ABSTRACT
The anthropology of climate change extends from historic cases in humanity’s past to contemporary cases tied to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. A distinctive feature of anthropology is its focus on fine-grained studies of big social issues in small places. Certainly, climate change is a big issue with implications for all of humanity. But impact, expression, experience, and response to climate change play out in diverse local settings. Location as a factor in climate change effects does not just include geographic place but socioeconomic position in hierarchies of wealth, power, and control of resources. Hearing the narratives of the poor, describing their coping strategies, and drawing attention to their social struggles are all within the wheelhouse of anthropology. This chapter frames the importance of focusing not solely on macrostructures or the actions of elites but also on the lives, perceptions, thoughts, and actions of poor communities around the world. It provides the conceptual tools for integrating into a single model the downstream ethnographic accounts of everyday lives with the upstream activities of the polluting elites primarily responsible for climate change. The chapter is organized around two anthropological approaches, ecological anthropology and critical anthropology.
