Constructing Cosmoscapes of Climate Change through Reciprocal Anthropology

The vast scale of climate change constitutes an urgent motivation for human communities and academic disciplines to converse and collaborate, and many are seeking more sustainable ways of interacting with our environments. The idea of cataclysm is however challenging to absorb through scientific language, and we sometimes seem trapped into an Anthropocene comprising carbon heavy lifestyles that contribute to climate change.

Sociologist Bruno Latour claims that the central issue underlying climate change is the conviction that we live in a world of mute natural resources for human consumption and use, a fundamental assumption of Abrahamic religions and modern science. For the villagers of Kaata, highland Bolivia, intricate reciprocal relationships with the landscape must be maintained for humans to live and carry out agriculture.

Bastien's classic ethnographic account explores how the mountain on which the village lies was considered a body, and its diviners would cure human bodies by curing the landscape. I will consider how climate change appears within such a cosmos: it seems it is inherent in people's everyday actions, the human body fractally reflecting the wider environment.

Kaata is experiencing a cosmological shift towards the Anthropocene as villagers come to re-consider the world through a capitalist ethos of extracting natural resources, in which the mountains and elements might not be, as they were, animate beings, capable of thought, action and vengeance. These ideas are controversial: while some create open cast mines and use agricultural chemicals, others claim that this is taking too much.

When the snows melt on neighbouring apus or mountain lords, villagers recount, they will erupt, which resounds with the mythological apocalypse or pachakuti of the Incas, as well as with contemporary earth science. The pachakuti is a resonant narrative describing human relations to a living earth, which can complement scientific narratives. I will communicate with earth scientists exploring connections between indigenous knowledge, climate change, glacial activity and volcanic eruptions, exploring interdisciplinary, intercultural approaches to communicating climate change.

I will write an anthropological monograph in an accessible style, and communicate with the public through media articles and talks at UK ideas festivals, and for relevant groups like Landworkers' Alliance. I will carry out cross-disciplinary collaboration with volcanologists, glaciologists and social scientists dealing with human responses to disaster, spending a term as a visiting fellow at NYU.

I will hold multidisciplinary workshops on Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change at NYU and UCL. I will conduct a reciprocal anthropology, where villagers can collaborate in research and data collection, training young people to record interviews using IPhones. I will collaborate with Kaatans in Citizen Science (CS) research exploring how traditional farming methods, knowledge of weather and eco-systems, and cosmological precepts can aid adaptation and contribute to a healthy and biodiverse landscape, resilient under changing conditions.

I will employ CS methodology developed by the UCL ExCites research centre. I will collaborate with Kaatans and a documentary maker in a short film, community archive, and multimedia report which we will present to development bodies, social movements, and government officials in La Paz. Workshops on Constructing a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change will be held at NYU in collaboration with WetLab and an initiative on human responses to disaster, and UCL in collaboration with the Anthropocene virtual research school and Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability.

I will establish a Constructing a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change network of scholars uniting sciences and humanities in common languages to communicate across worldviews in constructing action on climate change, reimagining our relations to the environment.