Materiality, inequality, and future‐making as focal points of future engagement of economic anthropology with climate change

Abstract

As I write this short essay, I am receiving news via WhatsApp from friends in northern Namibia that a prolonged drought is coming to an end amid torrential rain of the delayed 2019-20 rainy season. The drought has exerted a tight grip on southwestern Africa over the past six years. Two states of emergency were declared in Namibia over this period, and the multiyear drought has had a massive negative impact on the national economy. The drought also devastated the cattle herds of pastoralist communities with whom I have been working for many years. There was much talk that this drought was a harbinger of the localized effects that climate change would have on semi-arid savannahs of southwestern Africa in the twenty-first century. Indeed, climate change projections identify northwestern Namibia as a focal zone within the African continent for some of the most acute impacts of global climate change (Bollig 2020). At the same time that I was doing my last stint of fieldwork in northwestern Namibia in early 2019, the cyclones Idai and Kenneth devastated Mozambique and parts of Zimbabwe; in northwestern Kenya, people were killed by floods and landslides triggered by heavy rainfall in November 2019. The frequency of climatic perturbations portends comprehensive socioecological changes. Emergencies officially declared or locally experienced are becoming the order of the day-climate-induced disasters are increasingly routinized. A great deal of development aid is geared toward achieving greater resilience rather than achieving more equal distributions of wealth, health care, or other public goods. Allow me to suggest a reframing of this symposium to pose the following question: "How will climate change frame economic anthropology?" Let me clarify my point in three short arguments. First, the transitions brought about by climate change include wide-ranging effects on human lives and livelihoods. However, anthropological literature on climate change has had little to say about the wider material dynamics of climate change, although these are also comprehensive: shifting species compositions, water cycles, temperature patterns, resource availability, and so on. The description of such changes is certainly not a task that anthropologists should leave to ecologists alone. While the materiality of climate change certainly necessitates closer collaboration with natural scientists, anthropology will 180