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!"# %"! CLIMATE WITHOUT NATURE This book offers a critical reading of the Anthropocene that draws on archaeological, ecological, geological, and ethnographic evidence to argue that the concept reproduces the modernist binary between Society and Nature and forecloses a more inclusive politics around climate change. The authors challenge the divisions between humans as biological and geophysical agents that constitute the ontological foundations of the period. Building on contemporary critiques of capitalism, they examine different conceptions of human–environment relationships derived from anthropology to engage with the pressing problem of global warming. andrew m. bauer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. He is author of Before Vijayanagara: Prehistoric Landscapes and Politics in the Tungabhadra Basin (2015). mona bhan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at DePauw University. She is author of Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and the Politics of Identity in India: From Warfare to Welfare? (2014). *
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!"# %"! Climate without Nature A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene andrew m. bauer Stanford University mona bhan DePauw University *
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!"# %"! University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108423243 doi: 10.1017/9781108525633 © Andrew M. Bauer and Mona Bhan 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Bauer, Andrew M., author. | Bhan, Mona, author. title: Climate without nature : a critical anthropology of the anthropocene / Andrew M. Bauer, Mona Bhan. description: New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references. identifiers: lccn 2017036388 | isbn 9781108423243 (Hardback) subjects: lcsh: Nature–Effect of human beings on. | Conservation of natural resources. | Environmentalism. | Climatic changes. | Global warming. classification: lcc gf75 .b39 2018 | ddc 577.55–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036388 isbn 978-1-108-42324-3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. *
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!"# %"! Contents List of Figures page vi List of Tables vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1 Introduction: Materializing Climate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 Assembling the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 3 On Soils, Stones, and Social Relationships of Geophysical History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 4 On Glaciers and Grass and Weather and Welfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 5 Social Welfare without the Anthropocene’s Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 6 Conclusion: Toward a Critical Anthropology of Global Warming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 References Index 141 161 v *
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!"# %"! Figures 1.1 Location map showing principal areas of fieldwork discussed in the book, including a portion of the Southern Deccan region and the Gurez Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 28 2.1 Generalized representation of Ruddiman’s theory for the anthropogenic extension of the Holocene interglacial period . . . . . 41 3.1 Location map of archaeological sites and surveys of the Southern Deccan region discussed in the text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 3.2 Distribution of settlements and land use sites in the Benakal Reserve forest north of Kadebakele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 3.3 Examples of geomorphological landforms of the region and archaeological features associated with prehistoric land use . . . . . . . 58 3.4 Dolmen megalithic features on the quarried edges of a modified rock pool at the site of Hire Benakal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 3.5 Generalized map of dolmen monument heights near the central reservoir at Hire Benakal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 3.6 Medieval Period reservoir and sluice gate near the site of Vijayanagara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 4.1 Stacks of collected wood drying in the summer heat in the Gurez Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 4.2 Example of a sediment-covered glacier in the summer, showing many materials brought to Gurezis, including logs from the forest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 vi *
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!"# %"! Tables 1.1 Proposed dates for the start of the Anthropocene, after Lewis and Maslin (2015) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . page 10 3.1 Spatial statistics for monument proximity of formal “dolmen” features, and less formal cobble-created “boulder enclosure” monuments at Hire Benakal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 vii *
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!"# %"! Preface On Wednesday, January 21, 2015, the United States Senate voted 98–1 to approve a resolution that stated, “[I]t is the sense of the Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax.”1 Shortly afterward, the Senate rejected a follow-up resolution that linked the reality of climate change with human activities: “[C]limate change is real and human activity significantly contributes to climate change.”2 That the Senate could acknowledge that climate change was real and not acknowledge the role of humans in it serves as a fitting reminder of the politics of global warming in the United States as well as in many other parts of the globe, especially as it pertains to questions of human activities and responsibility. On one hand, it demonstrates that many people are reticent to accept (or at least are politically motivated to deny) the overwhelming scientific evidence that points to the role of human fossil fuel consumption in changing the planet’s atmosphere and climate. Yet, on the other hand, it also highlights the increasing difficulty of ignoring what many senators and many of their constituents are beginning to experience and perceive: record-setting temperatures, more frequent heat waves, earlier spring agricultural planting seasons, the increasing difficulty of ice fishing on thin ice, and “white” Christmases that are now romanticized visions of a former time in some places. Alarmingly for many concerned citizens and scientists, it seems that the process of global warming is intensifying to the degree that it is becoming perceptible to human experience. The number of times that TV meteorologists speak of conditions that are “unseasonably warm” or “Mother Nature’s” ruse of raining instead of snowing during a Midwestern January event is increasingly difficult to ignore. And yet there is still a sizable population, both among politicians 1 2 “Climate change is real and not a hoax, Senate overwhelmingly decides”. LA Times, 1/21/2015. “Senate Votes 98–1 That Climate Change ‘Is Not a Hoax.’” NBC News, 1/21/15. ix *
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!"# %"! x Preface and the public, who deny the role humans are playing in warming the planet. As Oklahoma senator Jim Inhofe stressed in his rejection of the second resolution, “[T]he hoax is that there are some people that are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change climate.”3 Given this political context, the “Anthropocene” – a proposed designation to formally acknowledge the “recent age of humankind” on the geological timescale of earth’s approximately 4.5 billion year stratigraphic record of rock chemistry, species evolution, and climate change – is a much needed scientific and public call to foreground the actions of humans in altering the planet’s ecology, surface materials, and broader systemic functioning. And yet, at the same time that the Anthropocene highlights human action in shaping earth’s climatic trajectory, the designation also continues to hold people apart from Nature while overlooking the vast differences that characterize the human species. As a proposed new geological or historiographical period, most scholars place its beginning around either 1800 or 1950 – marking the time when humans became a “geophysical force” following the advent of the steam engine and their subsequent reliance on fossil fuels in the case of the former, or the “great acceleration” in the consumption of fossil fuels and many other human activities that affect the earth system in the case of the latter. The Anthropocene periodization, for many of its proponents, identifies a time when the earth system has “left its natural geological epoch” (e.g., Stefen et al. 2007) as a consequence of human activities. In short, prior to the onset of this new period, earth’s climate operated in a “natural” state. After the beginning of this period, humans have “replaced nature as the dominant environmental force on Earth” (Ruddiman et al. 2015). Paradoxically, while earth systems scientists recognize human actions as constitutive elements of the earth system, in their common characterization of the Anthropocene they continue to hold humanity and Nature apart. Ironically, it is arguably the perpetuation of this dichotomy that impedes a progressive politics of global warming. Is it not precisely an ideology of Nature that exists without human influence, either now or in the past, that is mobilized by those who are no longer global warming naysayers but refuse to see the ways human interventions (undoubtedly some more than others) have and could contribute to climate change? As we demonstrate in this book, humans have long been embedded in the material workings of the earth system, and many of its environments and its planetary conditions have not been unaffected by humans for at least thousands of years. This 3 “Climate change is real and not a hoax, Senate overwhelmingly decides”. LA Times, 1/21/2015. *
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!"# %"! xi Preface recognition, we suggest, might potentially provide the basis for a more progressive politics of climate change in which representations of the global environment or climatic system as stable or natural, whether now or in the past, are replaced with a historically informed view on the complexity of how the environments that humans inhabit have always been constituted, not in some pure domain that stands apart from human society but instead through differentiated and place-based human– nonhuman relationships that articulate with climatic conditions. Would that not open up debate about what configurations of people and otherthan-human inhabitants of particular places are desirable, for whom, and how those might be achieved, constituted, or disrupted? While these might very well be the political goals and implications for advocating the designation “Anthropocene,” the concept, as first and foremost a new period in which humans have replaced “nature,” may largely work against them by reifying Nature’s very existence as separate from Society. To address the questions above requires a temporally much deeper historical understanding of how humans have been differentially embedded in the material workings of the earth system than what most proponents of the Anthropocene have hitherto stressed. The Anthropocene’s emphasis on the emergence of humans as a “geophysical force” within the last 50 or 200 years – or, in some arguments that have linked the Anthropocene period to the development of a capitalist and colonial world system, the last 500 years – has hardly begun to underscore how humans began contributing to much of what is considered to be natural about the planet’s atmospheric conditions and environmental systems prior to the onset of this proposed new epoch. To do so necessarily requires archaeology and the detailed studies of human land use and technological and social practices over the long term. Yet despite a considerable emphasis among archaeologists on studying human responses to climate change in the past, archaeologists themselves have been largely silent on questions of the Anthropocene until very recently. In this book we review material on long-term and contemporary relationships between humans and the planet’s ecology and atmosphere to examine the historicity and the political implications of the Anthropocene designation. Doing the latter, however, also means addressing the role of political economic forces as well as actors differentiated by class, race, gender, or location in shaping the current climate crisis. To be clear, the Anthropocene has hardly been produced equally by a singular Anthropos. If we recognize that many formulations of the Anthropocene fail to account for both the differentiated responsibilities and vulnerabilities of humans, it *
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!"# %"! xii Preface is also imperative to ask how, and under what conditions, are such inequalities produced and intensified. Given this context, we are faced with a critical question: How might letting go of Nature, not just in the present but also in the past, disrupt the foundational premise of the Anthropocene and yet be cognizant of the ways in which systems of production, human inequalities, and differentiated social contexts have contributed significantly to ongoing global warming, particularly over the last few hundred years? At the same time, how might we account for human experiences of a changing climate, which necessarily differ across social, economic, and geographical divisions? The US Senate has now belatedly acknowledged what nearly all of the world’s scientists and many of its citizens have long known: Climate change is “real.” This means that addressing the politics and implications of global warming also requires addressing how people conceive, experience, and perceive their relationships with their changing environments, a task that is best suited for cultural anthropology. A critical anthropology of the Anthropocene thus requires collaboration that draws on the strengths of the discipline’s different methods and the domain expertise of its various subfields. In the pages that follow we combine archaeology and sociocultural anthropology to consider the empirical basis and the philosophical and political implications of the Anthropocene. The idea for this collaboration began during a conversation in 2011 about how the combined insights from archeology and cultural anthropology could be used to counter climate’s “abstractness,” which has arguably greatly impeded wider policy and public support against mitigating global warming and its devastating consequences for human and nonhuman populations of the world. How could anthropology, with its deep commitment to historical understanding and social and political justice, use the experiences of people to build a politics that is mindful of large-scale climatic shifts while also being attentive to the ways people engage with houses, cars, soil, sand, sediments, mountains, trees, animals, and glaciers? It was clear to us that, as anthropologists, we had to address the category of “weather” to rethink and reimagine a politics of global warming that privileged people’s everyday experiences, rather than rely solely on rendering concrete abstract data from atmospheric and climate scientists. At the same time, however, we also recognized what many earth system scientists have demonstrated for a long time: that earth’s climate is a dynamic assemblage of interactions among a multitude of different things and materials, ranging from the gravitational pull of massive celestial bodies that impact earth’s orbit around the sun to the production of atmospheric methane by microscopic bacteria in waterlogged soils on *
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!"# %"! xiii Preface earth’s surface. Thus, materializing climate – by which we mean foregrounding how humans are embedded in a broader materiality that is constitutive of social, environmental, and climatic conditions – was a common point of departure to both assess how humans participate in climatic production over the long term and also how they perceive and experience their lives and welfare within this broader materiality. This seemed especially important within the context of shifting weather patterns, which are increasingly becoming the norm for populations across the globe with consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods, their cultures, and modes of engaging multiple social and material worlds. Indeed, as we detail in this book, the rapid and profound transformations in people’s sociomaterial lives are taking place within the context of large-scale infrastructural interventions and the intense commodification of environmental resources such as land and water, which are dramatically altering the relationship between humans and nonhumans and shaping people’s perceptions and experiences of weather. Since our conversation in 2011 we have both conducted multiple field seasons of anthropological research in South Asia (Figure 1.1), an area of the planet that is highly vulnerable to climate change. Bauer conducts research in South India on periods during which inhabitants of the Southern Deccan began differentially reshaping environmental conditions and simultaneously contributing to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, all in the context of developing social inequalities thousands of years ago. Bhan conducts research among contemporary mountain communities in the heavily militarized and war-torn border provinces of Jammu and Kashmir. These communities are currently experiencing massive ecological catastrophes that include an unprecedented number of floods associated with melting glaciers and extensive infrastructural development that is limiting people’s access to resources and disrupting their networks of kin and family. The critical understanding of the Anthropocene and the intervention that we offer in the following pages could not have been written with just one of these research settings and methods. By bringing together insights from archeology and cultural anthropology we thus hope to shed critical light on the Anthropocene concept and some of the most pressing issues of environmental and social justice of our times, the politics of which most of our politicians are just beginning to confront. *
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!"# %"! Acknowledgments We have many friends, family, and colleagues to thank for encouragement, advice, and inspiration that gave shape to this manuscript and ensured that it came to fruition. This collaboration began as a conversation in Greencastle, Indiana, in the fall of 2011, which led to a conference paper at the Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, the following year. The basis of several of the arguments that we weave together in the pages that follow appeared in that first coauthored paper, now more than five years ago, while others were articulated in a number of subsequent speaking engagements and invited contributions on the problematic of the Anthropocene as it pertains to archaeology, environmental history, anthropology, and welfare in the context of a warming planet. As with most such projects, these opportunities helped shape the direction of our thoughts and words, and specifically how we articulated the complementarity of archaeological and ethnographic engagement with the Anthropocene problematic. We are especially grateful for the feedback that we received from audiences at DePauw University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Society for American Archaeology, and the American Anthropological Association. We have carried on a number of sustained conversations with friends and colleagues in these contexts, and many have also provided written comments on previous drafts of our prose and forwarded to us material that helped shape our thinking. We are especially grateful to Alan Mikhail, Angus Mol, Anne Harris, AnneMaria Makhulu, Catherine Kearns, Charles Roseman, Glen Kuecker, Hannah Chazin, Jesse Ribot, Jessica Greenberg, Jonathan Greenberg, Kathleen Morrison, Robert Morrisey, Radhika Govindrajan, Roderick Wilson, Stanley Ambrose, and Tariq Ali for engaging us on this project. Collaborations with Erle Ellis and Steve Kosiba on topics related to xv *
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!"# %"! xvi Acknowledgments geophysics and new materialist framings of action and agency, respectively, also influenced the pages that follow, and we thank them for their friendship, inspiration, and continued dialogue. We are also indebted to several people for their encouragement to carry out this work, and specifically to Cassie Fennell for pushing us into the topic even further and Ian Hodder and Lynn Meskell for helping us move the project along once we were in it. Of course, few of the pages in this book would have been possible without the underlying fieldwork that enables the interventions we make in it. For that, we are forever indebted to friends and colleagues, both at home and abroad, who have long been our partners in those endeavors. This includes Carla Sinopoli, Kathleen Morrison, Mark Lycett, Mudit Trivedi, Peter Johansen, Pradeep Mehendiratta, Purnima Mehta, T.S. Gangadhar, R. Gopal, Vandana Sinha, George Michell, John Fritz, Showkat Saleem, Sonam Lotus, Sahil, Shahid, Parvaiz Bukhari, Nawaz Gul Qanungo, Sanjay Kak, and many other friends in Srinagar and Gurez. Research that was carried out as part of the Maski Archaeological Research Project, the Early Historic Landscapes of the Tungabhadra Corridor Project, and the Paleoenvironments of Peninsular India Project that informs the archaeological portions of this book was made possible by the kind permissions of the Karnataka Department of Archaeology, Museums and Heritage and the Archaeological Survey of India, for which we will remain forever thankful. Funding for ethnographic fieldwork in Kashmir was provided by DePauw University and funding for archaeological work in Karnataka was provided by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Science Foundation, DePauw University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois. We would also like to acknowledge Beatrice Rehl for the kind attention that she gave us and our manuscript. Without doubt, her encouragement, comments, and efforts to secure helpful feedback from other reviewers greatly improved the quality of the pages that follow. We are thankful to her for the opportunity to bring this book out through Cambridge University Press. Last, but certainly not least, our close family and friends provided incalculable support and encouragement for this project. Valerie, Ron, Mary, Michael, Bob, Julie, Mushtaq, Purnima, Autar, Farooq, Javed, and Amaar – we could never thank you enough. *
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!"$ &"! 1 Introduction Materializing Climate In the wake of the 2015 United Nations conference on climate change that reached an agreement among 195 nations to reduce human activities that facilitate global warming, scholars across the academy, from climate scientists to literary critics, continue to debate the adoption and implications of the designation “Anthropocene” to describe the current period of earth and human history – a time when humans are making an unprecedented impact on the earth system that has considerable consequences for all life on earth. Some, such as Crutzen (2002) and Morton (2013), trace its beginning to precisely 1784 with the invention of the steam engine and the “inception of humanity as a geophysical force” (Morton 2013: 7). Others place its boundary in the middle of the twentieth century, after which the chemical traces of atomic bombs are globally present in the earth’s surficial stratigraphy (e.g., Waters et al. 2016; Zalasiewicz et al. 2015). While there is continued debate about where to place the Anthropocene’s chronological boundary as a geological epoch (cf. Lewis and Maslin 2015; Vince 2011; Waters et al. 2016; Zalasiewicz et al. 2015), it is undebatable that the Anthropocene has gone “viral” – spanning both popular and academic discourses and spawning numerous lectures, symposia, editorials, articles, courses, films, and even designated journals. Most scholars, it seems, have been quick to adopt this new geological and historiographical period. And, why not? By definition, it re-centers humans and the study of humanity on some of the most pressing environmental and political concerns of the day. The Anthropocene is now broadly discussed because its implications transcend obvious environmentalist concerns for global warming, species extinctions, conservation, and sustainability, and extend to how natural scientists and humanist scholars conceptualize many of their foundational categories. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) suggests, human 1 ,
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!"$ &"! Climate without Nature 2 explanations for climate change that arguably warrant the designation Anthropocene “spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (201), and destabilize the ontological foundations of modern political institutions that are based on ideals of separating a Society of people from an external realm of Nature. In short, the Anthropocene is huge – not just because for many people it is synonymous with the broad-scale implications of global warming and its catastrophic consequences for all life on earth (as if that weren’t enough), but also because it may imply the end of science and society as they have long been conceptualized. As the philosopher of science Bruno Latour (2014a) has noted, the designation subverts traditional conceptions of an external objective natural world devoid of humans when humans are active not only in the construction of facts about that world, “but also in the very existence of the phenomena those facts are trying to document” (2). Needless to say, such pronouncements reinforce the need to analyze and perhaps rethink how we understand social life in the context of climate change, especially as it relates to fundamental anthropological concerns with nature, culture, climate, history, agency, and politics. Thus, much ink has been spilled over the Anthropocene since it was initially proposed just over fifteen years ago by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer (2000). And yet there is more to spill. Social scientists and humanities scholars have only begun to significantly address the Anthropocene. As Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) have critically pointed out, debates concerning the Anthropocene have been so dominated by the natural sciences that the concept has furthered the divide between nature and humanity.1 Yet, it is not difficult to see how anthropology and the social sciences writ large may contribute to the debate over its historiographical, conceptual, and political usefulness. For instance, most of the Anthropocene literature reproduces the very dichotomy of Nature and Society that many argue the period dissolves. It treats the human species as a homogeneous geophysical force that stands above Nature or comes to dominate it, producing in turn environmental and climatic conditions that are distinct from the natural conditions of the past. Yet, global warming has not been produced by a uniform human species, undifferentiated by class, gender, or geography. Moreover, a massive corpus of anthropological research has posed serious challenges to the universality of the NatureSociety binary that undergirds the Anthropocene narrative at the same time 1 See also the appeal of Ellis et al. (2016) to “Involve social scientists in defining the Anthropocene.” ,
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!"$ &"! Introduction: Materializing Climate 3 that climate scientists have shown how many of earth’s biological species have long shaped the planet’s geophysical conditions through a variety of interrelations with other organisms and materials. Nevertheless, these binaries, the distinctions between Society and Nature and human and nonhuman geophysical actors, continue to be reproduced in the Anthropocene narrative even as scholarship emanating from across the physical, natural, and social sciences has begun to call attention to the long-term porousness of organism–environment relations and the capacity of dynamic materials to shape both social and environmental histories (e.g., Coole and Frost 2010; Lewontin 2000; A. Moore 2016). Indeed, the Anthropocene by definition evokes a highly anthropocentric bias. While existing scholarship on the Anthropocene has called attention to human agency as a geophysical force, it has only begun to engage with the recent multispecies and materialist turn in the social sciences and humanities that questions the ontological distinctions between humans and other organisms and materials as constitutive agents of environmental and social conditions (e.g., Haraway 2016). A variety of “posthumanist” and “new materialist” scholarship has positioned humans within webs or networks of people, things, materials, and organisms and attributed action and agency to a variety of heterogeneous assemblages (cf. Bennett 2010; Ingold 2012; Latour 2005). This scholarship has equally high stakes to that of the Anthropocene inasmuch as it has problematized issues that are profoundly important to both academics and policy makers, questioning who defines the contours of society, how agency is understood, how history occurs, and how responsibility is allocated. Thus, on one hand, scholars of the Anthropocene are now highlighting the agency and implications of humans as a geophysical force capable of impacting all life on earth for generations to come. On the other hand, scholars from the humanities and the social sciences are calling attention to the historical agency of nonhuman things, organisms, and physicochemical processes that also shape socioenvironmental histories and limit the agentive actions of humans at the same time that they make them possible. It is somewhat ironic that these two strands of scholarship have not as yet been brought more fully into direct conversation. Climate, after all, could be considered a paradigmatic example of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe as an assemblage comprised by ontologically heterogeneous elements (see also DeLanda 2006). As we detail in the next chapter, it is constituted by interrelationships and dependencies among a multitude of different materials, things, and organisms that range from the gravitational pull of massive celestial bodies that impact earth’s orbital ,
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!"$ &"! Climate without Nature 4 parameters to the respiratory activities of microscopic bacteria that contribute to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Indeed, the vicissitudes of climate are nothing less than the dynamic configurations of a variety of active bodies, organisms, and materials that constitute environmental conditions through their relational actions: earth’s tendency to wobble on its orbital axis, trees’ requirements to sequester carbon, the reflective properties of snow and ice, beavers’ desires for wetlands that produce methane, and, of course, humans’ dependences on fossil fuels all contribute to climate. Indeed, James Lovelock (2001) has now famously argued with his theory of Gaia that part of what has made earth’s atmospheric and climatic conditions habitable to human life is life itself, given feedbacks between the atmosphere and biosphere. Rather than implying a singular logic or order as a vastly distributed hyperobject (sensu Morton 2013), however, the characterization of climate as a dynamic organism or assemblage necessarily evokes a temporality of an emergence, in which heterogeneity, contingency, multiplicity, and historical dynamics create inter-relationalities between diverse sets of actors, processes, and events to generate what emerges in its final form as climate (Collier and Ong 2005:12; see also DeLanda 2006). Yet, that is not to say that all of these relationships produce climate uniformly. As Smith (2015) cogently reminds us, to understand the “historical workings” of an assemblage means defining elements that “do not just articulate, but operate” (48). And this brings us to our present concern for spilling more ink on the Anthropocene and the objectives of this book. We share the well-founded and urgent concerns for mitigating global warming and as such believe that it is important to critically question the Anthropocene’s empirical, philosophical, and political implications from the various lenses that anthropology provides. By documenting the diverse ways people conceptualize, engage, and produce their environments, a long history of ethnographic and archaeological scholarship has challenged the underlying Nature-Society divide that makes the Anthropocene narrative possible. Moreover, to attribute a geological or historiographical period to the anthropos is to attribute geophysical agency to the human species as a totality. Yet humans do not produce environments as a homogeneous mass of actors; they do so differentially and unequally as placed, classed, gendered, and cultured actors. These differences are often silenced (sensu Trouillot 1995) in overgeneralizing emphases on anthropogenic environmental narratives – a critique that we argue applies as much to the Anthropocene’s historical emphasis on the human species as it does to many archaeological narratives of the more distant past that treat societies ,
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!"$ &"! Introduction: Materializing Climate 5 as undifferentiated environmental actors. At the same time that such narratives often ignore social differences among people, the anthropogenic framing also loses sight of the fact that differentiated people only act through articulations with a variety of materials, organisms, and things that also impact and contribute to the outcome of their actions. This point is now being highlighted anew by a variety of scholarship produced under the guise of new materialist and posthumanist approaches that have questioned human exceptionalism in producing sociomaterial histories, which are conjoined products of actors that fall on both sides of the human– nonhuman divide. By distributing action among humans, other animals, plants, and things in constituting sociomaterial conditions, and by providing the foundations for materializing climate, such scholarship forces us to reevaluate the stakes of the Anthropocene. The question “when did people become geophysical agents?” or when can it be said that humans began living in a period that was “after nature” requires a much grayer response when one considers humans as part of a dynamic and heterogeneous assemblage of humans and nonhumans that have always collectively, albeit unequally, produced environmental histories. Furthermore, the political questions of naming people, corporations, and institutions as culpable and accountable for climate change and climate-change-related disasters is similarly complicated with action distributed across an assemblage of humans and nonhumans. Although these are difficult questions to address, the stakes are clearly high. In this book we draw on our anthropological work in South Asia as well as on a variety of research from across the social and natural sciences in other geographical contexts to critically intersect the ostensibly contradictory stances of anthropocentric and new materialist frameworks as they pertain to the Anthropocene – but not as a mere philosophical exercise. Our concerns have as much to do with the politics of global warming that the Anthropocene narrative constrains and enables as they do with philosophical issues surrounding questions of actors, agency, or the nature of history. We will speak of humans as a heterogeneous category not a singular one, while remaining cognizant of how recent posthumanist, new materialist, and animal studies scholarship has shaken the very foundations of modern species differentiation and rightfully drawn attention to the racial, class, and gendered logics of anthropocentrism (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Leong 2016; Livingston and Puar 2011). And yet, while we recognize the need to decenter and destabilize the ontological certainties underlying the human–nonhuman binary, a much required political intervention to “unravel” the Western, individuated ,
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!"$ &"! Climate without Nature 6 category of the human, we remain wary of erasing urgent questions about human action and responsibility in shaping climate even as we recognize that we can only “become human with others” (Fuentes 2015). The category “human” is not a stable species category and yet the process of its stabilization is real, with consequences for some segments of humanity who have a hard time being seen as such and also for the other-than human beings, who, according to some Eurocentric perspectives, belong firmly to the realm of Nature. To the extent that we address human responsibility for climate change, our approach is, strictly speaking, still anthropocentric. So while we call attention to the distributed quality of action across multiple species, things, objects, and materials, the burden of responsibility, as we will later explain, is singularly human, yet not in any undifferentiated sense. As our cases in South Asia exemplify, there is a serious need for anthropologists to critically engage with emerging discourses on the Anthropocene and to do so with attention to how people experience climate change as situated and differentiated actors, not simply as a homogeneous species that externalizes Nature. This does not mean, however, that humanity is the only force that constitutes a living and dynamic universe of materiality that is in any way limited by human design or subservient to its purposes. Perhaps, as McLean (2016) provocatively claims, an “irradicable or inscrutable nature,” which lies “outside our capacity to relate to it” might indeed exist and to picture it is to recognize the limits of human thought and imagination. And yet, while we agree with him, we will argue that the Nature of the Anthropocene narrative is not an “inscrutable nature” (sensu McLean 2016), but one that is thoroughly externalized and simultaneously made even more amenable to technological interventions, and it is this conceptualization of Nature that we question in this book. We do so by bringing new materialist scholarship into conversation with the all too urgent debate on the Anthropocene in order to ground climate change in historic human and nonhuman relationalities and bridge two related but different bodies of literature. This allows us to take seriously everyday lived experiences of changing weather and its impact on human lives as a significant aspect of the current framing of climate change. Such a focus, we will demonstrate, is critical for generating a distinctive politics of climate change that is attentive to people’s everyday engagements with other environmental constituents and also to the efficacy of matter in shaping human welfare and environmental outcomes. As we will argue, an anthropologically informed analysis of how people historically and differentially engage a multitude of nonhuman environmental actors is not to disregard human agency as much as it is to locate its impact within ,
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!"$ &"! Introduction: Materializing Climate 7 complex assemblages of historical human–nonhuman configurations that are dynamic and emergent, and therefore also not entirely predictable. Such an analysis does not minimize politics or the need for human action; on the contrary, it problematizes tendencies to conflate the ontology of action with politicized claims of blame and culpability. At the same time, such an approach opens new possibilities for political action, in which claims to social and environmental justice, instead of reifying Nature through market-based conservation interventions, are grounded in placebased and situated human–nonhuman relationalities. Anthropology, including all of its subdisciplines, is ideally situated to make this intervention. Only anthropologists are equipped with methods to map the situated ways that human actions are historically embedded in the earth’s materiality of nonhuman things, organisms, and physicochemical processes that collectively produce environmental histories at multiple scales and temporalities. At the same time, anthropology gives us access to how people differentially experience and produce environmental phenomena that are more tangible than climate in their immediacy but no less real. Thus, by combining methods and analyses from archaeology and cultural anthropology, we seek to contribute to an important new emphasis in the study of climate change that calls for a greater degree of integration and collaboration among anthropologists while forcing us to think reflexively about our roles and responsibilities in mitigating climate-related disasters (Crate 2011). Assembling the Anthropocene and Fracturing the Anthropos Since the Anthropocene’s early formulation by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) to name a period of earth history that separates the current time of global human impacts on the planet’s ecological and systemic functioning from the Holocene, the most recent geological epoch that spans approximately the last 11,500 years, the concept has variably been taken up by academics across both the natural and social sciences. For many scholars of the humanities it has come to represent a period in which humans have emerged as a “geophysical force” (e.g., Chakrabarty 2009; Morton 2013) to create a “damaged earth” (Haraway 2016:2), or “a dark new ecological era,” one that was brought on by the Western belief in the great divide between Nature and humanity (Carrithers et al., 2011:663). The environmental historian Ian Miller (2013), for instance, has argued that the Anthropocene be considered coeval with the development of “ecological modernity” based on his research in Japan, where the emergence of zoological gardens ,
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!"$ &"! Climate without Nature 8 during the nineteenth century paradoxically assembled humans and animals from vast distances for the purposes of setting Nature apart from the modern, “Western-style civilization” (2). Yet, by underscoring humans’ emergence as a geophysical force that is capable of shaping global environmental and climatic conditions for all life on earth, the Anthropocene has largely come to represent a period in which this great divide is now obsolete. It is a period in environmental imaginaries and historiographies that is now post-nature or “after nature” – “the end of the division between people and nature” in the words of Jedediah Purdy (Purdy 2015:3). For many anthropologists the Anthropocene stands in for the dissolution of the long-standing modernist binary that has structured how we understand political life in distinction from an external natural world. The Anthropocene designation has therefore come to mark a conceptual shift in the ways anthropologists engage with the binaries between nature and culture and human and nonhuman. At the same time, the Anthropocene designation has also provided an opportunity for anthropologists to critically address the natural sciences’ emphasis on the anthropos as a homogeneous species (Gibson and Venkateswar 2015:9). For instance, the natural sciences’ emphasis on the human species has allowed some social sciences and humanities scholars to confront critical epistemological and ontological questions about the nature of history, historical subjects, and the constitution of the material world in which humans are embedded. By marking a period of human-caused global warming, the Anthropocene has engendered a philosophical recognition of objects and phenomena that transcend immediate human perception and experience. Timothy Morton (2013), for example, has argued that climate challenges human perception because of its nonlocal and enveloping qualities, and thus might better be considered a “hyperobject.” Regardless of whether we consider climate as an (hyper) “object” or dynamic assemblage, its material instantiation in time and space raises significant questions that any discussion of global warming has to address. Who are the subjects and objects of history when massive planetary changes cannot be directly perceived and can only be brought about through collective action at the level of the species? How can anthropology contribute to an understanding of climate change if the object of investigation defies human perception? As a concept the Anthropocene has thus emerged not simply in reference to how history is written in this new period, but also in connection to the theorization of the ontological and epistemological relationships between subjects and objects, the constitution of social actors, and the mediation of perception and historical imagination (cf. Chakrabarty 2009, 2012; Latour 2014a; Mikhail 2016; Morton 2013). ,
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!"$ &"! Introduction: Materializing Climate 9 On the other side of the human and natural sciences divide many environmental scholars have adopted or advocated the Anthropocene’s usage to signify a period during which humans have come to “dominate the great forces of nature” (Steffen et al. 2007: 614), or rather, as the climate scientists William F. Ruddiman et al. (2015) have characterized it, when humans have “replaced nature as the dominant environmental force on Earth” (38, our emphasis). In these contexts the Anthropocene largely demarcates a transition from the human species as merely agents of regional ecological and biological histories to agents of geophysical history that are capable of impacting climate and all planetary life by modifying the earth system as a whole. Earth system science research has largely cast attention on the processes by which humans have impacted the otherwise natural workings of the planet (e.g., Crutzen 2002; Hamilton 2015; Ruddiman et al. 2016; Stefen et al. 2007). But not surprisingly, the term’s inherent temporal designation has forced geologists to critically focus on the Anthropocene’s utility in demonstrating humans’ planetary impacts within global stratigraphic systematics – i.e., the degree to which the physical environmental impacts of humans will be characteristic of earth’s long-term lithological and sedimentary records (e.g., Vince 2011; Waters et al. 2016; Zalasiewicz et al. 2015). Indeed, vociferous debate has subsequently been generated among scientists about where to place the Anthropocene’s boundary, or stratigraphic “golden spike” on the Geologic Time Scale that is governed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). There has been no dearth of suggestions, with 1945 and 1784 being the most commonly advocated among many others – including 1610 (i.e., the “Orbis spike”), supplanting the “Holocene” and using the term to apply to the entirety of the last 10,000 plus years, or marking its inception with megafauna extinctions of the late Pleistocene (Table 1.1; cf. Braje 2016; Crutzen 2002; Erlandson and Braje 2013; Hamilton 2015; Lewis and Maslin 2015; Smith and Zeder 2013; Waters et al. 2016; Zalasiewicz et al. 2015). Among all of the various academic emphases on the designation Anthropocene, it is worth pointing out that the most literal translation of its etymology in scientific nomenclature references the “recent age” (cene) of “humans” (anthropos). And indeed, regardless of research foci among the many natural and human science scholars that have engaged it, the Anthropocene concept appears as a chronological designation – a period during which scholars recognize humans as a geophysical force, when the earth system has shifted from “its natural geological epoch” (Stefen et al. 2007:614), or a period after which the physical traces of the anthropos appear in stratigraphic material evidence, characterizing earth’s species ,
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!"$ &"! Climate without Nature 10 table 1.1 Proposed dates for the start of the Anthropocene, after Lewis and Maslin (2015) Note that the Anthropocene Working Group is only seriously considering those situated in the twentieth century, and to a lesser extent that of the eighteenth century (see also Ellis et al. 2016). Date of Origin Event Primary Stratigraphic Marker ca. 50,000–10,000 BP ca. 11,000 BP Megafauna extinction Origin of agriculture ca. 8,000 BP Extensive farming ca. 6,500 BP Irrigated rice production Anthropogenic soil development Columbian exchange Fossil record for megafauna extinction Fossil pollen or phytoliths of evidence for agriculture Carbon dioxide inflection in ice core data Methane inflection in ice core data ca. 3,000–500 BP 1492 1760 1945 1950 Industrial Revolution Nuclear weapon detonation Persistent industrial chemicals None Carbon dioxide low point in ice core data (i.e. Orbis spike) Fly ash from coal burning Radionuclies (14C) in tree-rings E.g., SF6 peak in glacial ice core data distributions and chemical composition. The Anthropocene has also been taken to mark the dissolution of natural history and human history and the end of the division between Society and Nature, a time when humans are now a great force of Nature. Given that the Anthropocene appears foundationally as a temporal or historiographical designation about how human activities relate to a variety of organisms, materials, and things that constitute our earthly environment one might assume that anthropology would have greatly contributed to its formulation. It is surprising to us that anthropology – a scholarly discipline that often emphasizes how experiential dimensions of human-environment relationships relate to long-term landscape transformations – has largely been peripheral to discussions of the Anthropocene. As archaeologist Keith Kintigh et al. (2014:15) have stressed, archaeology has barely contributed to the formulation of the Anthropocene concept. Indeed, the canonical articles that originally defined the Anthropocene cite little to no archaeology in their discussion of the current and alarming changes to earth’s ,
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 !"$! Index AAA. See American Anthropological Association action, 102, 115–122 agency, 3–5, 15, 22–23, 25, 105–106 distributed across an assemblage, 116–118 of nonhumans, 26–27, 116–119 agriculture, 45 cultural categories of, 68 by Gurezis, 77 irrigation for, 35–36 methane from, 45 new modes for production of, 66 alternative ontologies, 26, 100 American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) Global Climate Change Task Force, 133 animal-human relationships, 86 Anthropocene, x, 6, 8–9, 30–31, 99 agents of change in, 37 analytical usefulness of, 17 challenging philosophical basis of, 44–47, 74, 101 common usage of, 7–12 critical anthropology of, xii debate on boundary of, 1, 9–12, 46 early formulation of, 7 environmental politics without, 110–115 ESS and, 34 etymology of, 9 as evolving paradigm, 12 GSSP of, 46–47 homogenizing and depoliticizing tendencies of, 108–109, 126 narrative of, 5, 44–47, 101, 104–105, 109–110, 138 origin point of, 9–12, 33–34, 46 persistence in academy of, 134 political goals for advocating designation of, xi political implications of, 17–18, 137–138 popularity of term, 1–2, 34–35 social scientists and humanities scholars on, 2 anthropology, 6–7, 124–125 “anthropology of life,” 79–80 of climate change, 19–20, 95 archaeology, xi, 127–128 on human land use, 29 multidisciplinary environmental, 39 Southern Deccan archaeological surveys, 54 ashmound sites, 52–53 assemblage, 3–7, 16, 18, 21, 33, 46, 70, 74, 84, 102, 116–117 botanical, 66 climate as, 4, 8, 16, 19, 21–22, 27, 70, 137 161 *

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 !"$! Index 162 assemblage (cont.) environmental, 88, 94 heterogeneous, 3, 5, 7, 10, 23, 27, 42, 63–64, 106, 117, 139 of human–nonhuman configurations, 18, 25, 33, 38, 40, 45–46, 88, 96, 111, 114, 117, 131, 135 humans as part of, 47, 72, 74, 104, 106, 110, 115, 118, 123, 136 of interactions, xii, 38, 42, 84 material, 45, 50–51 of production features, 68 productive capabilities of, 69 relationships among an, 63 sociomaterial, 111, 123, 133 atomic bomb explosion, first, 1, 13, 16, 34, 36 avalanches, 82, 91–92, 114 bacteria, 15–16 barley, 51 Barthlott, W., 70–71 bears, 96, 131 beavers, 42–43 bees, 24 Bennett, Jane, 25–26, 117 biodiversity, 71, 77 discourse on, 112 environmentalism and, 111 loss in, 37 biofuels, 108 biological-geophysical binary, 9, 15–16, 37–39, 43, 46, 48, 101, 135 Black and Red Ware ceramics, 47 Bonneuil, Christophe, 14, 106, 125–126, 139 Botkin, Daniel, 111 Butzer, Karl, 11 capitalism, 14, 108, 126, 128–129 fossil fuels and, 16 global warming and, 74, 108 *

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"## Capitalocene, 106, 108 Caro, T., 111 cattle pastoralism, 50–51, 73 southern Neolithic period and, 50–53 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 1–2, 15, 19, 37, 106 climate change, 129 anthropogenic, 4–5, 19, 27, 32, 34–35, 37–38, 40–43, 46, 70, 100, 103, 107, 109, 123, 136–137 anthropology of, 19–20, 95 deniers, x, 20, 137–138 distinctive politics of, 6 ethnographic perspectives on, 122 more inclusive politics of, 92 responsibility for, 26–27 social, economic, and geographical divisions in experience of, xii social life in context of, 2 techno-scientific assessments of, 130 U.N. conference on, 1 urgencies of, 132 ways to perceive and render, ix–xii, 3–5, 7–8, 16, 18–21, 23, 28–29, 38–39, 49, 75–76, 86, 88, 90–91, 93–99, 102, 122, 126, 130–132, 135 climate scientists, xii–xiii, 98 climate-related disasters, 5, 7 CO2, 35, 41 coal, 106 cold-war military complexes, 14 conservation, 70–73 Crate, S.A., 132 critical race theorists, 22 Crumley, Carole, 127 Crutzen, Paul, 2, 7, 32–34 Dards, 79 deforestation, 79, 131 Deleuze G., 3 Descola, P., 104, 125–126 '''"!" "
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 !"$! Index Dewey, John, 25 Dharwar Craton, 50, 70–71 disenfranchisement, 84 displacement forced, 84, 86, 88 from Kishanganga river dam, 90 Early Historic Period (South Asia), 65 earth system extending high-modernism to, 105, 138 as historically contingent, 136 human embedded in material workings of, xi, 16, 39–42, 74, 103–104, 129 earth systems science (ESS), 9, 34, 136, 139 Anthropocene and, 34 emphasis on planetary-scale changes in, 11–12 earthquakes, 81 ecological modernity, 7–8 ecological transformations, 33, 98 eco-modernist approach, 105 energy budget, 35 Enlightenment, 12, 37, 74, 103 environmental justice issues, 121 environmental politics, 110–115 environmentalism, 98–99, 132 biodiversity and, 111 Nature-Society binary and, 75 ESS. See earth systems science Eurocentric paradigms, 6, 12–13, 101, 114 Nature and, 22, 26, 74, 104, 123 non-Eurocentric worldviews, 22 everyday experiences, 131 extinctions, 36–37, 135 humans and mass, 28–29 megafauna, 9 Flannery, Tim, 20 floods, 88–89 *

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"## 163 food prices, 108 Foote, Robert Bruce, 50–51 fossil fuels, ix–x, 4, 15–16, 35, 46, 136 Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, 14, 106, 125–126, 139 Fuller, Dorian, 40 Fyfe, R.M, 40 Gagné, K., 83 Geological Time Scale, 32 geomorphological landforms, 58 geophysical change, 38 ecological change and, 33 humans as force of, 8, 102 before Industrial Revolution, 45 Gibson, Hannah, 17 glaciers, 77, 116–117, 123–124 glacial thinning, 131 glaciation, 35–36, 49 Gurezis and, 82–83, 85 melting of, 91–93 Global Boundary Stratotype Sections (GSSP), 46–47 global stratigraphic systematics, 9 global warming capitalism and, 13–14, 16–17, 102, 108, 112, 120, 126, 128–129, 132, 134–137, 139 extinctions and, 36–37 local changes in weather and, 97 politics and implications of, xii, 109, 123 unequal production of, 13 Govindrajan, R., 22, 82, 86–87 greenhouse gases, 16, 35, 38 policies to reduce, 137 unequal production of, 13 groundwater replenishment, 25–26 GSSP. See Global Boundary Stratotype Sections Guattari F., 3 '''"!" "
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 !"$! Index 164 Gurez Valley, 29–30, 76–80, 99–100 cooling of, 91 livestock in, 82 nonhuman elements of landscape in, 85 nonhumans in, 30 Gurezis, 80–81, 84, 86–87 agriculture by, 77 fears of, 88 glaciers and, 82–83, 85 hunting by, 79 Kishanganga river and, 88–89 log houses of, 81 weather knowledge of, 89–91, 122 worldview of, 114 habitat diversity, 72 Hallur, 64 Hamilton, Clive, 12, 46 Haraway, Donna, 18, 133 Heise, Ursula, 112 herd management, 56 Himalayan Dal Lake, 113 Himalayas, 89 Hire Benakal, 59–60, 65, 67 Hodder, I., 127 Holocene, 7, 9, 49 human land use in early and mid, 41–42 Hornborg, Alf, 2, 37, 106 Hulme, Mike, 20–21 humanism, 112 humanities, 2, 134 multispecies and materialist turn, 3, 5–6, 18, 21–23, 27, 112, 115, 137 human–nonhuman binary, 3, 5–6, 22–23, 97, 102, 114–115, 120, 123, 127, 133 humans, 120 category of, 5–6, 22 different framings of, 106 as embedded in material workings of earth system, xi, 16, 39–42, 74, 103–104, 129 *

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"## mass extinctions and, 28–29 “modern” and “primitive,” 15 planetary impacts of, 11 progressive human exceptionalism, 44 responsibility of. See Responsibility hunting, 79 hyperobjects, 4, 8 indigenous scholars, 12, 22 Industrial Revolution, 11, 33, 129 geophysical change before, 45 industrialization, 36 long-term consequences of, 103 Ingold, Tim, 42 Inhofe, Jim, x inselbergs, 72 tropical, 70 Iron Age (South India), 47, 65, 107 human land use in, 71 social relationships and, 53–64 Southern Deccan region during, 63 irrigation, 69 for agriculture, 35–36 evidence for, 51 landscape modifications for, 64–65 large-scale, 65 methane from, 35–36, 40, 73, 107–108, 128 reservoirs, 73 for rice cultivation, 69 Johansen, P.G., 52 Kadebakele, 64–65 Karnataka, 50 Kashmir, 25, 76, 79, 91 Kintigh, Keith, 10–11 Kishanganga river, 77–78, 80, 84 fears around rising waters of, 90 Gurezis and, 88–89 snowfall and, 94 '''"!" "
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 !"$! Index Kishanganga river dam, 77–78, 80, 85–86 avalanches and, 92 displacements from, 90 far-reaching effects of, 90 official reports on, 91 snowfall and, 94 sociomaterial configurations disrupted by, 120 Kohn, Eduardo, 23, 80, 113 Korisettar R., 52 Kosek, Jake, 24–25 Latour, Bruno, 2, 44, 118, 137–138 livestock. See also cattle grazing of, 43–44 in Gurez Valley, 82 Lotus, Sonam, 92–93 Lovelock, James, 4 Makhulu, Anne-Maria, 115 Malm, Andreas, 2, 37, 106 Maski, 65, 68 materiality, 121 of environments, 14, 94, 127 temporality of, 64–70 materializing climate, xiii, 27–31 Mathur, N., 86, 96 matter, 22, 121 vitality and sociality of, 30 Medieval Period (South India), 65–67 rice cultivation in, 67–68 megafauna extinctions, 9 megaliths, 53–54, 57 methane, 35–36, 40 from agriculture, 45 human land use and, 42 Mikhail, Alan, 12, 103 militarization concertina wires, 99 military strategists, 24 military-installed landmines, 79 Miller, D., 27–28 Miller, Ian, 7–8 *

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"## 165 millets, 51, 64 Mitchell, Timothy, 106 modernity ecological modernity, 7–8 high-modernism, 105 Nature as historical construct of, 104, 138 monsoon rains, 51 Moore, Jason, 106, 128 morality, 96 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 42–43, 74 Morrison, Kathleen, 39–40, 68 Morton, Timothy, 8, 12–13, 19–20, 33–34, 139 on romanticized notions of Nature, 109 national parks, 72 naturalism, 104, 112, 125 Nature, x, 5–7, 12–14, 23, 26, 28–29, 43–45, 49–50, 72, 74, 87, 97, 100, 105, 109, 115, 123 bounds of, 15 conservation of, 70–73 Eurocentric paradigms and, 6, 26, 74 as historical construct of modernity, 29, 104, 138 ideologies of, x, 2, 45, 102–103, 110, 123, 126–127, 129, 136–138 letting go of, xii, 110–114 Morton on romanticized notions of, 109 Nature-Society binary, x–xi, 2–3, 7–8, 10, 12, 15, 22, 29–30, 32, 37, 44, 47, 63, 72, 75, 77, 84–85, 98–99, 101, 103–105, 115–116, 118, 134, 137 environmentalism and, 75 Latour on, 72 Neolithic Period (Southern Deccan) cattle and, 50–53 crop packages, 55 Neumann, R.P., 72 '''"!" "
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 !"$! Index 166 new materialist scholarship, 2–3, 5–6, 21–23, 27, 115 nonhuman emphasis of, 21–22 non-Eurocentric worldviews, 22 nonhumans, 97. See also humannonhuman binary actions of, 23–26, 30, 44, 62, 76, 78, 95, 97, 99, 114–116, 120–121, 127, 129 agency of, 3, 6, 23, 26–27, 116–119 in Gurez Valley, 30 human lives affected by, 6–7, 12, 21–22, 26, 29–30, 76, 80, 85, 103, 110, 113, 116–119, 123 materiality, 7, 18, 27, 30, 48, 79, 102, 119, 130 oil, 106 orbital parameters, 35 Orlove B., 83 oxygenation, 38 paleoecological analyses, 62 paleoecological pollen records, 40 Peet, R., 113 personhood, 85, 87, 104, 112 petroleum, 106–107 place-making, 80–84 Plantationocene, 107–108 Pleistocene, 9, 35 Podobnick, Bruce, 106 policy makers, 3 political action, 24–26, 30, 63, 102–103, 109, 111, 116–118, 120, 123, 126–127, 129, 133–134, 137, 139 political ecology, 14, 72, 113 Porembski, S., 70–71 posthumanism, 3, 5, 21–22, 25–26, 115, 120 problematic nature of, 23–25, 120 prehistoric herding resources, 57 private corporations, 84 private property, 85 *

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"## Proterozoic eon, 38 Purdy, Jedediah, 8, 17, 112, 136 Rasmussen, M., 83 reservoirs irrigation reservoirs, 73 nonfunctioning, 70 rice cultivation and, 64–70 respiratory disorders, 96 responsibility, 6, 23, 26, 30, 33–34, 101, 104, 114–122 action and, 102 for climate change, 26–27 of humans, 23, 104 politics of, 123–124 for sociomaterial configurations, 120–121 rice cultivation, 40, 66, 73 irrigation for, 69 in Medieval Period (Southern Deccan), 67–68 reservoirs and, 64–70 Ruddiman, William F., 9, 11, 37, 41 Salleh, A., 115–116 Sassaman, Kenneth, 130 Sayre, N.F., 109 semiotic analyses, 113 Sentate, U.S., ix, 109 settlement sites, 52 Shock of the Anthropocene (Bonneuil and Fressoz), 14 snowfall, 93–95 social differences, 4–5, 13–14, 30–31, 53–54, 68, 102, 106–108, 117, 123, 125–127, 130, 132, 134 herd management and (Southern Deccan), 56 spatial divisions reaffirming, 55 sociomaterial configurations, 119 Kishanganga river dam disruption of, 120 responsibility for, 120–121 '''"!" "
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 !"$! Index sociomaterial histories, 5, 25, 27 long-term, 28 soils, 62–63, 80–81 moisture of, 93–94 soil retention features, 57 solar energy, 109 Southern Deccan region, 50, 68 archaeological surveys in, 54 during Iron Age, 63 water management in, 66 southern India human land use in, 29 residual hills of, 70–73 Steffen, Will, 36 Stoermer, Eugene, 2, 7, 32 Stone Age, 45 Talbot, Cynthia, 68 technocentric interventions, 102–103 temporality of materiality, 64–70 scales of analysis, temporal, 124 trees, 15–16, 38 carbon-sequestering, 73 United Nations (U.N.) conference on climate change, 1 United States (U.S.), ix, 137 gun statutes in, 118 Van Dyke, R., 118 Veerapuram, 64 *

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"## 167 vegetative taxa and climate, 15–16, 39 Venkateswar, Sita, 17 Vijayanagara Empire, 62, 66 violence, 79–80 “virgin landscape,” 79–80 water, 63 fears around rising waters of Kishanganga river, 90 groundwater replenishment, 25–26 shortage of, 95–96 Southern Deccan region water management, 66 water intensive staples, 64 water retention features, 57 Watgal, 65 Watts, M., 113 weather, 20 climate and, 18 foregrounding, 21 global warming and local changes in, 97 Gurezis knowledge of, 89–91, 122 patterns, xiii rapidly changing, 90 welfare, 115–122 Wheeler, Mortimer, 50–51 wind farms, 109 winter, 82 Zalasiewicz, C., 33–34 '''"!"