ANTHROPOLOGY AND CLIMATE CHANGE: TRAJECTORIES, TOPICS AND PROPOSITIONS

Abstract

Climate change has become a major contemporary problem that exerts a strong influence on new policies, values, interests, horizons and anxieties. Although anthropology has only begun to pay attention to this phenomenon in recent years, it is opening up a whole new set of research fields that not only provide us with a more complex, situated and symmetric understanding of climate change, but also situate anthropology in a privileged position in order to participate in multi-disciplinary dialogues. This paper reviews the main international literature in the anthropology of climate change, with particular attention to the work available in Spanish and Portuguese, in order to trace its main topics, advances and challenges, as well as the connections with other key fields of anthropological enquiry. We begin this paper by describing the origins, past and present trajectories of this literature. We then outline the main propositions, topics and ideas that nowadays dominate the field. The paper ends with some reflections about the implications of the phenomenon of climate change for our discipline and outlines several suggestions for future developments.