ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects a shift in theoretical and practical interests for anthropologists concerned with climate. It suggests that current discussions about climate and weather differ in two ways from earlier interests in local weather, seasonal variations, extreme events, and cosmologies. The chapter focuses on both the global nature of anthropogenic climate change and the production and distribution of forms of scientific knowledge. It highlights some of the directions that contemporary anthropological approaches have gone in critically engaging with climate discourses. Early anthropologists were not just content with cataloguing the variety of human lives around the world; they were also interested in the drivers of societal and cultural variation, one of which was the environment. However, geographical or environmental determinism had dominated pre-Enlightenment intellectual thought, beginning with Hippocrates and Aristotle and lasting well into the twentieth century. Rayner argues that the "chauvinistic approach" of determinism ultimately resulted in an eighty-year backlash, in which anthropologists purposefully avoided climate as a research topic.
