Andrew M. Bauer and Mona Bhan
Welfare and the Politics and
Historicity of the Anthropocene
Across the academy, from climate scientists to lit-
erary critics, scholars now debate the adoption and
implications of the term Anthropocene to describe
the current period of Earth and human history—a
time when humans are making an unprecedented
impact on global climate that has considerable consequences for many species, including our own
(see Chakrabarty 2009, 2012; Crutzen 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Kohn 2014; Morton 2013).
Some, such as Paul J. Crutzen (2002) and Timothy
Morton (2013), trace its inception to precisely 1784
with the invention of the steam engine and the
subsequent “logarithmic increase in the actions of
humans as a geophysical force” associated with
greenhouse gas emissions (Morton 2013: 7). Others, such as Jan Zalasiewicz et al. (forthcoming),
suggest placing its boundary in 1945 after which
the chemical traces of nuclear bomb explosions are
evident in Earth’s surficial stratigraphy. Regardless
of whether the Anthropocene will be charted in the
rock record or will achieve an oicial geological
designation (see Vince 2011; Zalasiewicz et al.,
forthcoming), it is now broadly discussed because
its implications transcend obvious environmentalist concerns and extend to how social scientists and
humanist scholars conceptualize many of their
The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:1, January 2016
doi 10.1215/00382876-3424753 © 2016 Duke University Press
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foundational categories, including even what it means to be human. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009: 201), for instance, suggests that human
explanations for climate change now “spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” To say the least,
such pronouncements reinforce the need to analyze and perhaps rethink how
we understand welfare in the context of climate change, especially as it relates
to fundamental anthropological concerns with nature, culture, climate, history, and agency.
Although we share the well-founded concerns for mitigating global
warming, in this essay we critically explore the Anthropocene’s philosophical
and political implications for both constituting and understanding welfare in
this “new” historiographical period. There is little doubt that human impacts
on global climate now pose a veritable danger for many of Earth’s inhabitants
as communities become more vulnerable to sea-level rise, species go extinct,
and weather becomes more erratic (e.g., Lazrus 2012; Lavergne et al. 2010;
Ribot 2014). Yet as Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014: 63, 66) have correctly noted, debates concerning the Anthropocene are so “dominated by the
natural science[s]” that the concept furthers the divide between nature and
humanity while it also “blatantly overlooks the realities of diferentiated vulnerability on all scales of human society.” Indeed, there is a serious need for
anthropologists to engage critically with emerging discourses on the Anthropocene and, at the same time, to do so with attention to how the concept both
constrains and enables particular formulations of human and nonhuman
conditions for well-being. As we argue below, ethnographic and archaeological research poses serious challenges to the universality of the nature-society
and the natural-anthropogenic binaries that undergird narratives of the
Anthropocene and that also subsequently frame conditions of welfare as a
strict product of society, divorced from the social articulations humans establish with other things, materials, and organisms.
The traditional concept of welfare, at least in the Keynesian sense, envisioned a critical role for governments to care for the poor and the marginal
whose basic needs remained unmet in a laissez-faire economy. Yet several
neoliberal reforms since the 1980s have considerably weakened the foundations of welfarism (Harvey 2005: 298), an ideology that is now increasingly
seen to benefit the lazy and unproductive segments of the population. Indeed,
as Karen A. Curtis (2007: 31) argues, neoliberal economic restructuring has
“pathologized” recipients of aid and welfare and weakened ties of kin and
community. Therefore, anxious questions about the fate of a “withering” state
that no longer “cares” for its marginal populations and severely limits their
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 63
access to essential social goods such as food, health, and education are by no
means unfounded (see Makhulu, this issue). Yet there are also reasons to
question the abilities of Keynesian-style welfare to capture the relationships
that people establish with other humans and nonhumans, which eventually
condition and produce collective experiences of well-being.
At the outset of this issue, Anne-Maria Makhulu rightly recalls the
Aristotelian distinction between oikos and polis to resituate contemporary
debates on welfare and state responsibility within the historical binaries of
the domestic and the political—the former being the private domain of the
household where material necessities are met and where the “human species” is reproduced and the latter the public domain that “lies beyond the
domain of necessity” and where citizens are free to pursue activities that lead
to self-actualization (McKeon 2005: 7). For most critics of a welfare state,
“material needs are equated with the realm of mere life” (Makhulu, this
issue: 000), an association that does little to disrupt the fundamental separation between the private and the public, the oikos and the polis, or, as Ariel
Salleh (2006) argues, the natural and the cultural. Indeed, in Aristotelian
formulations, oikos is associated with nature, where material needs are met,
and polis with society, a space of freedom, innovation, and external association (Howarth 1996: 69).
How might such separations between the domestic and the political or
between nature and society limit our pursuit of human and nonhuman welfare, especially in light of a sustained scholarly efort to “transcend the dualism of objects and subjects” (D. Miller 2005: 43)? Also, how might we broaden
the debate on human welfare by moving beyond the restrictive framework of
state power and responsibility to engage with questions of environment, matter, and climate? Such an exercise, we argue, is not just intellectually exciting
but also politically necessary to capturing the range of human experiences
that constitute well-being during a period in which humans and nonhumans
are increasingly entangled in climate-related vulnerabilities. Insofar as our
current understanding of polis continues to be built on the fundamental separation of nature and society, it is, Salleh (2006: 28) rightly argues, “ill
equipped to steer an ecological future.” In short, any understanding of welfare, especially at the time of ongoing climate change, must challenge the
easy binary between the domestic and the political, and, more pertinently, it
must also disrupt the boundaries between the natural and the social.
In this essay we argue that the Anthropocene, as a historiographical
designation, is premised on the long-standing modernist distinction between
society and nature (e.g., Latour 1993). Thus, even though its intended politics
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of foregrounding human culpability in the climate crisis is progressive, it
fails to question the enduring legacies and implications of separating human
histories from natural histories. We thus begin our discussion of welfare in
the Anthropocene with a review of long-term sociomaterial histories to probe
the period’s uniqueness as a mode of human-environment interaction. However, rather than contributing to the Anthropocene debate by seeking to
establish when the period started, we suggest that scholars might more productively approach the question of the Anthropocene orthogonally to its typical framing—asking instead whether the underlying distinction between
natural and artificial environmental conditions that undergirds the Anthropocene narrative is a useful analytical divide for understanding socioenvironmental conditions as they relate to contemporary concerns with welfare and
environmental politics in the context of climate change. Thus we go on to
question the ontological foundations of the Anthropocene and subsequently
the corresponding binaries of public (polis) and domestic (oikos) that limit our
understandings of welfare. Indeed, problematizing these boundaries forces
analyses of historical human conditions and experiences of well-being to consider broadly the myriad relationships people establish with other humans,
organisms, and things that collectively have an impact on their lives. As we
argue below, in contexts of pronounced environmental changes it is thus a
necessary prerequisite to keep analytical attention on weather and its materialities because of their daily and immediate experiential qualities, rather than
merely attempting to make climate more intelligible to human perception.
We then turn to ethnography in South Asia to assess how people engage with
the materialities of environmental phenomena that afect their well-being.
And finally, we relect on the implications of our analyses for anthropology
and for the politics of welfare in a rapidly changing climate.
Questioning the Historicity of the Anthropocene and Its Silences
As advocated by Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer (2000), the “Anthropocene” signifies a division in the geological periodization of Earth’s history
that separates the current time of global human impacts on the planet’s ecology and atmosphere from the Holocene—the most recent geological epoch
that spans approximately the past ten thousand years. Although the designation has not been officially adopted among geologists (e.g., Vince 2011;
Zalasiewicz et al., forthcoming), it has gained considerable traction across
the academy. Crutzen (2002: 23), an atmospheric chemist credited with
popularizing the term, argues: “For the past three centuries, the efects of
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humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly
from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to
assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene—the warm period of
the past 10–12 millennia.” In short, there is an overwhelming body of scientific evidence that points to considerable changes in Earth’s atmosphere, surface materials, and species distributions (including extinctions) associated
with human activities and their unintended consequences over the past two
hundred years, and particularly since the first nuclear bomb explosion in
1945 (e.g., Crutzen 2000; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Lavergne et al. 2010;
van den Brink et al. 2011; Sanderson et al. 2002; Zalasiewicz et al., forthcoming; Archer and Rahmstorf 2010). Scholars have even suggested that
human consumption of fossil fuels and the production of greenhouse gases,
such as carbon dioxide and methane, might delay Earth’s next ice age (see
McGuire 2012; Stager 2011).
It is with such quantifiably large and lengthy human impacts that the
Anthropocene has been considered a qualitatively new historiographical
period and humans new kinds of agents of environment change. The climate scientist William F. Ruddiman and colleagues (2015: 38), for example,
have characterized formulations of the Anthropocene as marking a time in
which “humans have replaced nature as the dominant environmental force
on Earth.” Chakrabarty (2009) further underscores a historiographical distinction between humans as “biological” agents and “geological” agents that
is made possible by such anthropogenic explanations of climate change. In
his words, “humans are biological agents, both collectively and as individuals. They have always been so” (206). However, he continues, “humans have
become geological agents only very recently in human history. In that sense,
we can say that it is only very recently that the distinction between human
and natural histories—much of which had been preserved even in environmental histories that saw the two entities in interaction—has begun to collapse” (207). In this sense, as Malm and Hornborg (2014: 62) have noted, the
Anthropocene periodization now implies that “the Enlightenment distinction between Nature and Society is obsolete.”
And yet, insomuch as it pronounces and foregrounds the agency of
humans as an environmental force, the Anthropocene narrative also powerfully “silences” (sensu Trouillot 1995) a variety of social diferences and landscape histories that are critical to contemporary understandings and experiences of socioenvironmental conditions. By definition, it attributes climate
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change to humans as a single homogenous force that obscures underlying
social inequalities and asymmetries related to both the production and experience of environmental circumstances. However, as is well documented,
humans that have facilitated the production of greenhouse gases and global
warming that arguably warrant the Anthropocene designation have not
done so as a homogenous web or network of humanity; in the frank words of
Malm and Hornborg (2014: 65): “A significant chunk of humanity is not
party to the fossil economy at all.” Furthermore, it is important to note that
the Anthropocene narrative reproduces the same nature-society binary it
purportedly dissolves—distinguishing a time when the two realms could be
usefully separated from the current period when they cannot. In this sense,
the Anthropocene narrative is predicated on upholding a modernist distinction that not all of Earth’s inhabitants share. Such forced conceptualizations
of environmental histories can severely limit our understandings of human
(and nonhuman) welfare, particularly given that many of Earth’s human
inhabitants extend sociality to nonhuman species and materials that are
threatened by changing climates (see below). Thus, although the adoption of
the Anthropocene periodization calls needed attention to humans as agents
of contemporary climate change, it does so at the cost of potentially obfuscating social diferences, inequalities, and broader understandings of humanenvironmental histories and relationships with significant analytical implications for framing both human and nonhuman well-being and environmental
politics that do not rest on the externality of Nature.
Indeed, a plethora of anthropological, historical, and environmental
scholarship demonstrates that humans have always been enmeshed within
a web of materials and organisms that collectively produce ecologies, geographies, and socioenvironmental conditions that are significant to human welfare; moreover, such entanglements between humans and nonhumans have
always had the potential to afect global atmospheric conditions as they scale,
challenging the uniqueness of the Anthropocene as a new period of humanenvironment interaction. For example, it is well documented that human
land use was related to a cascade of mass extinctions when people populated
new continents, such as Australia approximately fifty thousand years ago
(G. Miller et al. 2005; Rule et al. 2012; Sandom et al. 2014). More recently,
and more directly related to global warming, the reversal in atmospheric levels of methane, which decreased in the first half of the Holocene but then
increased after circa 5000 BP (before the present), can likely be attributed to
an expansion of human agriculture and pastoralism in South and East Asia
(see Fuller et al. 2011; Ruddiman 2003).1 Furthermore, environmental
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Figure 1. Example of Iron Age soil retention feature on a residual hill in central Karnataka.
Photograph by the authors
archaeology of the interior of South India has demonstrated that intensified
agropastoral activities on the region’s rocky hills between circa 5000 BP and
2300 BP exposed soil matter to erosion, which in conjunction with broader
monsoonal changes in seasonal rainfall significantly altered regional landforms and vegetation communities (see Bauer 2008, 2014; Bauer and Morrison 2013; Caratini et al. 1994; Fuller and Korisettar 2004). Despite human
eforts during the period to prevent erosion and promote pasture growth
through the construction of retention walls, soil erosion nevertheless intensified in locations where animal grazing was most dense (see figure 1) (e.g.,
Bauer 2014, 2015). These instances are, of course, just a handful out of countless examples of how human land use has greatly modified the distribution
of carbon sequestering soil and vegetation prior to the Industrial Revolution
(see, e.g., Michael Williams’s [2006] treatise on deforestation).
We highlight the environmental archaeology of South Asia not simply to illustrate that humans have significantly altered its environment for a
long time, shaping the soils, landforms, and ecologies of the region’s rocky
hills for many thousands of years. Most proponents of the Anthropocene are
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aware that humans have long modified environmental conditions (Zalasiewicz et al., forthcoming). Our point is more broadly to problematize the
sharp ontological division between social and natural environments that
undergirds narratives of the Anthropocene and that has significant consequences for how we conceptualize society and the specificities of human
well-being within the context of climate change. Both before and after the
Industrial Revolution we see people taking up positions within their environments and constituting them with a range of materials and organisms
that interact, collectively and recursively, to produce historical socioenvironmental circumstances.
Yet to argue that the Anthropocene begins when shifts away from
“natural” planetary conditions, climatic or otherwise, can be recognized is
efectively an argument that humans are no longer part of Nature. It is a
similar argument of a particular kind of progressive human exceptionalism
that allowed early social evolutionary thinkers, such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1868), nearly 150 years ago to create distinctions between “savage” and
“civilized” people. Ironically, almost ten years before Morgan published
Ancient Society ([1877] 1964), he also wrote about the same exceptionalism
of the American beaver’s transcendence of Nature and how its dens, dams,
and ponds evidenced “an artificial mode of life” similar to the distinctions
Morgan (1868: 83) made between stages of human “savagery”: “As the dam
is not an absolute necessity to the beaver for the maintenance of his life, his
normal habitation being rather natural ponds and rivers, and burrows in
their banks, it is, in itself considered, a remarkable fact that he should have
voluntarily transferred himself, by means of dams and ponds of his own
construction, from a natural to an artificial mode of life.” We stress Morgan’s framing of the American beaver’s “artificial mode of life” partly
because beaver dams increase greenhouse gas production (e.g., methane)
across broad areas of North America today (e.g., Naiman, Manning, and
Johnston 1991; Yavitt et al. 1992), but more significantly because when
taken together with that fact, his framing accentuates the artificiality of the
natural-unnatural binary and the difficulties of drawing a strict line
between what is “naturally” ecological and “unnaturally” geophysical.
Indeed, geologists and climate scientists have long shown that the ecological history of Earth’s surface—particularly the distribution and composition of its respiring vegetative taxa and bacteria—has significant impacts
on atmospheric conditions and climate.2 Thus a strong argument can be
made that biological agents are always simultaneously acting as geophysical
agents when one considers the assemblages of interactions that produce
atmospheric conditions. Only by removing humans (or beavers) from the
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conceptual category of Nature and neglecting the relationships among the
other materials and organisms that mediate their actions and efects do
ecologies and climate become “artificial.”
While there are undeniable diferences in the scale of the efects of
humans on environmental conditions before and after the inventions of the
steam engine and the atomic bomb, there are less clearly diferences in kind.
Yet by signaling the end of the natural-social boundary, the Anthropocene
airms that such a divide used to exist. Thus, although progressive in its corrective to climate change narratives that frame human actions as inconsequential, the Anthropocene silently ushers in a corresponding regressive
environmentalism that reairms Nature.3 While it is no doubt critical to add
empirical specificity to how and the degree to which humans historically
have had an impact on planetary conditions (and continue to do so at an
increasingly alarming rate), it seems that an important step in this direction
would begin by recognizing that humans have always partly shaped their
socioenvironmental conditions. Instead of holding onto Nature as an other
to society, such a framing would allow one more fully to question and investigate what kinds of sociomaterial conditions are valued or desirable for particular people in particular places and how those conditions might be experienced, perceived, produced, and disrupted—forcing discussion of who is
responsible for particular changes, and on whom they have an impact, and
challenging the Anthropocene narrative that treats humans as an undiferentiated species. Moreover, it would also allow the crucial recognition that
not all humans conceptualize the world and their welfare by separating
social actors and nonhuman environmental constituents (e.g., Descola 1994;
Ingold 2000; Kohn 2013). Thus policies to promote visions of welfare in the
context of climate-related vulnerabilities would be forced to recognize situated cultural diferences, rather than promoting a universalist understanding of both Nature and desirable social conditions.
To underscore this point we turn to a discussion of one such community from the northwestern Himalayas and its members who see nonhuman
environmental constituents as inseparable from their social and political
lives. Such conceptions, we argue, are rooted in their everyday engagements
and experiences with diferent kinds of nonhumans. Before turning to our
ethnography, however, we discuss why an analytic attention to experiences
of weather and human-nonhuman interactions might allow for a more
grounded analysis of climate change. As Chakrabarty (2009: 220) efectively reminds us, people do not experience the world as a single species, and
as a consequence the lengthy and global efects of human-related climate
change do not readily fit human experience or historical imaginations.
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Humans and Nonhumans and Weather and Welfare in the Anthropocene
To question welfare in the Anthropocene requires a consideration of how
people experience climate change and environmental-related vulnerabilities
as situated and diferentiated actors—not simply as a species that exists in
opposition to Nature. Fundamental to the commonly held distinction
between weather and climate (prevalent in both popular and academic discourses) is the understanding that weather refers to local atmospheric conditions over a short period of time; it is temporary and chaotic, while climate
refers to long-term patterns of weather in a given place (e.g., Archer 2007;
Cunningham and Cunningham 2006; Sayre 2012). Thus, by definition, it is
almost impossible for changes in climate to be perceived through individual
experience. Hence it is arguably the diiculty with experiencing global
warming that impedes public support against it, even though, as many climate scientists have demonstrated, it poses a grave concern for many of
Earth’s inhabitants (IPCC 2013). And yet, as Morton (2013: 15) persuasively
reminds us, climate is real even when its “primordial reality is withdrawn
from humans.” Far from being a mental or discursive construct, climate in
his view is a hyperobject, in that it exists but is “massively distributed in time
and space relative to humans” (1). A problem confronting us and many who
write about the impossibility of “grasping” climate, however, is determining
ways that a robust politics can be mobilized around an entity and its efects
that defy immediate human experience (see Chakrabarty 2009, 2012; Crate
2011; Morton 2013; Vanderheiden 2008). How might human efforts be
mobilized to stop climate change if the object under question remains elusive, even invisible? How can we meaningfully rethink human welfare in
the context of climate change if the object of concern cannot be perceived? In
our view, a critical intervention in understanding welfare in the face of climate-related vulnerabilities is to privilege the experience of weather instead
of attempting to make “climate” more intelligible to human experience. A
renewed focus on weather allows one to use graspable occurrences that
shape everyday life and render it possible (or impossible) to generate a politics that foregrounds a profound rethinking of the ways human and nonhuman constituents entangle to produce environments.
As Morton and others have correctly noted, it is critical to problematize
the relationship between weather and climate as it pertains to the human
experience of global warming. Morton (2013) subverts the conventional distinctions between weather and climate, in that the former does not relect
climate even though it is undeniable in its immediacy. He cautions us
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 71
against resorting to a fallacy in which weather becomes more than a weak
representation of climate. One need only read the claims of global warming
denialists when weather conditions are anomalously cold to appreciate Morton’s provocative argument (e.g., Mooney 2014). Moreover, most meteorological scientists will be the first to clarify that no specific weather event can
be linked to climate change. Yet if we consider climate, as Tim Flannery
(2005: 20) does, to be “the sum of all weathers over a certain period, for a
region or for the planet as a whole,” then weather is constitutive of our understandings and experiences of climate. Although global climate is nonlocal,
its efects are experienced in particular places (e.g., Cassidy 2012; Lazrus
2012). While this framing risks conlating climate, as an abstracted representation, with its reality as a hyperobject (sensu Morton 2013), it nevertheless foregrounds what is experiential and what afects the lives of all inhabitants of Earth.
Weather is experienced by both humans and nonhumans. It occurs in
time and place; it inluences people’s day-to-day activities; it shapes their
moods, forms memories, facilitates crop growth, moves markets, and enables
people to enjoy the outside or confines them indoors. Weather is constitutive
of human life. In shifting attention away from the incomprehensibility of climate and toward the everydayness of weather, we supplement Morton’s (2013:
48) treatments of weather as a “false immediacy” that perilously masks
urgent concerns for global warming. Foregrounding weather makes human
experience foundational to welfare in the current period of Earth and human
history—a necessary step to understand the politics, everyday practices, vulnerabilities, and discourses related to global warming. Doing so makes the
critical insights that anthropology has to ofer deeply relevant to discussions
or public action concerning welfare and climate change. Fittingly, the anthropological turn to study the intricate relationships between humans and nonhumans, and, more critically, to advocate a dismissal of an ontological dualism between “intentional worlds of human subjects” and an object world of
material things, plants, and animals (Ingold 2000: 44), reairms the need to
disrupt the binaries between nature and culture and to take seriously how
people and communities around the globe continue to imagine their lifeworlds. We now turn to an ethnographic example from the Gurez Valley in
northern Kashmir on the India-Pakistan border to elucidate the ways that
people’s conceptualizations of well-being draw from an ontological making of
the world in which humans and nonhumans are both active and vital participants of a social ecological order and where nonhuman constituents are not
denied their “interiority” (see Toadvine 2007).
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Materializing Welfare in the Gurez Valley
Known for its rich biodiversity and its extreme winters, Gurez remains cut
of from the rest of the state for almost six months a year. Its “physical
isolation”—a complex product of border-making processes between India
and Pakistan that disrupted linkages between places and people—shapes
the ways Gurezis speak about and engage with their landscapes. The Indian
military has a massive presence in the region, and large portions of Gurezi
land, forests, and meadows are used to sustain India’s defense interests in
the region. Indeed, most infrastructural investments in Gurez are designed
to solidify Indian strategic objectives, often at the peril of local populations,
who either migrate out of Gurez during winters due to lack of food and other
vital resources or stay behind with very few amenities to help sustain harsh
weather conditions (Bhan 2014). In a context where the government has
done little to ensure yearlong connectivity or create avenues for their healthy
survival, Gurezis’ notions of welfare rely on the complex sociality that exists
between human and nonhuman actors in which people depend on their cattle, forests, wood, and glaciers for food, livelihood, and nurturance. For
Gurezis, then, any discussion of welfare must engage with their everyday
relationships with nonhuman environmental constituents and the ways
recent infrastructural interventions, such as dams and reservoirs, are putting tremendous strain on such relations.
Whether or not humans are changing the planet enough to leave
marks in the strata that warrant the epochal designation Anthropocene,
there is little doubt that “humanmade infrastructure” has substantively
“changed Earth’s biota and its hydrology through damming rivers, creating
reservoirs, sucking dry aquifers, and melting glaciers” (Vince 2011: 33).
Colossal infrastructural and ecological changes disrupt existing patterns of
human-nonhuman relationalities in which both humans and nonhumans
participate actively (albeit not always equally). For Gurezis, climate-related
anxieties are the outcome of everyday disruptions between human-nonhuman relationships caused by massive infrastructural interventions that
include the construction of a 330-megawatt dam on the disputed waters of
the Kishanganga River.
The dam, they claim, has already restructured their customary relationships with their land and waterscapes, substantially altering the web of
relationships among humans and nonhumans that frame notions of health,
survival, and welfare in Gurez. The health of their forests, glaciers, and soil
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is critical for their own survival because care of the self is deeply imbricated
with care for their nonhuman counterparts. Such perceptions are hardly
romantic; instead, they are based on the material relations that structure
Gurezis’ everyday lives, making it impossible to sustain the binaries that
separate human from nonhuman well-being or environmental rights from
human rights. For instance, the government’s schemes to displace the villagers by ofering them a meager compensation in return, only for portions
of land that are their “property,” or milkiyat, threaten Gurezis’ dependence
on their land, animals, and forests. In a context where people own very small
portions of land and rely mostly on the “commons” such as forests and glaciers for food, water, wood, and agriculture, such schemes commodify land
and strip communities of their critical resource base.
In addition to altering the local political economy and making Gurezis
dependent either on the military or on government compensation schemes,
the dam has also triggered several anxieties related to climate change. “If climate change is indeed global, its consequences,” Julie Cruikshank (2005: 25)
rightly claims, are “profoundly local.” Gurezis worry about “erratic weather”
becoming a regular feature of life in the valley given the construction of the
hydropower dam on the Kishanganga. The dam will do many things according to Gurezis; however, its function is not limited to channeling water and
following the scientific script that treats dams and rivers as predictable physical entities. The Kishanganga, Gurezis claim, has “moods” that are variable
and unpredictable (see figure 2). Memories of two massive loods in the 1970s
and the 1990s are vivid and continue to shape their fears and anxieties. They
worry that when blocked or rerouted the river will transform everything from
weather to vegetation to Gurez social and economic life. The water, they
claim, “will rise” beyond the level demarcated by experts, and, once it does,
water not only will “devour” land and houses but will also lead to more fog
and cold, making it impossible to live in a place where the temperature already
hits forty degrees below zero in the winter (pers. comm. July 13, 2013). 4
Contrary to scientific reports, Gurezis do not perceive climate change
as a rise in temperatures. According to them, the reservoir will accumulate
water that will freeze in the winter and contribute to colder temperatures in
the region. Furthermore, the dam, even though still in its construction
phase, is already “stunting the growth of crops or killing their prized trout
fish”—indicators that the locals use to demonstrate a substantive drop in temperatures (pers. comm. July 20, 2013). Most nonlocal engineers we spoke
with denied the construction’s far-reaching efects on village communities
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Figure 2. View of the Kishanganga River, Gurez Valley. Photograph by the authors
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or on the village ecology, although there is a plethora of reports suggesting
that the large number of dams in the Himalayas have significantly changed
its ecology and made mountain communities even more vulnerable to climatic shifts (e.g., Dharmadhikary 2008: 3; Grumbine and Pandit 2013;
Rana et al. 2007; Valdiya 1992). The villagers in Gurez, too, point to visible
alterations in their land, forests, rivers, and crops to substantiate their fears.
With an already high water table, the land is marshier because of the reservoir. “You only have to dig a few feet to find water under this land; it is dal dal
[marshy] and, therefore, hard to cultivate” (pers. comm. August 10, 2013).
Gurezis view scientific reports of the dam’s viability and impact with deep
skepticism, particularly in light of the fact that these rely on weather patterns of the previous hundred years while ignoring the Kishanganga’s desire
to act of its own accord. Their anxieties are critical for alerting us to the dangers of human “hubris in a complex and unpredictable world” (Cruikshank
2005: 19). Gurezis articulate this view well when they claim that the river
and its water has a “mind of its own,” one that will act according to its “will”
and possibly destroy villages, fields, and homes if its tracks are forcibly
altered. Climate-induced displacement is therefore a legitimate concern for
many villagers who remain skeptical of the National Hydroelectric Power
Corporation’s claims regarding the scale of displacements.
Just as with the Kishanganga, Gurezis speak of other environmental
constituents as alive and sentient rather than static, inert, or inanimate.
They view nonhumans as vital participants in a social order in which herbs,
trees, wood, rivers, glaciers, and dust act as allies but also contain in them
unpredictable impulses that can disrupt the foundations of human life.
Gurezis speak passionately about their glaciers, attributing to them features
that are both benevolent and wrathful. Notably, much as Athabascan and
Tlingit languages define glaciers and other landscape features “in terms of
their actions” (Cruikshank 2005: 3), Gurezis think of their rivers and glaciers in terms of their capacity to do things. As glaciers move, they carve
paths in mountains, allowing people to access highland pastures for their
cattle in the summer. Glaciers also bring Gurezis wood from high in the forests, reducing women’s labor in collecting firewood and easing the financial
burden on poorer households that can ill aford the purchase of fuel (see figure 3). In summer it is common to see people drying and stacking the wood
carried by the glaciers, in preparation for winter. Far from being dead or
inert, wood, for Gurezis, is an important actor that extends their lives and
helps them survive the extremities of weather. According to Nazir Lone, a
young Gurezi villager: “The government does not recognize the value of
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Figure 3. Example of a sediment-covered glacier in the summer, showing many materials
brought to Gurezis, including wood. Photograph by the authors
wood. They pay us hardly anything in compensation for wooden houses;
their schemes do not take into account the ways our wooden houses protect
us from the fury of winter.” The relational qualities of wood and its abilities
to insulate and withstand loods and earthquakes are seen as important
foundations of a “Gurezi way of life,” which is built on recognizing that
wood, much like other nonhuman environmental constituents, is also a cultural and social object that enables certain forms of life and modes of sociality. No wonder, then, that villagers are deeply upset about policies that pay
Gurezis very little money as compensation for their wooden houses, considered by the government to be kutcha (a term usually reserved for mud
houses) rather than pukka, or “concrete.”
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In addition to focusing on the “nurturing” traits of their forests and
glaciers, Gurezis also complain about how their glaciers can ruthlessly “kill”
during avalanches, which are common in the valley and hence deeply feared.
The extensive militarization of the region coupled with large-scale construction on the dam site has led to an unprecedented number of avalanches and
subsequent deaths. In 2012 a young villager died in an avalanche after engineers demanded the opening of a road in January, a time when access is
obstructed by at least six feet of snow. Gurezis blame the military and the
corporation for being “unresponsive” to the rhythms of glacial shifts and
behaviors; their overwhelming focus on security or eiciency, they argue,
treats glaciers as nonactors, an unfortunate move in their view for a space
carved by the swelling and retreat of glaciers, their ebb and low, as well as by
their wrath and generosity.
Stories about nonhuman actors that play a vital role in constituting people’s social lives in Gurez are many. But not all such actors are “indigenous.”
Indeed, the dam’s construction has introduced a multitude of new actants—
metal, stones, rubble, dust—all of which have significantly altered villagers’
social and economic activities. Dust, for example, settles on glaciers and on
plants and their wild fruit and vegetation, “dirtying them” and rendering
them impossible for human or animal use (see figure 4). That cattle now
refuse to eat the grass growing in the vicinity of the dam makes it challenging
for Gurezis to sustain a subsistence economy. People complain of the increased
frequency of asthma and other respiratory disorders because of the mix of
dust and rubble produced in the crushing plant located close to the village.
As the preceding discussion demonstrates, Gurezis view their rivers, forests, cattle, and glaciers as important constituents of a sociomaterial order and as actors that are indispensable for their everyday survival
but which can also be potentially ruthless. Much like hunter-gatherer
communities in India that see the forest as a “parent” (Bird-David 1990,
1992), Gurezis, too, emphasize the “caring” traits of forests while relying
on other nonhuman actors to forge a sense of self and personhood (West
2005: 633). Their attention to nonhumans allows us to see rivers, glaciers,
and forests as actors in motion, without “[re]enacting dualistic ontologies
that locate the natural and social in separate realms” (Sundberg 2011: 318).
Such an approach provides a solid ground for discerning the everyday
ainities and alliances but also the diferences and disagreements that
exist between humans and nonhumans, compelling us to engage with
existing configurations of materialities and, at the same time, to be mindful of those that are yet to emerge.
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Figure 4. Fine debris and dust generated at the dam site has settled on much of the pasture
in the vicinity, making it inedible to livestock. Photograph by the authors
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Discussion: Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene
Thus far we have sought to problematize the a priori ontological separation
of natural and artificial environmental conditions and human and nonhuman social actors that shape narratives of the Anthropocene and welfare in
the context of climate change. Such forced distinctions, we argue, have limited our ability to assess emerging vulnerabilities that pose a threat to human
well-being and silence the perceptions and experiences of many communities vulnerable to climatic changes. To reiterate, we are not denying that the
scale and magnitude of the human impact on the multitude of nonhuman
lifeforms and materials that inhabit Earth has significantly increased in the
past two hundred years. Indeed, a plethora of scholarship demonstrates considerable (and alarming) changes in Earth’s atmospheric and ecological conditions associated with the unintended consequences of industrialization.
However, our caution against accepting the Anthropocene designation is
that it potentially ignores that humans have long been enmeshed in a web of
human-nonhuman relationalities that are significant to understandings and
investigations of both human and nonhuman histories (see also Ruddiman
et al. 2015). By reifying the distinction between anthropogenic and natural
planetary conditions, society and nature, the concept of the Anthropocene
continues to produce Nature as an other set apart from humans in contemporary discourses of climate-related vulnerabilities. To be clear, yes, the scale of
human impact on the planet is now diferent than it was in the past. Yet to
suggest that the Anthropocene collapses the historiographical distinction
between natural history and human history is also to obscure the underlying
ontological issue that the boundary between natural history and human history has always been blurred.
In other words, we are questioning the usage of the Anthropocene not
because we are denying the scalar significance of human actions in contributing to planetary conditions that afect both human and nonhuman welfare, but because humans and nonhumans have always been constitutive
agents of these social conditions. This position, of course, is not to downplay
the significance of human action or limit the responsibilities of human
agents. It does, however, potentially extend agency to nonhumans given
their participation in producing particular sociomaterial conditions. Indeed,
whether one considers the movements of glaciers in the Gurez Valley as
agentive actions that are constitutive of particular social conditions depends
largely on how one defines terms. If strategic intentionality is essential to
“agency,” then, for most scholars, glaciers are definitionally precluded. Yet
the social sciences and humanities are far from consensus on how intentions
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relate to actions, and actions to social change—aside from the recognition
that human actions are not equivalent to human intentions and that sociohistorical environments are conditioned by a myriad of unintended consequences (e.g., Bourdieu 1990; Dobres and Robb 2000; Pauketat 2000).
Hence a broader sense of agency as modifying “a state of afairs” (sensu
Latour 2005: 71) would necessarily include the actions of glaciers in much
the same way that Gurezis attribute agency to rivers, dust, land, glaciers, and
the like. As Jane Bennett (2010: 5) efectively reminds us, materials do not
necessarily conform “to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them.”
However, this is also where nonhumans have limitations as “actors.” It is
humans—how they engage nonhumans, assemble them, and negotiate the
meanings of their actions—that largely establish the contexts for nonhumans to afect human experiences. As the case of Gurez demonstrates, large
infrastructural changes such as dams and reservoirs that entail new institutional configurations, labor regimes, and economic formations substantially
refigure existing human-nonhuman assemblages. It is therefore crucial that
we historicize human-nonhuman relationships, paying attention to the ways
such assemblages are produced. To problematize welfare in the Anthropocene by attending to human-nonhuman relationships is not to deny the role
of humans or broad contextual configurations of political economy in contributing to particular sociohistorical conditions. Instead, it is to emphasize
the complex associations that exist among humans and the other things,
organisms, and matter that contribute to human realities and make human
action highly contingent on other actors. In this sense, as the political economy of infrastructural development in Gurez reveals, a renewed focus on
human-nonhuman relationships should not neglect human politics and
agency in producing such engagements and assemblages; to the contrary, it
should force analytical attention on how such entanglements are enabled
and the conditions of possibility that inluence them.
Decentering human agency complicates liberal notions of causality
and responsibility that are critical to framings of welfare in the contexts of
global environmental concerns with climate change (e.g., Sayre 2012; Vanderheiden 2008). Indeed, with agency distributed across an assemblage,
how can anyone be held accountable? Yet the terms Anthropocene and anthropogenic, premised on human exceptionalism, potentially also obscure
notions of blame by attributing culpability to the human species as a totality.
As Nathan F. Sayre (2012: 67) cogently articulates, a “politics of the anthropogenic must give way to a politics that identifies which people have caused
which changes, with what consequences to whom, and demands a justice
that is indistinguishably social and environmental at the same time.” Clearly,
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 81
then, the politics of the anthropogenic is largely silent on questions of power
and diference, particularly given that humanity is not constituted by equal
participants in the fossil fuel economy. Indeed, Malm and Hornborg (2014)
have suggested that structural inequalities are a necessary condition for
modern fossil fuel technology (see also Hornborg 2001, 2011), a technological dependence of industrial capitalism that Philip McMichael (2009) has
further linked to inlated global food prices associated with current policies
to promote biofuels. Needless to say, the Anthropocene’s emphasis on the
human species as a geophysical force glosses these inequalities and hardly
ensures a just politics of climate change. Instead, it becomes an alibi for
powerful actors to escape the burden of causality and to ignore how certain
communities that rely intimately on their surroundings might be more susceptible to climate change, given that it is hardly ever uniform in its devastating impacts on human populations (e.g., Lazrus 2012; Ribot 2014). Thus
sweeping attributions of culpability to the human species as a whole weaken
any claims to social, political, or environmental justice by silencing (even
stabilizing) political economic inequalities that are foundational to the ways
people experience climate-related disasters.
It follows that an important step in mobilizing a politics of climate
change, we argue, is to recognize the vibrancy (sensu Bennett 2010) of nonhuman actors and not to dilute human responsibility. While human actions
are undeniably responsible for climate-related vulnerabilities, such actions
and their impact make little sense outside a web of materiality within which
human beings remain firmly enmeshed. To recognize the complexity of the
Gurezi worldview is not to disregard human agency as much as it is to locate
its impact within multiple assemblages of human-nonhuman configurations that are dynamic and emergent and therefore also not entirely predictable. Acknowledging matter’s vitality and sociality does not minimize politics; on the contrary, it allows new possibilities for political action that are
grounded in relations between humans and nonhumans and a fuller recognition of their intimacies, ainities, and diferences.
By taking questions of matter and materiality seriously, we can expand
the basis for speaking about human welfare as well as social and environmental justice. If we take seriously the social role of glaciers—providers of
wood, constructors of paths, and wrathful killers—it also becomes imperative to trace how these social roles are being altered and permits injured parties to highlight their experiences of injustice. For instance, the compensation
scheme of the Indian government pays Gurezis only for their landed property
that the dam will submerge. Such policies fail to take into account that it is the
forests, the mountains, and the glaciers and not state or corporate-sponsored
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employment schemes that enable Gurezis to create their livelihoods. Without the resources provided by glaciers and the forest, inhabitants of the
Gurez Valley would experience forms of acute poverty incalculable given
otherwise straightforward political economic indicators such as gross
domestic product or assessments of landownership.
An emphasis on matter and materiality allows us to engage with the
complex assemblages that enable well-being in particular places and that
likewise generate a myriad of unintended consequences. Indeed, both
archaeology and ethnography have demonstrated that materials frequently
do not heed the intentions of humans. As reviewed above, significant soil
erosion and vegetational changes occurred in prehistoric southern India
despite the best eforts of human inhabitants to maintain optimal conditions
for good pasture through the construction of retention walls. We call attention to the degree to which materials can act on their own because much of
what passes as progressive politics on climate change in international
forums (the Kyoto Protocol, for instance) also considers human technological progress as central to resolving the climate crisis (Toly 2005: 74), reinforcing triumphalist narratives in which humans will eventually subdue a
recalcitrant Nature. Missing, and indeed largely ignored, is the materiality of
nonhumans that are never guaranteed to be fully in conformity with human
will, desire, or design.
A critical understanding of welfare within the context of climate
change must thus be prepared to detail the intricate historical relationships
among humans and nonhuman actors that make life possible (or impossible) in particular places. Anthropology, with its multidisciplinary methods,
is better positioned than other disciplines to address such concerns, attuned
to how people embedded in this materiality experience it, perceive it, constitute it, and reassemble it. As ethnography and archaeology have repeatedly
shown, people develop fears and anxieties about materials that are part of
their daily lives and that are diferentially significant to their well-being. Paradoxically, while the Anthropocene adds a much-needed corrective to climate change narratives that view human action as inconsequential, it treats
humans as if they were a single, homogenous force. It makes people relevant
as agents of environmental change, while leaving people undiferentiated in
terms of their feelings, anxieties, geography, culture, class, occupation, or
historical relationships to the environment in particular places. Such a position leaves no scope for acknowledging distinct ways of environmental
engagement across human societies, thus profoundly undermining alternative understandings and politics of welfare that do not follow the Promethean
script of controlling and subduing Nature.
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Notes
We owe a debt of gratitude to numerous friends, family, colleagues, and institutions that have
both informed and supported the research that frames this essay. Special mention goes to the
Archaeological Survey of India, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Science
Foundation, DePauw University, and the University of Illinois for research permissions and
funding that made much of the analyses that shaped our thinking possible. Thanks are also
owed to Stanley Ambrose, Charles Roseman, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Rod Wilson for suggestions and for forwarding to us materials that helped shape our thoughts, as well as to Jesse
Ribot, who graciously shared a forthcoming manuscript. We would also like to thank Catherine Fennell for encouraging us to address the Anthropocene and Anne-Maria Makhulu for
the kind invitation to contribute to this issue and for her helpful recommendations and keen
editorial eye. Of course, any responsibility for errors or opinions remains solely our own.
1
Methane increases are estimated to account for “a quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse heat trapping” (Archer 2007: 116).
2
On the geological timescale, one could point to the oxygenation of the atmosphere during the Proterozoic eon (approximately 2.5 billion years ago) that was likely caused by
cyanobacteria photosynthesis as an example of when geophysical history was significantly altered by surface ecology; the introduction of free oxygen into the atmosphere
likely reduced the concentrations of methane and triggered a period of global glaciation
(see Archer 2007; Flannery and Walter 2012; Frei et al. 2009; Sim et al. 2012; Kopp et
al. 2005).
3
See also Ian Jared Miller’s (2013) analyses of nineteenth-century Japan in which he
efectively argues that the Anthropocene be considered coeval with the development of
“ecological modernity.”
4
Quotations in this paragraph and the subsequent paragraph come from personal interviews conducted by Mona Bhan in Gurez, Indian administered Jammu-Kashmir,
between June and August 2013. Quotations translated into English from Urdu by Mona
Bahn.
References
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Archer, David, and Stefan Rahmstorf. 2010. The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
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Bauer, Andrew M. 2014. “Impacts of Mid- to Late-Holocene Land Use on Residual Hill Morphology: A Remote Sensing and Archaeological Evaluation of Human-Related Soil Erosion in Central Karnataka, South India.” Holocene 24, no. 1: 3–14.
Bauer, Andrew M. 2015. Before Vijayanagara: Prehistoric Landscapes and Politics in the Tungabhadra Basin. New Delhi: Manohar and American Institute of Indian Studies.
Bauer, Andrew M., and Kathleen D. Morrison. 2013. “Assessing Anthropogenic Soil Erosion
with Multi-spectral Satellite Imagery: An Archaeological Case Study of Long-Term
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South Atlantic Quarterly
Andrew M. Bauer and Mona Bhan
Welfare and the Politics and
Historicity of the Anthropocene
A
cross the academy, from climate scientists to literary critics, scholars now debate the adoption and
implications of the term Anthropocene to describe
the current period of Earth and human history—
a time when humans are making an unprecedented impact on global climate that has considerable consequences for many species, including
our own (see Chakrabarty 2009, 2012; Crutzen
2002; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Kohn 2014;
Morton 2013). Some, such as Paul J. Crutzen (2002)
and Timothy Morton (2013), trace its inception to
precisely 1784 with the invention of the steam
engine and the beginning of humanity as a geophysical force” associated with greenhouse gas
emissions (Morton 2013: 7). Others, such as Jan
Zalasiewicz et al. (forthcoming), suggest placing
its boundary in 1945 after which the chemical
traces of nuclear bomb explosions are evident in
Earth’s surficial stratigraphy. Regardless of
whether the Anthropocene will be charted in the
rock record or will achieve an oicial geological
designation (see Vince 2011; Zalasiewicz et al.
forthcoming), it is now broadly discussed because
its implications transcend obvious environmentalist concerns and extend to how social scientists and
humanist scholars conceptualize many of their
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doi 10.1215/00382876-3424753 © 2016 Duke University Press
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foundational categories, including even what it means to be human. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009: 201), for instance, suggests that human
explanations for climate change now “spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” To say the least,
such pronouncements reinforce the need to analyze and perhaps rethink how
we understand welfare in the context of climate change, especially as it relates
to fundamental anthropological concerns with nature, culture, climate, history, and agency.
Although we share the well-founded concerns for mitigating global
warming, in this essay we critically explore the Anthropocene’s philosophical
and political implications for both constituting and understanding welfare in
this “new” historiographical period. There is little doubt that human impacts
on global climate now pose a veritable danger for many of Earth’s inhabitants
as communities become more vulnerable to sea-level rise, species go extinct,
and weather becomes more erratic (e.g., Lazrus 2012; Lavergne et al. 2010;
Ribot 2014). Yet as Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014: 63, 66) have correctly noted, debates concerning the Anthropocene are so “dominated by the
natural science[s]” that the concept furthers the divide between nature and
humanity while it also “blatantly overlooks the realities of diferentiated vulnerability on all scales of human society.” Indeed, there is a serious need for
anthropologists to engage critically with emerging discourses on the Anthropocene and, at the same time, to do so with attention to how the concept both
constrains and enables particular formulations of human and nonhuman
conditions for well-being. As we argue below, ethnographic and archaeological research poses serious challenges to the universality of the nature-society
and the natural-anthropogenic binaries that undergird narratives of the
Anthropocene and that also subsequently frame conditions of welfare as a
strict product of society, divorced from the social articulations humans establish with other things, materials, and organisms.
The traditional concept of welfare, at least in the Keynesian sense, envisioned a critical role for governments to care for the poor and the marginal
whose basic needs remained unmet in a laissez-faire economy. Yet several
neoliberal reforms since the 1980s have considerably weakened the foundations of welfarism (Harvey 2005: 298), an ideology that is now increasingly
seen to beneit the lazy and unproductive segments of the population. Indeed,
as Karen A. Curtis (2007: 31) argues, neoliberal economic restructuring has
“pathologized” recipients of aid and welfare and weakened ties of kin and
community. Therefore, anxious questions about the fate of a “withering” state
that no longer “cares” for its marginal populations and severely limits their
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 63
access to essential social goods such as food, health, and education are by no
means unfounded (see Makhulu, this issue). Yet there are also reasons to
question the abilities of Keynesian-style welfare to capture the relationships
that people establish with other humans and nonhumans, which eventually
condition and produce collective experiences of well-being.
At the outset of this issue, Anne-Maria Makhulu cogently recalls the
Aristotelian distinction between oikos and polis to resituate contemporary
debates on welfare and state responsibility within the historical binaries of
the domestic and the political—the former being the private domain of the
household where material necessities are met and where the “human species” is reproduced and the latter the public domain that “lies beyond the
domain of necessity” and where citizens are free to pursue activities that lead
to self-actualization (McKeon 2005: 7). For most critics of a welfare state,
material needs are equated with the realm of mere life (Makhulu, this issue:
4), an association that does little to disrupt the fundamental separation
between the private and the public, the oikos and the polis, or, as Ariel Salleh
(2006) argues, the natural and the cultural. Indeed, in Aristotelian formulations, oikos is associated with nature, where material needs are met, and polis
with society, a space of freedom, innovation, and external association (Howarth 1996: 69).
How might such separations between the domestic and the political or
between nature and society limit our pursuit of human and nonhuman welfare, especially in light of a sustained scholarly efort to “transcend the dualism of objects and subjects” (D. Miller 2005: 43)? Also, how might we broaden
the debate on human welfare by moving beyond the restrictive framework of
state power and responsibility to engage with questions of environment, matter, and climate? Such an exercise, we argue, is not just intellectually exciting
but also politically necessary for capturing the range of human experiences
that constitute well-being during a period in which humans and nonhumans
are increasingly entangled in climate-related vulnerabilities. Insofar as our
current understanding of polis continues to be built on the fundamental separation of nature and society, it is, Salleh (2006: 28) argues, “ill equipped
to steer an ecological future.” In short, any understanding of welfare, especially at the time of ongoing climate change, must challenge the easy binary
between the domestic and the political, and, more pertinently, it must also
disrupt the boundaries between the natural and the social.
In this essay we argue that the Anthropocene, as a historiographical
designation, is premised on the long-standing modernist distinction between
society and nature (e.g., Latour 1993). Thus, even though its intended politics
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of foregrounding human culpability in the climate crisis is progressive, it
fails to question the enduring legacies and implications of separating human
histories from natural histories. We thus begin our discussion of welfare in
the Anthropocene with a review of long-term sociomaterial histories to probe
the period’s uniqueness as a mode of human-environment interaction. However, rather than contributing to this debate by seeking to establish when the
period started, we suggest that scholars might more productively approach
the question of the Anthropocene orthogonally to its typical framing—asking
instead whether the underlying distinction between natural and unnatural
environmental conditions that undergirds the Anthropocene narrative is a
useful analytical divide for understanding socioenvironments as they relate
to contemporary concerns with welfare and environmental politics in the context of climate change. Thus we go on to question the ontological foundations
of the Anthropocene and subsequently the corresponding binaries of public
(polis) and domestic (oikos) that limit our understandings of welfare. Indeed,
problematizing these boundaries forces analyses of historical human conditions and experiences of well-being to consider broadly the myriad relationships people establish with other humans, organisms, and things that
collectively have an impact on their lives. As we argue below, in contexts of
pronounced environmental changes it is thus a necessary prerequisite to
keep analytical attention on weather and its materialities because of their
daily and immediate experiential qualities, rather than merely attempting to
make climate more intelligible to human perception. We then turn to ethnography in South Asia to assess how people engage with the materialities of
environmental phenomena that afect their well-being. And inally, we relect
on the implications of our analyses for anthropology and for the politics of
welfare in a rapidly changing climate.
Questioning the Historicity of the Anthropocene and Its Silences
As advocated by Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer (2000), the “Anthropocene” signiies a division in the geological periodization of Earth’s history
that separates the current time of global human impacts on the planet’s ecology and atmosphere from the Holocene—the most recent geological epoch
that spans approximately the past ten thousand years. Although the designation has not been officially adopted among geologists (e.g., Vince 2011;
Zalasiewicz et al., forthcoming), it has gained considerable traction across
the academy. Crutzen (2002: 23), an atmospheric chemist credited with
popularizing the term, argues: “For the past three centuries, the efects of
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 65
humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart signiicantly
from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to
assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene—the warm period of
the past 10–12 millennia.” In short, there is an overwhelming body of scientiic evidence that points to considerable changes in Earth’s atmosphere, surface materials, and species distributions (including extinctions) associated
with human activities and their unintended consequences over the past two
hundred years, and particularly since the irst nuclear bomb explosion in
1945 (e.g., Archer and Rahmstorf 2010; Crutzen 2000; Crutzen and Stoermer
2000; Lavergne et al. 2010; van den Brink et al. 2011; Sanderson et al. 2002;
Zalasiewicz et al., forthcoming). Scholars have even suggested that human
consumption of fossil fuels and the production of greenhouse gases, such as
carbon dioxide and methane, might delay Earth’s next ice age (see McGuire
2012; Stager 2011).
It is with such quantiiably large and lengthy human impacts that the
Anthropocene has been considered a qualitatively new historiographical
period and humans new kinds of agents of environment change. The climate scientist William F. Ruddiman and colleagues (2015: 38), for example,
have characterized formulations of the Anthropocene as marking a time in
which “humans have replaced nature as the dominant environmental force
on Earth.” Chakrabarty (2009) further underscores a historiographical distinction between humans as “biological” agents and “geological” agents that
is made possible by such anthropogenic explanations of climate change. In
his words, “humans are biological agents, both collectively and as individuals. They have always been so” (206). However, he continues, “humans have
become geological agents very recently in human history. In that sense, we
can say that it is only very recently that the distinction between human and
natural histories—much of which had been preserved even in environmental histories that saw the two entities in interaction—has begun to collapse”
(207). In this sense, as Malm and Hornborg (2014: 62) have noted, the
Anthropocene periodization now implies that “the Enlightenment distinction between Nature and Society is obsolete.”
And yet, insomuch as it pronounces and foregrounds the agency of
humans as an environmental force, the Anthropocene narrative also powerfully “silences” (sensu Trouillot 1995) a variety of social diferences and landscape histories that are critical to contemporary understandings and experiences of socioenvironmental conditions. By deinition, it attributes climate
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change to humans as a single homogenous force and obscures underlying
social inequalities and asymmetries related to both the production and experience of environmental circumstances. However, as is well documented,
humans that have facilitated the production of greenhouse gases and global
warming that arguably warrant the designation Anthropocene have not
done so as a homogenous web or network of humanity; in the frank words of
Malm and Hornborg (2014: 65): “A signiicant chunk of humanity is not
party to the fossil economy at all.” Furthermore, it is important to note that
the Anthropocene narrative reproduces the same nature-society binary it
purportedly dissolves—distinguishing a time when the two realms could be
usefully separated from the current period when they cannot. In this sense,
the Anthropocene narrative is predicated on upholding a modernist distinction that not all of Earth’s inhabitants share. Such forced conceptualizations
of environmental histories can severely limit our understandings of human
(and nonhuman) welfare, particularly given that many of Earth’s human
inhabitants recognize sociality among nonhuman species and materials that
are threatened by changing climates (see below). Thus, although the adoption
of the Anthropocene periodization calls needed attention to humans as
agents of contemporary climate change, it does so at the cost of potentially
obfuscating social diferences, inequalities, and broader understandings of
human-environmental histories and relationships with signiicant analytical
implications for framing both human and nonhuman well-being and environmental politics that do not rest on the externality of Nature (see also Bhan
and Trisal, forthcoming).
Indeed, a plethora of anthropological, historical, and environmental
scholarship demonstrates that humans have always been enmeshed within
a web of materials and organisms that collectively produce ecologies, geographies, and socioenvironmental conditions that are signiicant to human welfare; moreover, such entanglements between humans and nonhumans have
always had the potential to afect global atmospheric conditions as they scale,
challenging the uniqueness of the Anthropocene as a new period of humanenvironment interaction. For example, it is well documented that human
land use was related to a cascade of mass extinctions when people populated
new continents, such as Australia approximately ifty thousand years ago
(G. Miller et al. 2005; Rule et al. 2012; Sandom et al. 2014). More recently,
and more directly related to global warming, the reversal in atmospheric levels of methane, which decreased in the irst half of the Holocene but then
increased after circa 5000 BP (before the present), can likely be attributed to
an expansion of human agriculture and pastoralism in South and East Asia
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 67
Figure 1. Example of Iron Age soil retention feature on a residual hill in central Karnataka.
Photograph by Andrew Bauer
(see Fuller et al. 2011; Ruddiman 2003).1 Furthermore, environmental
archaeology of the interior of South India has demonstrated that intensiied
agropastoral activities on the region’s rocky hills between circa 5000 BP and
2300 BP exposed soil matter to erosion, which in conjunction with broader
monsoonal changes in seasonal rainfall signiicantly altered regional landforms and vegetation communities (see Bauer 2008, 2014; Bauer and Morrison 2013; Caratini et al. 1994; Fuller and Korisettar 2004). Despite human
eforts during the period to prevent erosion and promote pasture growth
through the construction of retention walls, soil erosion nevertheless intensiied in locations where animal grazing was most dense (see igure 1) (e.g.,
Bauer 2014, 2015). These instances are, of course, just a handful out of countless examples of how human land use has greatly modiied the distribution
of carbon sequestering soil and vegetation prior to the Industrial Revolution
(see, e.g., Michael Williams’s [2006] treatise on deforestation).
We highlight the environmental archaeology of South Asia not simply
to illustrate that humans have signiicantly altered the environment for a long
time, shaping the soils, landforms, and ecologies of the region’s rocky hills for
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many thousands of years. Proponents of the Anthropocene are aware that
humans have long modiied environmental conditions (Zalasiewicz et al.,
forthcoming). Our point is more broadly to problematize the sharp ontological division between social and natural environments that underlies the
Anthropocene narrative and has signiicant consequences for how we conceptualize society and the speciicities of human well-being within the context of climate change. Both before and after the Industrial Revolution we see
people taking up positions within their environments and constituting them
with a range of materials and organisms that interact, collectively and recursively, to produce historical socioenvironmental circumstances.
Yet to argue that the Anthropocene begins when shifts away from
“natural” planetary conditions, climatic or otherwise, can be recognized is
efectively an argument that humans are no longer part of Nature. It is a
similar argument of a particular kind of progressive human exceptionalism
that allowed early social evolutionary thinkers, such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1868), nearly 150 years ago to create distinctions between “savage” and
“civilized” people. Ironically, almost ten years before Morgan published
Ancient Society ([1877] 1964), he also wrote about the same exceptionalism
of the American beaver’s transcendence of Nature and how its dens, dams,
and ponds evidenced “an artiicial mode of life” similar to the distinctions
Morgan (1868: 83) made between stages of human “savagery”: “As the dam
is not an absolute necessity to the beaver for the maintenance of his life, his
normal habitation being rather natural ponds and rivers, and burrows in
their banks, it is, in itself considered, a remarkable fact that he should have
voluntarily transferred himself, by means of dams and ponds of his own
construction, from a natural to an artiicial mode of life.” We stress Morgan’s framing of the American beaver’s “artificial mode of life” partly
because beaver dams increase greenhouse gas production (e.g., methane)
across broad areas of North America today (e.g., Naiman, Manning, and
Johnston 1991; Yavitt et al. 1992), but more signiicantly because when taken
together with that fact, his framing accentuates the problems with the natural-unnatural binary and the diiculties of drawing a strict line between
what is “naturally” ecological and “unnaturally” geophysical. Indeed, geologists and climate scientists have long shown that the ecological history of
Earth’s surface—particularly the distribution and composition of its respiring vegetative taxa and bacteria—has signiicant impacts on atmospheric
conditions and climate.2 Thus a strong argument can be made that biological agents are always simultaneously acting as geophysical agents when one
considers the assemblages of interactions that produce atmospheric conditions. Only by removing humans (or beavers) from the conceptual category
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 69
of Nature and neglecting the relationships among the other materials and
organisms that mediate their actions and efects do ecologies and climate
become “artiicial.”
While there are undeniable diferences in the scale of the efects of
humans on environmental conditions before and after the inventions of the
steam engine and the atomic bomb, there are less clearly diferences in kind.
Yet by signaling the end of the natural-social boundary, the Anthropocene
airms that such a divide used to exist. Thus, although progressive in its corrective to climate change narratives that frame human actions as inconsequential, the Anthropocene silently ushers in a corresponding regressive
environmentalism that reairms Nature.3 While it is no doubt critical to add
empirical speciicity to how and the degree to which humans historically
have had an impact on planetary conditions (and continue to do so at an
increasingly alarming rate), it seems that an important step in this direction would begin by recognizing that humans have always unequally shaped
their socioenvironmental conditions. Instead of holding onto Nature as an
other to society, such a framing would allow one more fully to question and
investigate what kinds of sociomaterial conditions are valued or desirable for
particular people in particular places and how those conditions might be
experienced, perceived, produced, and disrupted—forcing discussion of who
is responsible for particular changes, and on whom they have an impact, and
challenging the Anthropocene narrative that treats humans as an undiferentiated species. Moreover, it would also allow the crucial recognition that
not all humans conceptualize the world and their welfare by separating
social actors and nonhuman environmental constituents (e.g., Descola 1994;
Ingold 2000; Kohn 2013). Thus policies to promote visions of welfare in the
context of climate-related vulnerabilities would be forced to recognize situated cultural diferences, rather than promoting a universalist understanding of both Nature and desirable social conditions.
To underscore this point we turn to a discussion of one such community from the northwestern Himalayas and its members who see nonhuman
environmental constituents as inseparable from their social and political
lives. Such conceptions, we argue, are rooted in their everyday engagements
and experiences with diferent kinds of nonhumans. Before turning to our
ethnography, however, we discuss why an analytic attention to experiences
of weather and human-nonhuman interactions might allow for a more
grounded analysis of climate change. As Chakrabarty (2009: 220) efectively reminds us, people do not experience the world as a single species, and
as a consequence the lengthy and global efects of human-related climate
change do not readily it human experience or historical imaginations.
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Humans and Nonhumans and Weather and Welfare in the Anthropocene
To question welfare in the Anthropocene requires a consideration of how
people experience climate change and environmental-related vulnerabilities
as situated and diferentiated actors—not simply as a species that exists in
opposition to Nature. Fundamental to the commonly held distinction
between weather and climate (prevalent in both popular and academic discourses) is the understanding that weather refers to local atmospheric conditions over a short period of time; it is temporary and chaotic, while climate
refers to long-term patterns of weather in a given place (e.g., Archer 2007;
Cunningham and Cunningham 2006; Sayre 2012). Thus, by deinition, it is
almost impossible for changes in climate to be perceived through individual
experience. Hence it is arguably the diiculty with experiencing global
warming that impedes public support against it, even though, as many climate scientists have demonstrated, it poses a grave concern for many of
Earth’s inhabitants (IPCC 2013). And yet, as Morton (2013: 15) persuasively
reminds us, climate is real even when its “primordial reality is withdrawn
from humans.” Far from being a mental or discursive construct, climate in
his view is a hyperobject, in that it exists but is “massively distributed in time
and space relative to humans” (1). A problem confronting us and many who
write about the impossibility of “grasping” climate, however, is determining
ways that a robust politics can be mobilized around an entity and its efects
that defy immediate human experience (see Chakrabarty 2009, 2012; Crate
2011; Morton 2013; Vanderheiden 2008). How might human efforts be
mobilized to stop climate change if the object under question remains elusive, even invisible? How can we meaningfully rethink human welfare in
the context of climate change if the object of concern cannot be perceived? In
our view, a critical intervention in understanding welfare in the face of climate-related vulnerabilities is to privilege the experience of weather instead
of attempting to make “climate” more intelligible to human experience. A
renewed focus on weather allows one to use graspable occurrences that
shape everyday life and render it possible (or impossible) to generate a politics that foregrounds a profound rethinking of the ways human and nonhuman constituents entangle to produce environments.
As Morton and others have correctly noted, it is critical to problematize
the relationship between weather and climate as it pertains to the human
experience of global warming. Morton (2013) subverts the conventional distinctions between weather and climate, in that the former does not relect
climate even though it is undeniable in its immediacy. He cautions us
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 71
against resorting to a fallacy in which weather becomes more than a weak
representation of climate. One need only read the claims of global warming
denialists when weather conditions are anomalously cold to appreciate Morton’s provocative argument (e.g., Mooney 2014). Moreover, most meteorological scientists will be the irst to clarify that no speciic weather event can
be linked to climate change. Yet if we consider climate, as Tim Flannery
(2005: 20) does, to be “the sum of all weathers over a certain period, for a
region or for the planet as a whole,” then weather is constitutive of our understandings and experiences of climate. Although global climate is nonlocal,
its efects are experienced in particular places (e.g., Cassidy 2012; Lazrus
2012). While this framing risks conlating climate, as an abstracted representation, with its reality as a hyperobject (sensu Morton 2013), it nevertheless foregrounds what is experiential and what afects the lives of all inhabitants of Earth.
Weather is experienced by both humans and nonhumans. It occurs in
time and place; it inluences people’s day-to-day activities; it shapes their
moods, forms memories, facilitates crop growth, moves markets, and enables
people to enjoy the outside or conines them indoors. Weather is constitutive
of human life. In shifting attention away from the incomprehensibility of climate and toward the everydayness of weather, we supplement Morton’s (2013:
48) treatments of weather as a “false immediacy” that perilously masks
urgent concerns for global warming. Foregrounding weather makes human
experience foundational to welfare in the current period of Earth and human
history—a necessary step to understand the politics, everyday practices, vulnerabilities, and discourses related to global warming. Doing so makes the
critical insights that anthropology has to ofer deeply relevant to discussions
or public action concerning welfare and climate change. Fittingly, the anthropological turn to study the intricate relationships between humans and nonhumans, and, more critically, to advocate a dismissal of an ontological dualism between “intentional worlds of human subjects” and an object world of
material things, plants, and animals (Ingold 2000: 44), reairms the need to
disrupt the binaries between nature and culture and to take seriously how
people and communities around the globe continue to imagine their lifeworlds. We now turn to an ethnographic example from the Gurez Valley in
northern Kashmir on the India-Pakistan border to elucidate the ways that
people’s conceptualizations of well-being draw from an ontological making of
the world in which humans and nonhumans are both active and vital participants of a social ecological order and where nonhuman constituents are not
denied their “interiority” (see Toadvine 2007).
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Materializing Welfare in the Gurez Valley
Known for its rich biodiversity and its extreme winters, Gurez remains cut
of from the rest of the state for almost six months a year. Its “physical
isolation”—a complex product of border-making processes between India
and Pakistan that disrupted linkages between places and people—shapes
the ways Gurezis speak about and engage with their landscapes. The Indian
military has a massive presence in Gurez, and large portions of local land,
forests, and meadows are used to sustain India’s defense and territorial interests. Indeed, most infrastructural investments in Gurez are designed to solidify Indian strategic objectives, often at the peril of local populations, who
either migrate out of Gurez during winters due to lack of food and other vital
resources or stay behind with very few amenities to help sustain harsh weather
conditions (Bhan 2014). In a context where the government has done little to
ensure yearlong connectivity or create avenues for their healthy survival,
Gurezis’ notions of welfare rely on the complex sociality that exists between
human and nonhuman actors in which people depend on their cattle, forests, wood, and glaciers for food, livelihood, and nurturance. For Gurezis,
then, any discussion of welfare must engage with their everyday relationships with nonhuman environmental constituents and the ways recent
infrastructural interventions, such as dams and reservoirs, are putting tremendous strain on such relations.
Whether or not humans are changing the planet enough to leave
marks in the strata that warrant the epochal designation Anthropocene,
there is little doubt that “humanmade infrastructure” has substantively
“changed Earth’s biota and its hydrology through damming rivers, creating
reservoirs, sucking dry aquifers, and melting glaciers” (Vince 2011: 33).
Colossal infrastructural and ecological changes disrupt existing patterns of
human-nonhuman relationalities in which both humans and nonhumans
participate actively (albeit not always equally). For Gurezis, climate-related
anxieties are the outcome of everyday disruptions between human-nonhuman relationships caused by massive infrastructural interventions that
include the construction of a 330-megawatt dam on the disputed waters of
the Kishanganga River.
The dam, Gurezis claim, has already restructured their customary relationships with their land and waterscapes, substantially altering the web of
relationships among humans and nonhumans that frame notions of health,
survival, and welfare in Gurez. The health of their forests, glaciers, and soil
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 73
is critical for their survival because care of the self is deeply imbricated with
care for their nonhuman counterparts. Such perceptions are hardly romantic; instead, they are based on the material relations that structure Gurezis’
everyday lives, making it impossible to sustain the binaries that separate
human from nonhuman well-being or environmental rights from human
rights. For instance, the government’s schemes to displace the villagers by
ofering them a meager compensation in return, only for portions of land
that are their “property,” or milkiyat, threaten Gurezis’ dependence on their
land, animals, and forests. In a context where people own very small portions of land and rely mostly on the “commons” such as forests and glaciers
for food, water, wood, and agriculture, such schemes commodify land and
strip communities of their critical resource base.
In addition to altering the local political economy and making Gurezis
dependent either on the military or on government compensation schemes,
the dam has also triggered several anxieties related to climate change. “If climate change is indeed global, its consequences,” Julie Cruikshank (2005: 25)
rightly claims, are “profoundly local.” Gurezis worry about “erratic weather”
becoming a regular feature of life in the valley given the construction of the
hydropower dam on the Kishanganga. The dam will do many things according to Gurezis; however, its function is not limited to channeling water and
following the scientiic script that treats dams and rivers as predictable physical entities. The Kishanganga, Gurezis claim, has “moods” that are variable
and unpredictable (see igure 2). Memories of two massive loods in the 1970s
and the 1990s are vivid and continue to shape their fears and anxieties. They
worry that when blocked or rerouted the river will transform everything from
weather to vegetation to Gurezi social and economic life. The water, they
claim, “will rise” beyond the level demarcated by experts, and, once it does,
water not only will “devour” land and houses but will also lead to more fog
and cold, making it impossible to live in a place where the temperature already
hits forty degrees below zero in the winter (pers. comm., July 13, 2013). 4
Contrary to scientiic reports, Gurezis do not perceive climate change
as a rise in temperatures. According to them, the reservoir will accumulate
water that will freeze in the winter and contribute to colder temperatures in
the region. Furthermore, the dam, even though still in its construction
phase, is already “stunting the growth of crops or killing their prized trout
ish”—indicators that the locals use to demonstrate a substantive drop in temperatures (pers. comm., July 20, 2013). Most nonlocal engineers we spoke
with denied the construction’s far-reaching efects on village communities
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Figure 2. View of the Kishanganga River, Gurez Valley. Photograph by Mona Bhan
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or on the village ecology, although there is a plethora of reports suggesting
that the large number of dams in the Himalayas have signiicantly changed
its ecology and made mountain communities even more vulnerable to climatic shifts (e.g., Dharmadhikary 2008: 3; Grumbine and Pandit 2013;
Rana et al. 2007; Valdiya 1992). The villagers in Gurez, too, point to visible
alterations in their land, forests, rivers, and crops to substantiate their fears.
With an already high water table, the land is marshier because of the reservoir. “You only have to dig a few feet to ind water under this land; it is dal dal
[marshy] and, therefore, hard to cultivate” (pers. comm., August 10, 2013).
Gurezis view scientiic reports of the dam’s viability and impact with deep
skepticism, particularly in light of the fact that these rely on weather patterns of the previous hundred years while ignoring the Kishanganga’s desire
to act of its own accord. Their anxieties are critical for alerting us to the dangers of human “hubris in a complex and unpredictable world” (Cruikshank
2005: 19). Gurezis articulate this view well when they claim that the river
and its water has a “mind of its own,” one that will act according to its “will”
and possibly destroy villages, ields, and homes if its tracks are forcibly
altered. Climate-induced displacement is therefore a legitimate concern for
many villagers who remain skeptical of India’s National Hydroelectric Power
Corporation’s claims regarding the scale of displacements.
Just as with the Kishanganga, Gurezis speak of other environmental
constituents as alive and sentient rather than as static, inert, or inanimate.
They view nonhumans as vital participants in a social order in which herbs,
trees, wood, rivers, glaciers, and dust act as allies but also contain in them
unpredictable impulses that can disrupt the foundations of human life.
Gurezis speak passionately about their glaciers, attributing to them features
that are both benevolent and wrathful. Notably, much as Athabascan and
Tlingit languages deine glaciers and other landscape features “in terms of
their actions” (Cruikshank 2005: 3), Gurezis think of their rivers and glaciers in terms of their capacity to do things. As glaciers move, they carve
paths in mountains, allowing people to access highland pastures for their
cattle in the summer. Glaciers also bring Gurezis wood from high in the forests, reducing women’s labor in collecting irewood and easing the inancial
burden on poorer households that can ill aford the purchase of fuel (see igure 3). In summer it is common to see people drying and stacking the wood
carried by the glaciers, in preparation for winter. Far from being dead or
inert, wood, for Gurezis, is an important actor that extends their lives and
helps them survive the extremities of weather. According to Nazir Lone, a
young Gurezi villager: “The government does not recognize the value of
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Figure 3. Example of a sediment-covered glacier in the summer, showing many materials
brought to Gurezis, including wood. Photograph by Mona Bhan
wood. They pay us hardly anything in compensation for wooden houses;
their schemes do not take into account the ways our wooden houses protect
us from the fury of winter.” The relational qualities of wood and its abilities
to insulate and withstand loods and earthquakes are seen as important
foundations of a “Gurezi way of life,” which is built on recognizing that
wood, much like other nonhuman environmental constituents, is also a cultural and social object that enables certain forms of life and modes of sociality. No wonder, then, that villagers are deeply upset about policies that pay
Gurezis very little money as compensation for their wooden houses, considered by the government to be kutcha (a term usually reserved for mud
houses) rather than pukka, or “concrete.”
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In addition to focusing on the “nurturing” traits of their forests and
glaciers, Gurezis also complain about how their glaciers can ruthlessly “kill”
during avalanches, which are common in the valley and hence deeply feared.
The extensive militarization of the region coupled with large-scale construction on the dam site has led to an unprecedented number of avalanches and
subsequent deaths. In 2012 a young villager died in an avalanche after engineers demanded the opening of a road in January, a time when access is
obstructed by six to twelve feet of snow. Gurezis blame the military and the
corporation for being “unresponsive” to the rhythms of glacial shifts and
behaviors; their overwhelming focus on security or eiciency, they argue,
treats glaciers as nonactors, an unfortunate move in their view for a space
carved by the swelling and retreat of glaciers, their ebb and low, as well as by
their wrath and generosity.
Stories about nonhuman actors that play a vital role in constituting
people’s social lives in Gurez are many. But not all such actors are “indigenous.” Indeed, the dam’s construction has introduced a multitude of new
constituents—metal, stones, rubble, dust—all of which have signiicantly
altered villagers’ social and economic activities. Dust, for example, settles
on glaciers and on plants and their wild fruit and leaves, “dirtying them”
and rendering them impossible for human or animal use (see igure 4). That
cattle now refuse to eat the grass growing in the vicinity of the dam makes
it challenging for Gurezis to sustain a subsistence economy. People complain of the increased frequency of asthma and other respiratory disorders
because of the mix of dust and rubble produced in the crushing plant located
close to the village.
As the preceding discussion demonstrates, Gurezis view their rivers,
forests, cattle, and glaciers as important constituents of a sociomaterial order
and as actors that are indispensable for their everyday survival but which can
also be potentially ruthless. Much like hunter-gatherer communities in India
that see the forest as a “parent” (Bird-David 1990, 1992), Gurezis, too, emphasize the “caring” traits of forests while also relying on other nonhuman actors
to forge a sense of self and personhood (West 2005: 633). Their attention to
nonhumans allows us to see rivers, glaciers, and forests as actors in motion,
without “[re]enacting dualistic ontologies that locate the natural and social in
separate realms” (Sundberg 2011: 318). Such an approach provides a solid
ground for discerning the everyday ainities and alliances but also the diferences and disagreements that exist between humans and nonhumans, compelling us to engage with existing conigurations of materialities and, at the
same time, to be mindful of those that are yet to emerge.
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Figure 4. Fine debris and dust generated at the dam site has settled on much of the pasture
in the vicinity, making it inedible to livestock. Photograph by Mona Bhan
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Discussion: Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene
Thus far we have sought to problematize the a priori ontological separation
of natural and anthropogenic environmental conditions and human and
nonhuman social actors that shape narratives of the Anthropocene and welfare in the context of climate change. Such forced distinctions, we argue,
have limited our ability to assess emerging vulnerabilities that pose a threat
to human well-being and silence the perceptions and experiences of many
communities vulnerable to climatic changes. To reiterate, we are not denying that the scale and magnitude of the human impact on climate and the
multitude of nonhuman lifeforms and materials that inhabit Earth has signiicantly increased in the past two hundred years. Indeed, a plethora of
scholarship demonstrates considerable (and alarming) changes in Earth’s
atmospheric and ecological conditions associated with the unintended consequences of industrialization. However, our caution against accepting the
designation Anthropocene is that it potentially ignores that humans have long
been enmeshed in a web of human-nonhuman relationalities that are signiicant to understandings and investigations of both human and nonhuman histories (see also Ruddiman et al. 2015). By reifying the distinction
between anthropogenic and natural planetary conditions, society and nature,
the concept of the Anthropocene continues to produce Nature as an other set
apart from humans in contemporary discourses of climate-related vulnerabilities. To be clear, yes, the scale of human impact on the planet is now different than it was in the past. Yet to suggest that the Anthropocene collapses
the historiographical distinction between natural history and human history
is also to obscure the underlying ontological issue that the boundary between
natural history and human history has always been blurred.
In other words, we are questioning the usage of the Anthropocene not
because we are denying the scalar signiicance of human actions in contributing to planetary conditions that afect both human and nonhuman welfare, but because humans and nonhumans have always been constitutive of
these social conditions. This position, of course, is not to downplay the signiicance of human action or limit the responsibilities of human actors. It
does, however, potentially extend agency to nonhumans given their participation in producing particular sociomaterial conditions. Indeed, whether
one considers the movements of glaciers in the Gurez Valley as agentive
actions that are constitutive of particular social conditions depends largely
on how one conceptualizes terms. If intentionality is essential to “agency,”
then, for most scholars, glaciers are deinitionally precluded. Yet the social
sciences and humanities are far from consensus on how intentions relate to
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actions, and actions to social change—aside from the recognition that
human actions are not equivalent to human intentions and that sociohistorical environments are conditioned by myriad unintended consequences (e.g.,
Bourdieu 1990; Dobres and Robb 2000; Pauketat 2000). A broader sense of
agency as modifying “a state of afairs” (sensu Latour 2005: 71) would necessarily include the actions of glaciers in much the same way that Gurezis
attribute agency to rivers, dust, land, glaciers, and the like. As Jane Bennett
(2010: 5) efectively reminds us, materials do not necessarily conform “to the
contexts in which (human) subjects set them.” However, this is also where
nonhumans have limitations as “agents.” It is humans—how they engage
nonhumans, assemble them, and negotiate the meanings of their actions—
that largely establish the contexts for nonhumans to afect human afairs. As
the case of Gurez demonstrates, large infrastructural changes such as dams
and reservoirs that entail new institutional conigurations, labor regimes,
and economic formations substantially reigure existing human-nonhuman
assemblages. It is therefore crucial that we historicize human-nonhuman
relationships, paying attention to the ways such assemblages are produced.
To problematize welfare in the Anthropocene by attending to human-nonhuman relationships is not to deny the role of humans or broad contextual
conigurations of political economy in contributing to particular sociohistorical conditions. Instead, it is to emphasize the complex associations that
exist among humans and the other things, organisms, and matter that contribute to human realities and make human action highly contingent on
other actors. In this sense, as the political economy of infrastructural development in Gurez reveals, a renewed focus on human-nonhuman relationships should not neglect human politics and agency in producing such
engagements and assemblages; to the contrary, it should force analytical
attention on how such entanglements are enabled and the conditions of possibility that inluence them.
Decentering human agency complicates liberal notions of causality
and responsibility that are critical to framings of welfare in the contexts of
global environmental concerns with climate change (e.g., Sayre 2012; Vanderheiden 2008). Indeed, with agency distributed across an assemblage
(sensu Bennett 2010), how can anyone be held accountable? Yet the terms
Anthropocene and anthropogenic, premised on human exceptionalism, potentially also obscure notions of blame by attributing culpability to the human
species as a totality. As Nathan F. Sayre (2012: 67) cogently articulates, a
“politics of the anthropogenic must give way to a politics that identiies
which people have caused which changes, with what consequences to whom,
and demands a justice that is indistinguishably social and environmental at
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 81
the same time.” Clearly, then, the politics of the anthropogenic is largely
silent on questions of power and diference, particularly given that humanity
is not constituted by equal participants in the fossil fuel economy. Indeed,
Malm and Hornborg (2014) have suggested that structural inequalities are a
necessary condition for modern fossil fuel technology (see also Hornborg
2001, 2011), a technological dependence of industrial capitalism that Philip
McMichael (2009) has further linked to inlated global food prices associated with current policies to promote biofuels. Needless to say, the Anthropocene’s emphasis on the human species as a geophysical force glosses these
inequalities and hardly ensures a just politics of climate change. Instead, it
becomes an alibi for powerful actors to escape the burden of causality and to
ignore how certain communities that rely intimately on their surroundings
might be more susceptible to climate change, given that it is hardly ever uniform in its devastating impacts on human populations (e.g., Lazrus 2012;
Ribot 2014). Thus sweeping attributions of culpability to the human species
as a whole weaken any claims to social, political, or environmental justice by
silencing (even stabilizing) political economic inequalities that are foundational to the ways people experience climate-related disasters.
It follows that an important step in mobilizing a politics of climate
change, we argue, is to recognize the vibrancy (sensu Bennett 2010) of nonhumans and not to dilute human responsibility. While human actions are
undeniably responsible for climate-related vulnerabilities, such actions and
their impact make little sense outside a web of materiality within which
human beings remain irmly enmeshed. To recognize the complexity of the
Gurezi worldview is not to disregard human agency as much as it is to locate
its impact within multiple assemblages of human-nonhuman conigurations that are dynamic and emergent and therefore also not entirely predictable. Acknowledging matter’s vitality and sociality does not minimize politics; on the contrary, it allows new possibilities for political action that are
grounded in relations between humans and nonhumans and a fuller recognition of their intimacies, ainities, and diferences.
By taking questions of matter and materiality seriously, we can expand
the basis for speaking about human welfare as well as social and environmental justice. If we take seriously the social role of glaciers—providers of wood,
constructors of paths, and wrathful killers—it also becomes imperative to trace
how these social roles are being altered and permits injured parties to highlight
their experiences of injustice. For instance, the compensation scheme of the
Indian government pays Gurezis only for their landed property that the dam
will submerge. Such policies fail to take into account that it is also the forests, the mountains, and the glaciers, and not state- or corporate-sponsored
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employment schemes, that enable Gurezis to create their livelihoods. Without the resources provided by glaciers and the forest, inhabitants of the
Gurez Valley would experience forms of acute poverty incalculable given
otherwise straightforward political economic indicators such as gross
domestic product or assessments of landownership.
An emphasis on matter and materiality allows us to engage with the
complex assemblages that enable well-being in particular places and that
likewise generate myriad unintended consequences. Indeed, both archaeology and ethnography have demonstrated that materials frequently do not
heed the intentions of humans. As reviewed above, signiicant soil erosion
and vegetational changes occurred in prehistoric southern India despite the
best eforts of human inhabitants to maintain optimal conditions for good
pasture through the construction of retention walls. We call attention to the
degree to which materials can act on their own because much of what passes
as progressive politics on climate change in international forums (the Kyoto
Protocol, for instance) also considers human technological progress as central to resolving the climate crisis (Toly 2005: 74), reinforcing triumphalist
narratives in which humans will eventually subdue a recalcitrant Nature.
Missing, and indeed largely ignored, is the materiality of nonhumans that
are never guaranteed to be fully in conformity with human will, desire, or
design.
A critical understanding of welfare within the context of climate
change must thus be prepared to detail the intricate historical relationships
among humans and nonhuman actors that make life possible (or impossible) in particular places. Anthropology, with its multidisciplinary methods,
is better positioned than other disciplines to address such concerns, attuned
to how people embedded in this materiality experience it, perceive it, constitute it, and reassemble it. As ethnography and archaeology have repeatedly
shown, people develop fears and anxieties about materials that are part of
their daily lives and that are diferentially signiicant to their well-being. Paradoxically, while the Anthropocene adds a much-needed corrective to climate change narratives that view human action as inconsequential, it treats
humans as if they were a single, homogenous force. It makes people relevant
as agents of environmental change, while leaving people undiferentiated in
terms of their feelings, anxieties, geography, culture, class, occupation, or
historical relationships to the environment in particular places. Such a position leaves no scope for acknowledging distinct ways of environmental
engagement across human societies, thus profoundly undermining alternative understandings and politics of welfare that do not follow the Promethean
script of controlling and subduing Nature.
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Welfare and the Politics and Historicity of the Anthropocene 83
Notes
We owe a debt of gratitude to numerous friends, family, colleagues, and institutions that have
both informed and supported the research that frames this essay. Special mention goes to the
Archaeological Survey of India, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Science
Foundation, DePauw University, and the University of Illinois for research permissions and
funding that made much of the analyses that shaped our thinking possible. Thanks are also
owed to Stanley Ambrose, Charles Roseman, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Rod Wilson for suggestions and for forwarding to us materials that helped shape our thoughts, as well as to Jesse
Ribot, who graciously shared a forthcoming manuscript. An earlier version of this paper was
presented in 2013 during the 42nd Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Madison, where we received helpful feedback from participants. We would also like to thank Catherine Fennell for encouraging us to address the Anthropocene and Anne-Maria Makhulu for
the kind invitation to contribute to this issue and for her helpful recommendations and keen
editorial eye. Of course, any responsibility for errors or opinions remains solely our own.
1
Methane increases are estimated to account for “a quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse heat trapping” (Archer 2007: 116).
2
On the geological timescale, one could point to the oxygenation of the atmosphere during the Proterozoic eon (approximately 2.5 billion years ago) that was likely caused by
cyanobacteria photosynthesis as an example of when geophysical history was signiicantly altered by surface ecology; the introduction of free oxygen into the atmosphere
likely reduced the concentrations of methane and triggered a period of global glaciation
(see Archer 2007; Flannery and Walter 2012; Frei et al. 2009; Sim et al. 2012; Kopp et
al. 2005).
3
See also Ian Jared Miller’s (2013) analyses of nineteenth-century Japan in which he
efectively argues that the Anthropocene be considered coeval with the development of
“ecological modernity.”
4
Quotations in this paragraph and the subsequent paragraph come from personal interviews conducted by Mona Bhan in Gurez, Indian administered Jammu-Kashmir,
between June and August 2013. Quotations translated into English from Urdu by Mona
Bhan.
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