Domesticating Nature: Commentary on the Anthropological Study of Weather and Climate Discourse
Steve Rayner
Abstract
The essays collected in this chapter attest to the resurgence of anthropological interest in weather and climate that has occurred during the past decade. Margaret Mead was probably the first anthropologist to address the societal threats of anthropogenic climate change, joining forces with meteorologist William Kellogg to convene a scholarly workshop on the topic as long ago as 1976. The general absence of professional reflexivity about the dual nature of philosophers' musings was one of the factors that drove the author to anthropology as a graduate discipline. Climate change has become a prominent site of disputation about competing social values and epistemologies. General circulation models have been the focus of most of the past decade's scientific and political controversy about the extent and even reality of climate change. In the end it does seem, as Harley and Orlove indicate, that memories of past climates depend very heavily on idealized stereotypes of seasonal conditions.