American Anthropologist最新文献

This narrative experiment brings together scenes from my family histories in western Pennsylvania coal country, alongside ongoing visits to learn about rising health issues in the region today. Increasing numbers of residents express concerns about chronic problems such as young cancers, and many people worry about potential exposures coming from past and present energy infrastructures. These growing health concerns, some of them my own, also brought me to revisit Rachel Carson's medical writings from her family home in western Pennsylvania. Looking out from her childhood bedroom with my mother and returning to Carson's archival notes on “transmissible cancers” and her childhood essay, “A Battle in the Clouds,” these descriptions circle long-accumulating debates about chronic diseases and their causes and effects over time. Returning to varieties of changing clouds today, this essay reflects on how chronic exposures—unevenly accumulating in bodies and landscapes and across generations—show “undone sciences” of many kinds in need of collective attention. It traces how families are grappling with the sense of needing to connect their own dots; the ways local communities are coming together to process displaced responsibilities; and the implications for health, public trust, and care when so much is left in clouds.

Pugilistic or militaristic metaphors are everywhere in conversations on environmental crises, not least in the perceived trenches of climate change. The “fight like hell” that Solnit incites belongs to a broader semantic field of agonistic conflict and “war talk” on the rise in public discourse about impending climate-related changes and political decision-making (e.g., Mangat and Dalby 2018).1 This battle rhetoric is provocative, but often elliptical: whom or what is the fight against? Whose battles? Many who deploy this language in relation to climate change mitigation, like Solnit, are really depicting a fight against fossil fuel company executives and agents, neoliberal leaders, private equity firms, and capitalist institutions who block progressive policies for reducing global carbon emissions to the mystical “net-zero.” War talk like this thus often targets the figures or apparatus responsible for anthropogenic climate change (Moore and Antonacci 2023; see e.g., Mann 2021) (Figure 1).

But for many publics, it slips into a fight against climate, pitting the survival of humanity against material phenomena like weather events or quantified CO₂ levels, and aims to marshal a range of tactics—from reducing everyday meat consumption to lobbying for renewable energies. In doing so, the language converts what many might rightly recognize as a multiscalar and political problem, like climate or climate change, into a reified, singular antagonist. Such metaphors are deemed important for rallying publics to the cause of fighting for present and future conditions, and for regrouping people away from the ranks of defeatism or doomism. At another more historical register, they belong to a wider “renaturing” turn toward biopolitics and environmental determinism by those who would see human history as a series of human-nature conflicts driving civilizational rise and fall (on determinism and renaturing, see e.g., González-Ruibal 2018; Arponen et al. 2019). With all due disrespect to Jared Diamond (2005).

If climate or climate change is akin to an oppositional battle “out there,” it can be compartmentalized and categorized in distinction from other kinds of agency. Such a move reinforces our long-lived, persistent Western binary of nature versus culture. That rhetorical division is not just intellectually insufficient but has real material effects, as policymakers can claim that they are tackling the “climate problem” reified and quantified as carbon emissions, not the neoliberal capitalist relations and problems of social and environmental justice that oppress many communities, especially in the Global South (Sultana 2022).

That move also implies that we all agree on what “climate” is and how to quantify it, as if it is a universal, a familiar linguistic trick of the Global North. But universality is constructed and created

This article explores the persistence of race in biological anthropology, particularly in the context of ancestry estimation using the Fordisc software. Despite efforts to move away from race-based typologies since the mid-20th century, historical notions of race continue to shape scientific methods and technologies in anthropology. By tracing the “data journey” of a skeletal collection within Fordisc's database, we reveal how early 20th-century race science shaped statistical methods used in contemporary anthropology and how typological notions of race persist today. Our interdisciplinary approach, combining history of science and science and technology studies, highlights the need to historicize and critically examine the methods and technologies that underpin anthropological practices. This analysis demonstrates that issues of race in science are deeply rooted in the material practices of data collection, analysis, and statistical methods. Recognizing and dismantling these legacies is central to creating more ethical scientific practices. We argue that addressing the trouble with race in anthropology requires a comprehensive reevaluation of scientific practices, its methods and technologies, and would benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration within anthropology and beyond.