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ABSTRACT Climate change is the latest in a dismaying series of challenges that industrialism and modernity have
gifted to humanity. To date, anthropological and archaeological responses have focused largely on the culturally
particularthat is, on the interactions of climate, environment, cultural schema, and social systems in specific
locales and eras. In this article, I urge a complementary response that capitalizes on archaeology and anthropologys
holistic and universalistic investigative aspirations and expertise. For two decades, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) has overseen major efforts to model human social dynamics and their implications for
future climate change. These models are technically sophisticated but economically reductionist and substantively
crude. Here, I review these efforts and provide three examples of how established and future archaeological and
anthropological research could improve them. Recent changes to the IPCCs modeling regime make this an opportune
moment for such a project. [climate change, climate modeling, IPCC, emissions scenarios]
dos decadas,
el Panel Intergubernamental sobre Cambio Climatico
(IPCC) ha monitoreado grandes esfuerzos para
modelar dinamicas
sociales y sus implicaciones para el cambio climatico
futuro. Estos modelos son tecnicamente
arqueologica
del IPCC hace este un momento oportuno para tal proyecto. [cambio
Cambios recientes al regimen
de modelizacion
climatica,
climatico,
modelizacion
IPCC, escenarios de emisiones]
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FIGURE 1.
these explorative scenarios, the IPCC contracted the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA),
a nongovernmental operational research institute based in
Laxenburg, Austria, and the results appeared as the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES; see Nakicenovic and
Swart 2000). The SRES is a triumph of technical sophistication, but its modeling of human social dynamics accounts
for a large fraction of our current uncertainties about future global warming. Over the course of the 21st century,
the SRES projected, total cumulative carbon emissions from
all sources could be as little as 770 GtC or as high as 2,540
GtC, a difference of more than 300 percent (Nakicenovic and
Swart 2000).
A number of anthropologists and other social scientists
have critiqued these sorts of modeling exercises, examining
among other things how they are socially produced, the distribution of certainty that surrounds them, how they help
manufacture consent in the face of scientific uncertainty, and
howdespite these uncertaintiesthey become authoritative instruments of social policy (e.g., Hastrup and Skrydstrup 2013; Lahsen 2005; Rayner and Malone 1998:5974).
These are necessary and useful critiques and carry particular
force when applied to the SRESs human models, where the
technical sophistication that confers authority helps to mask
the analytical shortcomings at their core.
For archaeology and anthropology, though, these limitations are an opportunity for more than critique alone.
To date, the balance of anthropological and archaeological research on climate change has focused on the culturally particular: that is, on the interactions of climate,
environment, cultural schema, and social systems in particular locales and eras (e.g., Castro et al. 2012; Crate 2011;
Crate and Nuttall 2009; Fagan 2000; Hastrup 2009; Hastrup
and Fog Elwig 2012; McGovern 1994; Orlove et al. 2008;
Schwartz 1957). As disciplines holistic in their theoretical aspirations, and cross-cultural and transtemporal in their
empirical reach, however, anthropology and archaeology are
also ideally positioned to improve the human models used in
climate-change simulations (see also Barnes et al. 2013). It is
nave, of course, to imagine that any discipline could model
with precision the dynamics of human social life. However,
there are multiple areas in which we can pare down some of
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their interactions. Technological and organizational innovations in transportation (the horse, wind and mechanically
powered watercraft, automobile, rail, and air) expanded
the range of face-to-face interaction. Similar developments
in communication (signaling, writing, printing, radio, TV,
and the Internet) facilitated the time-space distanciation
of interaction (Giddens 1984). For the first time, social activity could be disconnected from face-to-face interaction,
facilitating the stretching of social systems and relationships across time-space. For their part, printing and electronic communications greatly amplified the capacity for
interactional scalingthat is, the ability of one agent to interact simultaneously with many others (Roscoe 2013; see
Harvey 1990:260307, for some of the cultural implications).
Motivated by human interests in expansion, these infrastructural and institutional developments confer the directionality we see in human social-cultural development
through the Holocene: a consistent trend toward ever more
populous, territorially extensive, and organizationally complex social systems and toward ever more wide-ranging
social relationships.
The implications of these social-cultural processes for
economic convergencedivergence have received little anthropological or archaeological attention, and as a result,
they are poorly understood. One plausible scenario, however, suggests a complex trajectory, one dominated initially
by increasing economic heterogeneity but then transitioning
to economic convergence.
Although it seems antic to apply capitalist concepts of
economic productivity to deep history, the human economic
world was relatively homogenous (in SRES terms) until the beginning of the Holocene because hunter-gatherer
economies were universal. As the Holocene progressed,
though, some systems developed intensified levels of economic production and complexity, resulting in a heterogeneity that escalated as time passed. This heterogeneity
would have reached an apogee around the time when the
first intensive agricultural states emerged. At this point,
these states would have constituted the high productivity
pole of a spectrum of economic regimes that had low productivity hunter-gatherers at the other end and pastoralists
and extensive cultivators in between.
Having driven the emergence of economic heterogeneity, however, the processes propelling political integration
would now cause the economic trend to reverse, from
divergence to convergence. This is because the number
of human systems on the planet is finite and because, as
they expand, systems with higher economic productivity
(states) swallow up and incorporate the dwindling number
of smaller scale, lower productivity systems that remain.1
A homogenous world that began as tens of thousands of
low productivity systems before diverging into marked economic heterogeneity, in other words, is now converging toward a homogenous world of higher productivity
systems.
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ers, the media, and the public because it suggested that future
growth in GGEs and global warming would as likely be minimal as it would be dire. Placing the SRES scenarios within
an anthropological and archaeological understanding of the
processes driving economic development also suggests it was
a mistake. Although we cannot be certain that convergence
will characterize the remainder of the 21st century, this
background knowledge indicates it is far more probable than
not. Absent an asteroid strike, a thermonuclear holocaust,
an abrupt climate change, or some other global catastrophe of the kind that the SRES explicitly excluded from
their modeling, emissions scenarios based on the A1 and B1
storylinesthose that foresee economic convergenceare
more realistic than those developed from the A2 and B2
storylines, which envision economic stasis or divergence.
This conclusion, as it happens, finds support in CO2
emissions over the decade since the SRESs projections first
appeared (Figure 3). Between 2000 and 2010, emissions
were in line with the A1 and B1 rather than the A2 and B2
marker scenarios, a finding thrown into even-starker relief
because the SRES was charged with assuming the counterfactual that no climate mitigation efforts would be enacted
during this period.
A CONSUMING ISSUE: STATUS COMPETITION AS
A DRIVER OF GGES
Anthropology, Wilk continues, is well positioned to grapple with these questions because it provides the scope and
sweep of time to step back and offer a bigger picture of
how the human species got itself into its present dilemma of
rapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions (2009:268; see
also Mullins 2011).
If we knew why wants and needs grow over time,
it would clearly enhance our ability to predict future
growth in global economic and GGE rates. Unfortunately,
even the terms themselveswants and needscarry staggeringly complex philosophical baggage (see, e.g., Rayner and
Malone 1998: ch. 3). Not least, they are polyvalent in everyday language, referring among other things to both the
desires experienced by an agent and the goods and services
perceived as satisfying those desires. Adopting the latter usage, however, we may observe that wants and needs vary
in their expansionary dynamics: some increase at a faster
rate than others, with more serious implications for climate
change if their production, consumption, and disposal generates GGEs.
In industrialized nations, desires for existential wants
and needs such as food and water and utilitarian desires for goods and services such as hot water and airconditioning have clearly increased over time. However,
status competitionthe impulse to maintain social-political
standing (keeping up with the Joneses in Western culture), to achieve superior status or prestige (keeping ahead
of the Joneses), or bothprovokes wants and needs that
are intrinsically more vulnerable to inflation (Kempton and
Payne 1997). One can consume only so much water, food,
heating, cooling, and other existential and utilitarian goods
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and services, but one can never have enough of those commodities that confer status. If status comes from taking heads,
distributing pigs, or possessing luxury cars or private jets,
for instance, each additional or higher quality head, pig,
or extravagant vehicle has as much value or more than the
previous one. If esteem comes from ritual purity, each additional quantum of pureness is asor morevaluable than
the last and so on. Even if the aim is only to keep up with the
Joneses rather than outdo them, status competition guarantees its own intensification: as others catch up with them,
the Joneses are motivated to ratchet up the stakes, priming
the cycle to repeat and expanding the level of commodities
required to satisfy status aspirations.
All of this would matter little to climate change if the
satisfaction of status aspirations had negligible effects on
GGEsand for most contemporary and past societies, this
is (or was) the case. In many aquatically adapted lowland
communities of contact-era New Guinea, for instance, headhunting was the dominant mode of male status competition,
but its impact on GGEs was negligible and possibly even negative given its effects on regional population levels. Other
modes of status competition have only modestly greater
GGE implications. Among the Northern Abelam of New
Guinea, males produced (largely inedible) long yams to gain
status, but the forest area cleared and burnedand hence
the GGEs generatedwere no more than about 12 percent
of that required for subsistence production (Lea 1964:96).
Matters are very different in the Anglo-American world,
wherein the principal mode of status competition is conspicuous consumption. The GGEs generated by this mode
of status competition are all but impossible to estimate:
quite apart from the gargantuan scale of the accounting
required, there is the methodological difficulty of differentiating status-related and nonstatus consumption desires.
Suffice it to say, the per capita GGEs that consumerism
generates dwarf those associated with status competition
in small-scale societies. Consumer societies chew through
resources at intensifying velocities as fashions and trends
in clothes, cars, household appliances, interior decoration,
and so onresult in the disposal of many goods long before their utilitarian life is over. This improvidence likely
accounts for a sizeable chunk of the difference in per capita
GGEs (measured as CO2 equivalent for 2005) between the
United States and Canada (26 tons) and Europe (11 tons),
on the one hand, and South Asia (3 tons), Africa (4 tons),
and Latin America (8 tons), on the other hand (Pachauri and
Reisinger 2007:37).
Sociology and psychology have both identified the
dynamics of status competition in consumerist society
as an important area for future climate change research
(APA 2010:3740; Nagel et al. 2009:15, 47, 87), and
anthropology and archaeology are uniquely positioned to
advance these enquiries. As Wilk observes, we have already amassed magnificent cross-cultural and long-term
data on human societies that can be used to think synthetically about the problem of growth and consumption
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and GGE production will spread under the forces of globalization (Wilk 1997). It could also illuminate the dynamics
and climate implications of an entirely new phenomenon: the
globalization of status competition. In the last few decades,
mechanisms of time-space compression have expanded the
sphere of competition from national to global scales, with the
potential to intensify vastly both status competition (e.g., by
placing elaborate homes around the world) and economic
growth rates.
As a further benefit, a solid theory of status might illuminate ways of channeling consumerism and other GGEintensive modes of status competition into less atmospherically damaging forms (though see Isenhour 2012 for a
Swedish example of the challenges involved). For the same
status increment, for instance, collecting artwork produces
fewer GGEs than possessing a Hummer or a private jet. Such
a project has to be sensitive to class issues: academic elites,
who traffic in cultural capital themselves, must be careful
to avoid treating materialism as a vulgar form of statusclaiming (Holt 2000:246248). Even so, psychological research does seem to show that materialistic valuesI shop,
therefore I am, as the ironic slogan has itcan be detrimental to measures of subjective well-being. Policies to reduce
consumerist-driven status competition therefore could have
payoffs not only for the planet but also for consumerist
agents themselves (APA 2010:3740; see also Kempton and
Payne 1997).
THE IDEOLOGICAL CLIMATE
cultural brokers to enact climate policies developed primarily in Anglo-American cultural worlds. Even in Europe and
the United States, however, governing elites confront belief
and value systems that are unreceptive, if not hostile, to climate policies. An understanding of cultural schemalocal
understandings of the material and social worlds and how
they workis thus critical to sustainability efforts and, in
the case of climate, to forecasting future climate change.
To be effective, climate-mitigation policies have to engage the populations they target, which requires in turn that
they be tuned to local cultural models, their dynamics, and
how they shape perceptions of the environment and climate. For this to work, a population must recognize at a
minimum that (a) climate can potentially change; (b) human
actions can precipitate these changes; (c) human actions can
mitigate them; and (d) mitigation policies are viable and
legitimate. If a local cosmology fails to validate even one
of these conditions, then a community will see no reason
to moderate its climate-changing activities. Despite exposure to media narratives that they may soon become climate
refugees, for instance, very few residents of Funafuti Atoll in
Tuvalu are reportedly interested in emigrating because of a
religious conviction that God will not break the promise He
made, following the Biblical deluge, never to flood the Earth
again (Mortreux and Barnett 2009:109110). Among U.S.
Evangelicals who acknowledge the reality of climate change,
attitudes are split between those who view mitigation as
ordained by Christs command to be proper stewards of
His creation and others who see climate change as a sign
of the End Times to be accepted or encouraged rather than
mitigated (Peifer et al. 2014). Cosmologies may also affect peoples responses to climate change. If climate change
proves abrupt or severe, many communities may locate the
causes in moral transgressions or apocalyptic prophesy and
the solutions in redemptive eschatology. These communities will probably not be enchanted with mitigation policies
advocating reductions in carboniferous fuel use.
The conclusions here are obvious. If climate mitigation
policies are to work, they must attend to local worldviews
in particular, how locals conceptualize climate, weather, and
their dynamics. Ethnographers have already amassed a large
quantity of ethnometeorological data on numerous communities around the world, and more recently anthropologists have conducted nuanced field research focused specifically on cultural models of climate (for reviews, see Adger
et al. 2012; Crate 2011). As noted earlier, though, most of
these studies are culture specific. We need now to collate,
systematize, and expand this information into a database,
which we can then use to generate an improved theoretical
understanding of ideological dynamics as they impinge on
the perception and production of climate change.
The dynamics of belief are by far the most intractable of
human phenomena to model, but they are no less important
to predicting and mitigating GGEs and climate change. At a
proximate level, the climate-denial industry in the United
States provides a graphic instance of how vested interests,
543
power, and media control can manipulate perceptions of climate change. These efforts have only succeeded, however,
because they take account of, and capitalize on, pre-existing
ideological systems. Efforts to predict and manage climate
change need to follow suit, but currently we have almost no
idea what parameters might affect a communitys ideological inclination to accept that climate can change and to be
motivated enough do something about it.
Ezra Markowitz and Azim Shariff (2012) have made a
useful start by identifying six characteristics of the human
moral judgement system that leave it poorly equipped to
identify climate change mitigation as a moral imperative.
Unfortunately, they argue from an assumption that the U.S.
moral judgment system exemplifies human moral judgment systems in general. Nevertheless, their research deserves cross-cultural expansion, not least to identify which
of these characteristics might indeed be generalizable, which
are culturally particular, and why. The cultural theory of
risk perception of Dan Kahan (2012) and his colleagues
(Kahan et al. 2011) provides a complementary starting
point. Drawing on the grid-group analytical frame that Mary
Douglas (1973; see also Douglas and Wildavsky 1982) originally deployed to understand the distribution of ancestor
cults, demons, and witchcraft in Africa, Kahan and colleagues analytical scheme seeks to map cultural worldviews,
connect them to cultural perceptions of hazards such as climate change, and promote collective management of these
risks.
It would be useful also to map and analyze the
sociopsychological contours of ethnometeorological systems. Which elements of these symbolic structures are core
or key (in the sense of critical to social or psychological
security), and which are more peripheral (in the sense of being secondary elaborations)? Answers would advance our
capacity to model and manage climate change in two ways.
Core beliefs and values may be more resistant to modification than peripheral ones. Attempts by policymakers to
revise them, therefore, may be fruitless, counterproductive, or even problematic in their sociopsychological consequences. Peripheral beliefs, in contrast, may be more labile
and their modification less detrimental to social and psychological well-being. In a future of demonstrable climate
change, core and peripheral beliefs may also provoke different responses. If dramatic temperature increases, sea-level
rise, and other physical disruptions impinge primarily on peripheral beliefs, climate change could reduce local resistance
to mitigation policy. Conversely, if they impinge on core beliefs, they may be more likely to provoke ideological crises
and apocalyptic or other responses that impede mitigation
and adaption efforts.
These are challenging issues, and it is unfortunate that
anthropology has shown a decreasing appetite in recent
years for general theorizing about the ideological realm,
the principal exceptions being in evolutionary psychology
and cognitive anthropology (e.g., Atran 2002; Boyer 2001;
Whitehouse 2004). There would seem to be scope, though,
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for elaborating and applying more mainstream anthropological theories to ethnometeorological systems, for example, theories that the body is a focal influence on human
perceptions of, and interactions with, the natural world
(Blacking 1977; Strauss and Orlove 2003:46). Changes
that modernity and globalization have provoked in these relationships (Besnier 2011) may provide a further, fruitful
area for investigation.
BACKCASTING TO THE FUTURE
of a continuum to modest economic growth based on localized systems on the other endthat is, convergence versus
stasis or divergence. They suggest that one SSP could represent a scenario involving rapid economic growth combined
with low investments in sustainability, while another refers
to a world in which investments were made in environmentally friendly processes (Kriegler et al. 2012:817)that is,
economic growth versus environmental concern. Different
SSPs, in other words, can be indexed to analogues in different
SRES marker scenariosnamely, A1T, A1FI, A2, and B1
(ONeill et al. 2014:398; see also Kriegler et al. 2012:817
818). The anthropological findings and research sketched in
this article, in other words, will be as relevant to developing
more sophisticated human models for future IPCC reports
as they might have been in fortifying those of the past decade
and a half.
CONCLUSION
545
Roscoe
Maine,
Orono,
Department
of
ME,
Paul.Roscoe@umit.maine.edu;
04473;
Anthropology,
University
http://umaine.edu/anthropology/faculty-staff/jim-roscoe/
NOTES
Acknowledgments.
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