Introduction: Modalities of planetary health and justice

Abstract

The short essays in this Vital Topics Forum investigate how communicative modalities contribute to the construction of planetary health and justice “crises” as well as proposals for their “cures.” We explore the ways in which powerful signs (i.e., meaningful forms) have been forged, circulated, and interpreted within the planetary systems that humans have wrought over the last 10,000 years, more specifically beginning 500 years ago with European colonialism, and especially via neoliberal capitalism over the last 75 years. The shared understanding among the scholars writing here is that power-inflected semiotic modalities have been deployed to wrench economic resources, political/legal representation, and sociocultural dignity away from some while enriching, empowering, and valorizing others in ways that have impacted human health, environmental balance, and communal sovereignty at a planetary scale in a range of entangled ways. In brief, we are exploring how linguistic anthropologists can help diagnose a range of age-old injustices inherent in the dialogue as it has been scripted up until now and attempt to change the narrative going forward.

While we generally agree that the systems of human health, environmental balance, and sociocultural/political-economic justice are clearly enmeshed in a wide web of semiotic modalities, not all of us think it necessary, nor even possible, to create a single overarching model to examine how these systems and semiotic modalities operate. Instead, we are interested in ethnographically exploring a variety of net-makings, on the one hand, and a range of apparently haphazard assemblages, on the other, with an eye toward disrupting some of the globally dominant discourses of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governmental policymakers, elite spokespersons, scholars, and so forth and in support of alternative modalities for agentive bodies to speak justice into being in a range of environmental, social, economic, and political contexts. But before briefly introducing the contributions collected here, we begin with one brief and now all-too-familiar example of how myriad modalities may become entangled in the construction of planetary health and justice “crises” and “cures.”

Building on work initiated at the start of the pandemic by numerous scholars (e.g., Black, 2021; Briggs, 2020), we use the example of the COVID-19 pandemic to trace a few of the modal threads that entangle ecological, medical, and political-economic systems. This will allow us to unpack how various ideological understandings of the pandemic—its origins and nature as “crisis”—have been semiotically forged as well as how some “cures” have been articulated, communicated, and received, while alternative forms of care have been indexically erased or simply ignored as illegible.

First, consider how two discourses concerning the pandemic's origins represent long-standing political-economic tensions and scientific-ecological manipulations. On the one hand, there is the hypothesis that the virus originated from scientific experimentation and accidental or strategic release into the planet's anthropogenic biomes (Ellis & Ramankutty, 2008) which is set against the backdrop of global frictions between China and “the West,” all of which has in turn been contextualized by an ideologically shaped history of competition over the design and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The other hypothesis, based on critiques of humans’ abuse of the more-than-human universe in the Anthropocene, posits that increasing encroachment on the “natural” environment caused by our sociocultural tastes for and commodification of wet/wild meats provided a viral bridge to undermine both human and beyond-human microbiomes (Berg et al., 2020). In both cases, preconceived and politicized frameworks have shaped these pathogenetic analyses and processes,¹ making it difficult to gather the data to formulate the best explanation and therefore find ways to counter future medical crises.

Two additional threads of discourse exemplify the multimodal ways by which this virus reached the level of a pandemic (now endemic) crisis, not only affecting the bodily and mental health of some more than others, but also exacerbating already well-entrenched political-economic inequities and fueling environmental destruction that is endangering first and most intensely those who are already politically and economically disenfranchised. On the one hand, although there was a great sigh of relief at the start of the pandemic when the elite fled from their offices and planes and the air cleared, as Kashmiri goats strolled through Welsh villages and cougars took up residence in Santiago², the eruption of postpandemic consumption practices heated up the global economy in ways that will worsen the climate crisis despite the warnings of many scientists. On the other hand, both the anthropause and the subsequent anthropulse may yet occasion new ways of thinking about human and beyond-human interactions³.

Second, the proposed cures for the pandemic—from personal protective equipment (PPE) and masks⁴ to remote work and vaccines⁵, which were from the beginning most limited for already-precarious essential workers in risky settings, and continue to be most accessible and acceptable to the most privileged segments of the population and countries in the world—have reentrenched a range of problems for the marginalized while assuring comfort for the elite. Indeed, isolationist discourses that recommend social distancing reproduced older colonial models of xenophobic fear and the distancing of humans from the environment: extract what you need from subjugated human laborers and the planet and enjoy it from the safety of privileged enclaves⁶. Meanwhile, large swathes of our planetary community rejected the options (masks, social distancing, and vaccines) for halting the proliferation of the virus, thus fueling its ability to mutate due to various ideologically misinformed refrains spread and elaborated via old and new forms of social media (from everyday gossip to corporate X, formerly known as Twitter).

By contrast, alternative cures to crises alternatively defined point to alternative modalities for imagining a healthier and more just planet. For example, we could try watching how animals taste herbal medicines⁷, listen to how Australian aborigines respond to wildfires⁸, and learn about food system resiliency from Indigenous peoples⁹ as well as about spiritual beliefs that might help safeguard biodiversity¹⁰, but without treating those living people like dusty “archives” available for plundering once again for the good of “humanity” (Fine et al., 2023). Similarly, we might try now to understand and build on African American resources and resilience (Snowden & Snowden, 2021) in the face of a medical research system that has historically used their bodies to study syphilis and plutonium without informed consent (Kennedy et al., 2007). Resilience emerged unexpectedly as well in Africa despite the dangers of the impending pandemic (Blanton et al., 2020). Elite “experts” need to begin listening more attentively to other forms of knowing, which can only be heard through alternative media of communication, modes of empathy, and frameworks of care. Only in this way may we begin to forge ties within and beyond the human, remaking systems of significance that do not trample others underfoot.

Finally, the virus highlighted how Indigenous, Black, and other communities affected by the slow violence of European colonialism and capitalism have suffered most not only from entrenched forms of economic inequality and food insecurity¹¹ but also from the increasing and related forms of vulnerability resulting from degraded environments (e.g., a mix of redlining practices and extreme heat¹²) as well as increased chances of experiencing the trauma of extreme illness and death due not only to pandemics beyond COVID (e.g., mpox¹³ and avian flu) but also traditional killers such as cholera and malaria¹⁴. Nonetheless, new platforms for listening to those most impacted by these crises and new means of acting out to address them have been erupting (some of these are no longer exactly new but have been gaining momentum—e.g., Native Foodways¹⁵, SisterSong¹⁶, Black Lives Matter¹⁷, Planetary Health Alliance¹⁸, and Climate Disobedience¹⁹). The papers in this Vital Topics Forum all touch on and express these emerging forms of (inter)activism in a number of ways.

Linguistic anthropologists and other scholars interested in the production, circulation, and consumption of dominant discourses and semiotic distinctions have contributed for several decades to the study of planetary health and justice, setting the stage for the work discussed here in this Vital Topics Forum. First, there is a long history of work focusing on language, culture, and political-economic stratification (Avineri et al., 2019; Gal & Irvine, 2019; Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Perley, 2020; Piller, 2016; Riley et al., 2024; Schieffelin et al., 1998). Secondly, discourse analysis has long been and continues to be applied in innovative ways to the study of health (in)equities (Black, 2021; Briggs, 2017; Guzmán, 2014; Yates-Doerr, 2020). Finally, a growing body of work now employs semiotic and multimodal analysis in the study of issues relating to environmental justice for humans and beyond (Bateson, 1979; Haraway, 2016; Kohn, 2013; Latour, 2018; Tsing, 2015), and the National Science Foundation and other scientific institutions are increasingly supporting this research (e.g., the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledge and Science²⁰).

Against this shared backdrop, the contributors to this Vital Topics Forum hold a common commitment to engaging in participatory research and collaborative processes and products as we examine diverse loci of interpretation and translation, care and trust across vast socio-spatial scales (global-local, imperial-Indigenous, governmental-corporate, researcher-participant, etc.). The recurring themes include planetary health, environmental justice, and health equity in Oceania (Chao; Riley & Donaldson), Eurasia (Kannan; Yount-André), Africa (Schulthies) or the Americas (Black; Hall; Lu; Perley). Some (Kannan; Lu) are focused on discourses of human health based on environmental cleanliness, medical safety, and intergenerational care, as well as issues of trust in the face of scientific expertise and bureaucratic authority. Others (Black; Chao; Hall; Riley & Donaldson; Perley; Schulthies; Yount-André) are examining debates over environmental balance and the treatment of land and resources, as well as human access to them. Finally, all of us are attuned to various axes of inequity based on race/ethnicity/nationality (Chao; Schulthies) and geopolitical south/north and east/west divides (Kannan,; Lu; Schulthies), as well as the structural violence unleashed by settler colonialism (Black; Chao; Hall; Perley; Riley & Donaldson) and neocolonial/neoliberal corporate maneuvers (Chao; Lu; Schulthies; Yount-André).

The range of communicative modalities identified and analyzed in these essays is also worth briefly mentioning. In terms of cultural materials, several of us discuss native plants and food as both medium and topic of semiotic mediation (Chao; Riley & Donaldson; Schulthies; Hall) while others zoom in on extracted modalities, such as vaccines (Hall), antibiotics (Lu), cosmetic products (Schulthies), plastics (Kannan) and vibrant landscapes (Perley). With respect to strictly linguistic material, several contributors focus on words, labels, discourse genres—including ads (Lu), product brands (Schulthies), metrics (Yount-André), land treaties (Hall), and maxims (Kannan) —not to mention whole endangered languages (Perley; Riley and Donaldson). Finally, a wide range of speech acts and beyond-verbal media are analyzed from calls for “Land Back” (Hall) to plastic-ban campaigns (Kannan) and audiovisual boundary objects (Black).

Finally, the one most deeply unifying thread running throughout these contributions is an understanding of the inevitability of paradoxical truths and mixed messages. Indeed, many of those who are invested in seeking answers to the problems of our world are deeply aware of the existential reality, succinctly put into words by Leonard Woolf in the mid-20th century, that “Nothing matters, and everything matters” (Glendinning, 2006, 430). Having lived through two world wars, Westerners were just beginning to experience what others have long been conscious of: not only the infinity of the universe but also humanity's insignificance within it, both a deep hope as well as anguished hopelessness that human suffering might ever end. Anthropologists, in particular, tend to dwell in these contradictions, “staying with the trouble” as Haraway (2016) puts it, sometimes in vivid detail.

And so, in these essays, we consider the emergence of caring communities in Indigenous sovereignty movements (Hall); we probe the impact of gastrocolonialism on Papuan forager-horticulturalists turned palm oil extractors (Chao) and the debates among children (and others) over the uses of plastic in Tamil Nadu (Kannan); we explore activist-researcher collaborations on ecological and cultural sustainability in Costa Rica (Black) and on endangered languages and foodways in the Marquesas (Riley and Donaldson); we deconstruct the semiotic flow of antibiotic advertising in Guatemala (Lu) and the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) hero narratives of international corporations and NGOs (Yount-André); we trace how Moroccan plants are engaging in phyto-diplomacy (Schulthies) and how Indigenous peoples are finding vibrant modalities for facing the sixth extinction (Perley).

We also seek to circulate what we have learned both within and far beyond the specific settings where we set up to listen. To this end, we include a cartoon (Perley) that speaks to this theme of human ambivalence in the face of our planet's precarity, especially the ambivalent positionality of anthropological researchers (Figure 1). However, through this gathering of words in which we hold dual truths in mind simultaneously, we hope to be able to identify the false simplifications of complex crises and disrupt the imposition of the inadequate cures proposed in response. While paralysis is always a possibility in such situations, we hold that digging in and discussing the situation across diverse barriers is a necessary first step.

This Vital Topics Forum emerged out of the pandemic and has developed slowly thanks to the interactions with and support of many (although any errors in this introduction remain my own). The one I wish to thank first is my daughter, Anna Riley-Shepard, without whom this project would not exist. She has been an ongoing interlocutor beginning with our first attempts at communicating-in-place due to the pandemic, through to our AAA presentations in 2020 and 2023, and on through our continued dialogues as we exchanged reading suggestions and co-constructed ideas. She is also my greatest source of hope for planetary health and justice, and I stand in awe of her continued attempts to fulfill these through activities as diverse as her Rewilding the Body dance research²¹, her Otherwise Collective's Plant-Human Communication project²², and her work on corporate ESG initiatives in Amsterdam²³. Second, I wish to thank Elizabeth Chin for contacting me and discussing the idea that we transform the AAA 2020 Semiotics of Planetary Health and Justice Roundtable into something for the American Anthropologist, conversations that set this collaboration into motion, and thus my thanks go out to everyone who participated during that original roundtable (including three who did not continue on into the final forum: Natalja Czarnecki, Jacqueline Peters, and Shana Walton) as well as to those who have hopped in since.

Finally, I want to add my two cents here to the land acknowledgements debates (see, for instance, McElhinny, 2016). What I am most curious about is the transformation of the term “performativity” and the ways in which many object these days to the idea that land acknowledgements are “just performative.” By this, many seem to be saying that these speech acts do nothing “real”—i.e., they do not materially change the world. And indeed, despite Austin (1962), Jakobson (1960), Searle (1970), and Silverstein (2023), many speech acts do not perform anything particularly significant. However, I have two thoughts in response, both general and specific. First, specifically, I do think that land acknowledgments have the potential to do something aside from performing (in the theatrical sense) the speaker's ego-indexing and identity-flexing machinations. That is, if the speaker says something beyond the ritual phrasings: “I acknowledge that I speak here from the unceded territories of the _____ people” —i.e., if the communicator enacts a little more of the social, political, economic, emotional truth and humility about who, how, and why this site from which they speak does not belong to the presumed owners of the platform—then there is a chance that their listeners will be moved to think about their presumptions differently, and this is not nothing. It is a form of real (inter)activism (see the selection by Riley & Donaldson in this forum for a discussion of this term).

However, the other, more general way I've begun to think differently about “performativity” grew out of a conversation I had with Anna at the bottom of a deep ravine in Corsica in the summer of 2021. She was complaining, as many youth do, that there's too much virtue signaling going on in NGO, corporate, and political activism—that is, that people are simply after the applause for their performance rather than seeking to make anything actually happen. I therein began my usual lecture (as the twilight cuckoos quit their cuckooing and the Mediterranean scops owl began its beeping) on how the whole revolutionary point of speech act theory was to show how such seemingly ephemeral actions do make material things happen. But then I stopped suddenly to ask about the cuckoo who I was hearing outside of a clock for the first time in my life and to listen to the scops (Old English for “bard”) I am enamored of, and realized for the first time that indeed the whole premise of performativity is that, to be effective, the speech acts must be “heard,” specifically by other sentient beings (human or beyond) who are attuned to the modal media employed by the communicator—whether signed, written or spoken, using a shared linguistic variety, inter-species modality, or spiritual address. That is, there needs to be an attentive audience because if speech acts “fall on deaf ears,” nothing will be performed in fact (except within the fantasies of the speaker). And what else does the theatrical notion of performance mean aside from this?

In other words, what this debate has led me to is an understanding that a communicative performance is necessary but not sufficient, that it relies in part on the quality of the performance and in part on the attention of the audience, and that these are not matters that any one person ever wholly controls. The perlocutionary force of one's communicative acts will always be greater or lesser or in some way different than the sum of one's intentions and communicative skills. This is inevitably irritating but sometimes also wonderfully generative. That said, let me perform this ritual act (written in standard academic English, without the aid of vocal tone or facial expression) in hopes that it will hold some significance for someone: “I write these words from the unceded territories of the Abenaki nation, acknowledging as well that the Odanak Abenaki north of the settler-instantiated US-Canadian border have challenged the Vermont-state recognition of the Abenaki Nation at Missiquoi (ANM) as tribal claimants to this territory, a complication that remains for the moment a war of words with, nonetheless, psychic and material consequences in the form of hunting/fishing rights and funding opportunities for ANM members (Leroux, 2023). I salute all who are contributing in good faith to this dialogue over recognition and reparations and hope that my own words here are not inconsequential.”