This Mess Is a “World”! Environmental Diplomats in the Mud of Anthropology

Abstract

In this chapter I will discuss how anthropology might crucially enact environmental diplomacy: a form of comparison and eco-political mediation between different ways of connecting humans and their ecosystems. In comparing the unfolding “ends of the worlds” across cultures and peoples it could help to conceptualize an idea of socio-ecological connection that requires a politically effective articulation of scientific and non-scientific rationales—and perhaps before it is too late? In particular, this chapter will explore the eco-political approximation of a shaman and a scientist who are currently producing a common ground of communication around the future of the Amazonian rainforest. While these two spokespersons represent what might sometimes be understood as opposed ontologies or relational “worlds” (i.e., Western science vs. Amazonian shamanism), I propose to theorize the “world in-between” disclosed in their connective gestures. It will be shown how in their struggle to reach out to each other´s audiences the middle ground they find—and also produce—is a messy anthropological constellation wherein different relational modes such as “naturalism” or “perspectivism” are intermingled and co-implicated. I aim at signaling here the importance of the space in between these bodies; that is, the more-than-discursive arena of negotiation around climate change as a planetary crisis and as it concerns in particular the connection between forests and rainfall patterns. May this new relational space be seen as a new “ontology” that “emerges” in the context of cosmopolitical connections around climatic crises, as Rosalyn Bold suggests (in this volume)? Persuaded that the case in focus is the bodily enactment of a world otherwise—rather than a mere discursive workout, I will stress the analytical interest of such spaces of conceptual negotiation for anthropology, and I will understand the scientist and shaman’s connective gestures as an emerging form of “environmental diplomacy.”