Beyond dystopia: Regenerative cultures and ethics among European climate activists

Abstract

In this article, I analyze practices of self-formation among European climate activists. I develop the concept of regenerative cultures as a lens to capture nonspectacular practices that embody intimate forms of activism. Drawing on ethnographic research among climate activists, I show that regenerative cultures employs recursive circuits of practicing, retrospective visions, and subjunctive ecologies in order to enable ethical self-formations geared toward personal or planetary regeneration. I identify two implications of such practices. First, I argue that intimate forms of activism reshuffle the sphere of politics in rendering the intimate a locus of concerted action that is deemed to radiate out. Second, I argue that such ethical labor is situated between what in the anthropology of ethics figures as virtue ethics and endurance. What I identify as utopian becomings instantiated by climate activists’ ethical labor embodies attempts to open spaces for caring differently. Moving beyond an understanding of the utopian as prefigurative move, I argue that utopian becomings operate by enabling to become otherwise in affectively loaded encounters.