Wound-up worlds and The Wind-up Girl: on the anthropology of climate change and climate fiction

Abstract

In recent years, climate fiction has exploded on the literary scene. Meanwhile, climate change is occurring in the Mekong river basin. In this paper, I put these phenomena into contact in an ontologically multi-sited ethnography of climate change and climate fiction. Rather than assuming a radical separation between real and fictive worlds, this entails a comparison that moves back and forth between the realms. On the one hand, as objects of ethnography, works of cli-fi can be examined in terms of the climate-changed worlds they construct and the responses generated within those worlds. On the other hand, as objects for ethnography, these worlds and responses can be laterally compared with different situations, like those found around the Mekong basin. Inhabiting a zone of indiscernibility between Mekong climate change and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-up Girl, I suggest that lateral comparisons of climate change and climate fiction make it possible to broaden the imaginative spectrum of climate futures and to recover the “strange and adventurous task of believing in this world.”.