Anthropology and Climate Change From Transformations to Worldmaking

"This third edition of Anthropology and Climate Change is an excellent assemblage of articles and case studies exploring the reorientations required for fully capturing the multiple and complexly intertwined challenges of climate change, the need to reconfigure through a process of world-making different ways (worlds) of envisioning how we relate to one another and to our environments, and finally, the problems and pitfalls that occur when global policy fails to recognize local capacities and vulnerabilities. Challenging the neoliberal logic that negates the possibility of other possible futures, essentially construing neoliberal capitalism as some ultimate stage of human evolution (Baschet 2003), the authors assert that anthropology thus must tap into the full array of resources, past, contemporary and imagined, for guides for creating alternative futures beyond the current relentless construction of risk. Framing the focus of the third edition with the subtitle "From Transformations to World-Making," Crate and Nuttall and the various authors contend that if climate change doesn't move us toward imagining other worlds (ways) than current neoliberal approaches, we never will, and the consequences will be catastrophic. The third edition of Anthropology and Climate Change moves that discussion significantly forward."

Anthony Oliver-Smith, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Florida