it. By comparing scientific and indigenous accounts of the same phenomenon, contributors seek to broaden Western understandings of what climate change constitutes. In this context, existing cosmologies are challenged, opening spaces for hegemonic narratives to enter into conversation with the non-modern and construct 'worlds otherwise'—situations of world change and renewal through climate change. Bold brings together perspectives from Central America, Mexico, the Amazon, and the Andes to converse with scientific narratives of climate change and create cracks that bring new worlds into being for readers.

© The Author(s) 2019

R. Bold (ed.)Indigenous Perceptions of the End of the WorldPalgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainabilityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13860-8_1

Begin Abstract

Introduction: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change

Rosalyn Bold¹

(1)

Department of Social Anthropology, University College London, London, UK

Rosalyn Bold

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The contemporary salience of “the end of the world” as a topic scarcely needs to be highlighted. Social scientists wrestle on the one hand with abundant manifestations of the theme in international popular culture (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017), and on the other address the widespread skepticism that has to date halted effective action on climate change and the environmental crisis (Latour 2017). Speculation on the end of the world is of course coherent with the most careful scientific analyses of the state of things, which show trends hockey-sticking out of the known and into a realm of extreme and irreversible change if we do not halt our consumption, especially of fossil fuels. The Stockholm Resilience Center has identified nine planetary boundaries in a careful attempt to measure damage and chances of recovery in areas of key concern, including the ozone layer, biodiversity, ocean acidification, and climatic change (Rockström et al. 2009); a 2015 update to the Rockström et al. report concluded that four of these boundaries had already been crossed including two key areas, biodiversity and climate change, which as the report’s leading author indicates, “could inadvertently drive the Earth System into a much less hospitable state, damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of human wellbeing in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries” (Steffen et al. 2015).

Such analyses too often separate these “natural” factors from the “social,” the vast and increasing disparity of wealth itself predicted to topple the world economy sometime soon if no attempt is made to curb the excesses of those at the top (Motesharrei et al. 2014) in the era some call the Capitalocene (Moore 2015, 2017). The Capitalocene, as Brightman and Lewis (2018) indicate, marks where the agency of the Anthropocene is concentrated, in “modern growth based market economies that have intensified resource extraction and consumption around the world, mostly externalising the cost to non-human species and environments” (Brightman and Lewis 2018: 14), yet Anthropocenic thinking can be perceived in all the environments it touches. Separating agentive culture from the mere materiality of “nature”, the Anthropocene alienates humans from the environments they inhabit, magnifying anthropos against its landscape. Concordantly, the decline in the number of species with whom humans share the earth is so abrupt as to be called the sixth great extinction (Ceballos et al. 2017), a label it seems only contested by those who argue that while we are clearly on the brink of such a change it cannot yet be said to have happened.

Is it too late? James Lovelock, co-creator with Lynn Margulis of the influential Gaia theory (Lovelock and Margulis 1974) in 2008 proclaimed himself of the opinion that it was too late, only to recently conclude in the media that a robot takeover of the planet was likely to be a more pressing concern, introducing a third phalange of eschatological concern, culture/nature/cyborgs.¹ Climate models speak of likelihoods and not of certainties. We are treading into unknown territory; while it is known, for example, that oceans will absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, we cannot know exactly how much nor likewise the impact of flora, expanding in size as the environment becomes richer in carbon, on climatic change.

Out of this uncertainty spring apocalyptic imaginings. For both ISIS and US fundamentalists the end of the world is impending, a situation which neither side dread, as it will evince their status as true believers leading them to paradise. An extremely precarious situation. Perhaps it is, as Pratchett and Gaiman set out in their comic novel Good Omens (1990) that despite the darkness of the context we inhabit, the “end of the world” is something we are led into by the narratives we tell ourselves. Turning our attention to innocent pursuits, as the scientist Mayer Hillman indicates,² “music and love and education and happiness,” which consume no fossil fuels, despite the tangible reality of the four horsemen of famine, pollution, avarice, and war in our everyday lives, we might (still) avoid crisis or, according to Hillman, at least stave it off a little longer.

As Latour indicates, climate change is the “revenge of Gaia” on the modern view in which “nature” is deprived or “de-animated” of agentive capacity, reduced to the status of object for human subject or “culture” to manipulate. Our only chance of escaping it is to think our way out of the modern trap (Latour 2017). Let us therefore construct a cosmopolitics (Stengers 2005) of climate change, widening the concept of politics beyond its modern confines, resisting the tendency of the term to signify, as Latour puts it, “give and take in an exclusive human club” (Latour 2004: 454) to consult with communities who understand worlds from “other” cosmological standpoints. Cosmos, in Stengers’ rendering, refers to the unknown constituted by “multiple divergent worlds, and the articulations of which they could eventually be capable” (Stengers 2005: 995).³ In this book we encounter various such articulations or reconciliations across registers that are commonly separated as science and mythology.

Mythology is a vehicle specialized in dealing with endings and beginnings and unlike science can construct moral narratives, connecting across the realms of “nature” and “culture.” Contemporary Amerindian communities, as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017) indicate, with their sustainable technologies open to complex syncretic assemblages and modest human population sizes, could be considered “one of the possible chances of a subsistence of the future” (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017: 123). In this book we consult such communities on whether the world is ending, whether and why it has ended before, and how we can change contemporary practice to make it sustainable. Can it be saved? What does climate change look like to those who consider that the elements and landscape are imbued with what we might tentatively call consciousness—the capacity to reflect, act, feel? We consider how these communities are equivocating (Viveiros de Castro 2004) their views in cosmopolitical arenas and compare attempts by modern scientists to communicate with them, creating cross-cultural rapprochement.

The Latin American communities consulted here have in common that they inhabit worlds in which humans and spirits co-exist and exchange with one another for their subsistence. Relationships are fundamentally constitutive of the landscapes described, composed of cross-species networks of interacting agentive actors, visible and invisible. In a context where such relationships are more salient than a modern division between nature and culture, changes to the climate are considered inseparable from human actions, and indeed from a sense of crisis subsuming entire landscapes. These are all communities conversant with modernity, most of whom are agentively tackling incursions into their territory, whether from loggers, mining companies, or development agencies, as well as shifting lifestyles and beliefs among themselves.

The communities clearly concur that worlds end when we do not respect the spirits and other species layered into landscapes and indeed within what modernity might term “natural resources.” Sharing with other humans and animals that partake in these relational networks is key to entertaining their approval. People are currently ceasing to conduct “earth practices” (Harvey 2007) of respecting and feeding telluric spirits, which across the communities is highlighted as the most prevalent concern. Crucially, we must ask before we take, expressing respect and acknowledgment, what we might call “connection.” While they also put forward salient critiques of capitalist extractivist modernity, it may seem remarkable the extent to which these “communities of the futu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change
• Broken Pillars of the Sky: Masewal Actions and Reflections on Modernity, Spirits, and a Damaged World
• Fragile Time: The Redemptive Force of the Urarina Apocalypse
• The End of Days: Climate Change, Mythistory, and Cosmological Notions of Regeneration
• Contamination, Climate Change, and Cosmopolitical Resonance in Kaata, Bolivia
• Shifting Strategies: The Myth of Wanamei and the Amazon Indigenous REDD+ Programme in Madre de Dios, Peru
• A Territory to Sustain the World(s): From Local Awareness and Practice to the Global Crisis
• Relational Ecologists Facing “the End of a World”: Inner Transition, Ecospirituality, and the Ontological Debate
• This Mess Is a “World”! Environmental Diplomats in the Mud of Anthropology
• Epilogue: Indigenous Worlds and Planetary Futures
• Correction to: Fragile Time: The Redemptive Force of the Urarina Apocalypse
• Back Matter