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Globalisation and climate change in the High Arctic: Fieldwork in Svalbard, the fastest-heating place on earth

Magdalene Fjord, Svalbard. Photo: Ashok Boghani, flickr

Most people can hardly imagine that it is possible to enjoy life up in Northern Norway, in Tromsø for example where I once stayed and studied at the northernmost university in the world for one year: Too cold, too remote, too boring – these are conventional misconceptions.

But Northern Norway is nothing compared to the fieldsite that anthropologist Zdenka Sokolíčková has chosen: Svalbard, an island that is located two plane hours north of Tromsø in Northern Norway, halfway on the way to the North Pole. An island that consists 60% of ice, where the sun disappears for more than three months below the horizon and where you always have to be prepared to meet polar bears (and therefore carry a gun).

Nevertheless, after two years of fieldwork, anthropologist Zdenka Sokolíčková tells in an interesting interview with Radio Prague International: “It will be quite painful to leave” – and – this is about the need to de-exoticize – “It’s just an ordinary town very high up north”.

Coal mining has been the key industry at Svalbard ever since Norway won sovereignty over the archipelago in 1920 – until 2021 at least. Photo: Ashok Boghani, flickr

Svalbard and its only town Longyearbyen with 2300 inhabitants (from 50 nations!) is popular among researchers. One reason is that it is a good place to study climate change. It is the fastest-heating place on earth. Since 1971 the average temperature has risen by 4 degrees in summer, and 7 in winter.

Climate change has for a long time been a topic not only for natural sciences, but also the social sciences,including anthropology. One of the first studies “Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions” by Susan Crate and Mark Nuttal was published already 12 years ago.

How do people cope? What changes have they observed? How does it affect their life and and their relation to the environment? These are some of the important questions to ask. As anthropologist, she explains, she is interested in peoples’ stories about these changes, Zdenka Sokolíčková explains in the interview.

We get more details about her findings in two conference presentations she uploaded on her Youtube channel.

One of the many good things with the global pandemic is that we get videos like these ones. Instead of standing in a boring conference room the researcher is taliking utside directly in her fieldsite, the buildings and mountains of her current home town Longyearbyen nicely visible in the background. Due to the pandemic the conference was held online only. (But as she explained

she would anyway not have travelled such long distances for environmental reasons).

As outsider one might be tempted to think that climate change also might be a good thing. This is only partly true, she explains. -20 instead of -35 degrees are easier to adapt to, but the problem are the more unstable weather conditions that have become more common. Higher temperatures mean less sea ice, it becomes more difficult to move around with snow scooters. Even in winter there are sometimes periods with rain or even strong rains. “Our worst nightmare is dark season with rain, you know no sun, rain, dark soil, nothing to do becasue you can’t go outside. This does something to you. You think this is not the place to be”, one of the inhabitants, who has been living there for a long time, told her. “Also when it rains and then frost comes back, the tundra gets hard and icy and that makes grazing for reindeers difficult”, the anthropologist adds. “Seing the starving animals coming to the town is heartbreaking.”

Also interesting: While of course not all inhabitants care for climate change, there is a widely shared notion of the inappropriateness oif human settlement. Living there is unsustainable and has a high ecological footprint – even after the end of coal mining was announced that has been the key industry at Svalbard ever since Norway won sovereignty over the archipelago in 1920. Tourism has become more important instead, which also has a huge negative environmental impact. The impact of the researchers themselves, no small number either, should also not be neglected.

I was surprised to see that Zdenka Sokolíčková is part of the research project Overheating. The three crises of globalisation at the University of Oslo where I took part as journalist. I interviewed several anthropologists who researched climate change. See “We still know too little about the human dimensions of climate change”.

SEE ALSO:

For more anthropology of climate change

“Seen from an anthropological view, humanity is at risk of extinction”

Researching in “non-prestigious areas” in the Artctic North – Robert Paine 1926-2010

Why Siberian nomads cope so well with climate change

Magdalene Fjord, Svalbard. Photo: Ashok Boghani, flickr

Most people can hardly imagine that it is possible to enjoy life up in Northern Norway, in Tromsø for example where I once stayed and studied at the northernmost university in the world for…

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Nobody is normal: "The line between healthy and not healthy is drawn more by culture than by nature”

Who is crazy? Who is normal? Describing somebody as “not normal” has serious implications for this person, can destroy her life. From an anthropological perspective, there is nothing called normal. What we have are endless ways to lead a more or less meaningful life. Principally, everybody is as crazy as everybody else. The distinction in normal or crazy is artifical – it has to do with culture, history and politics, and is therefore an interesting object of study.

In this sense, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker has written an important book that was just released: Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness.

In this book he explores the roots of mental illness stigma around the world – and reveals how our prejudices and notions of mental illnesses and ‘normality’ reek of cultural biases that stop many from seeking help.

According to a very interesting review by Claudia Wallis in Spectrum News, Grinker shares Sigmund Freud’s wish that mental illnesses would be viewed “like the common cold, something everyone gets from time to time,” and that people “might eventually feel no shame in seeking psychological care for their problems.”

So why do people in the so-called West, and increasingly everywhere else as well view mental illnesses differently? And where does the stigma come from?

Grinker traces the stigma back to industrial revolution and capitalism in in late 17th-century Europe, Claudia Wallis writes:

With industrialization, people with intellectual disabilities, schizophrenia and other serious brain conditions were moved out of their homes and into asylums, along with criminals, debtors and addicts — basically anyone viewed as incapable of being a productive and self-sufficient worker.

Once institutionalized, people were sorted by their caretakers into categories: “idiotic” and “insane,” “probably curable” and “probably incurable,” and eventually more specific, medicalized terms. The words “normal” and “abnormal” were borrowed from mathematics and statistical averages.

As new categories of sickness and perceived deviance were added — mania, melancholia, dementia, masturbation (an actual diagnosis!) — the number of people consigned to asylums exploded in England and the United States. “Experts were at a loss to explain the apparent epidemic created by illnesses they themselves had invented and were now counting,” Grinker wryly observes.

In an interview with Psychology Today Grinker provides more details:

When capitalism took hold, we started to value individual autonomy and productivity for everybody. Before that, we didn’t hold a person responsible for all of their differences and all of their successes and failures

In the U.S., the hero is the individual. People with disabilities aren’t necessarily always able to be independent. By the very nature of capitalism, the person who depends on others, who lives with others, or who isn’t an efficient worker is considered to be a failure.

As a contrast he provides an example from rural Namibia:

A man I’ll call Tamzo, who lives in rural Namibia, has what we would call schizophrenia. He walks 20 kilometers to the village once a month to get antipsychotic medicine. The Western doctor there writes down his diagnosis as schizophrenia.

But at home he is thought to be the victim of a curse that somebody placed on their village that settled randomly on Tamzo. In his family and his village, as long as he is not hearing voices, he’s not considered at all to be sick. Whereas in the clinic, it’s “once labeled, always labeled.”

The anthropologist does not deny the existence of mental illnessess, Virginia Hughes writes in her review in the New York Times. But for the past few centuries, Western doctors have been fixated on distinguishing normal from abnormal. And those bright demarcations have made it easier to stigmatize people.

Grinker does not believe that a focus on the precise genes and biological mechanisms behind brain conditions such as autism and schizophrenia will reduce stigma. Neuroscientists hoped this would make mental illness more equivalent to for example heart disease:

Grinker disagrees. He notes that in some parts of the world a genetic basis becomes even more stigmatizing, as it casts doubt on bloodlines. And he believes that mental illness can never be entirely reduced to biology. As with hypertension, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolemia, obesity and many other conditions, the line between healthy and not healthy is constructed, or, as he puts it, “drawn more by culture than by nature.”

>> review in Spectrum News

>> review in New York Times

>> interview in Psychology Today

Check also his website, his texts in Psychology Today with titles as The Racist Origins of the Modern Concept of “Schizophrenia” and his Ted Talk:

Reading about his book, I remember a useful concept that the Norwegian researcher Ivar Morken introduced – in Norwegian he called it “normalitetssentrisme” – in English it might be normalcentrism. He thinks it would be fruitful to talk about nornalcentrism in a similar way as we talk about ethnocentrism.

Mental illness and normalcentrism has been topic before, therefore:

SEE ALSO:

The globalisation of the Western conception of mental illness

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Medicine as power: “Creates new categories of sick people”

Why anthropologists should politicize mental illnesses

The Anthropology of Suicide

Who is crazy? Who is normal? Describing somebody as "not normal" has serious implications for this person, can destroy her life. From an anthropological perspective, there is nothing called normal. What we have are endless ways to lead a more…

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Call for research: How does digital surveillance change society?

Not only when we are reading the news, but also when we are on Zoom-conferences, sending messages with Whatsapp, playing silly games on our mobile or when we switch on our robot vacuum to clean the mess in our flat, we are tracked and analyzed by thousands of companies that would like to sell us something – be it a product or a message (here you can check trackers in mobile apps).

What does this constant surveillance do to us? Is it a threat as activists claim? And can something be done about it? What is the culture, ethos and worldview within these increasingly powerful corporations Google, Facebook and Microsoft that are developing these technologies of surveillance?

In the recent issue of the journal Anthropology Now, anthropologist Jennifer Huberman suggests several new areas of research for anthropologists.

New economic developments require detailed ethnographies!

In her article she reviews probably one of the most important recent books: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff – of of those few books that, as she writes, "forces one to radically question the way the world works":

Surveillance Capitalism is both an analysis and critique. Zuboff’s main argument is that surveillance capitalism poses an existential threat to democracy and human nature as it subordinates people to ever more pervasive forms of social control and “instrumentarian power.”

Zuboff does a masterful job laying bare the hidden laws of motion that structure the workings of surveillance capitalism. She has opened our eyes to what many of us perhaps already intuited but didn’t have a technical language to describe.

But her book is a general study, from a bird’s eye view, based on interviews and analyzing documents and texts. What we need now, she writes, are "detailed ethnographic accounts of the way that surveillance capitalism is lived, felt, experienced and, we hope, even resisted by those it seeks to dominate".

This includes also studies of corporate culture in the Silicon Valley:

What kind of ethos permeates institutions such as Singularity University or the MIT Media Lab, where according to Zuboff “some of surveillance capitalism’s most valuable capabilities and applications, from data mining to wearable technologies, were invented” (206)?

To pursue such questions is not just to push the envelope of ethnographic curiosities. It is also to align oneself with a valuable theoretical perspective. For as anthropologists have long demonstrated, the (re)production of power, whether it be elite power or labor power, is very much a matter of culture.

Even though the machinations of surveillance capitalism seem to suggest a world where people are increasingly subordinated to the workings of algorithms, computer science and big data, at the end of the day, as Zuboff herself emphasizes, what allows surveillance capitalism to achieve such dominance in society is not the technology per se but rather the people who decide toward what ends it should be used.

>> continue reading her article in Anthropology Now: What to Do with Surveillance Capitalism?

I suppose, she thinks of studies as the one I wrote about two weeks ago:

Pregnancy and baby apps, smart home devices: Anthropologist shows how surveillance capitalism targets children

Personally, I would find following questions also interesting to study:

Why do people continue using products that are spying on them? What keeps people from using privacy friendly alternatives? Jitsi instead of Zoom for example? Linux instead of Windows? Signal instead of Whatsapp? Libre Office instead of Microsoft Word?

The problem with many privacy-friendly alternatives, in my experience, is that they tend to be viewed as "geeky" and not very user-friendly. Here it would be intersting to look at the process of software development itself and the relations between developers and users: Design anthropology has made lots of products more user-friendly

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Why were they doing this work just to give it away for free? Thesis on Ubuntu Linux hackers

Not only when we are reading the news, but also when we are on Zoom-conferences, sending messages with Whatsapp, playing silly games on our mobile or when we switch on our robot vacuum to clean the mess in our flat,…

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Corona-Anthropology: We feel safe with "people we know", for the danger always comes from "the others"

Do you wear a mask when you meet your friends? Do you?

Recently I often had to think of an observation of a Twitter user in Germany: She or he realised that people do wear masks in public transport or in supermarkets but showed careless behaviour when they are with people they know: They rarely wear a mask when they are with friends or with colleagues at work.

Today I’ve stumbled upon anthropological research that conforms this observation: In her short article Staying safe in the time of coronavirus: pay attention to ‘the guy you know’ medical anthropologist Lisa J. Hardy writes about her ongoing research on how people in the US experience living during a global pandemic. She and her team bserved the same tendency: People feel safe with people they know, but are scared of people they define as “others”, although people know that “viruses do not travel along lines of familiarity”. Our behaviour is far from logical:

What we are seeing in our data from this project has a twist on the idea of “other.” People are telling themselves stories about the safety of people they know. This means that many people report that they’re doing everything possible to stay safe and, in the next breath, tell us about a party they attended for the holidays with friends and family. “It’s OK,” they say, “we knew everyone there.”

The danger, we tend to think, always comes from “the others”.

Some interviewees in the Southwest told us that they avoid shopping where Indigenous people go because of high rates of Covid-19 on reservations, indicating the kind of racism and avoidance that often comes with contagious disease.

These “sometimes illogical conclusions about other people” are ” not unexpected”, she writes:

Throughout history there have been examples of epidemics and blame. Someone else is often considered to be the vector of disease.

>> read the whole article in StatNews

In her article she also links to a paper she published in the journal Medical Anthropology last September called Connection, Contagion, and COVID-19 where she in the abstract stresses the importance of social science research when dealing with Covid-19:

In the United States people understand the global pandemic not as biology, but as the manifestation of political affiliation, difference, connection, and disconnection. COVID-19 is, according to public perception, dangerous because it maliciously mutates to attack. It is “a guy we don’t know.” Relationships between the mysteriousness of the virus and heightened visibility of longstanding inequality in the United States form new contexts for existing social tensions. (…)

Here I draw on analysis of 50 semi-structured interviews we conducted from March to August of 2020 demonstrating how understandings of the biology of a virus are woven into perceptions of politics, inequality, and the fractures of a divided nation. To understand social and political responses to the global pandemic it is essential that we continue to investigate xenophobia, inequality, and racism alongside the biological impact of SARS-CoV-2.

She also has a nice website with many articles, including creative writing, check www.ljhardy.com

There has already been conducted extremly much anthropological research on Covid-19 / Corona, I have lost the overview, so, for the time being, I just refer to The Anthropology Newspaper on Covid-19 and the coronavirus and also on open access journal articles in The Anthropology Journal Ticker on Covid-19

Do you wear a mask when you meet your friends? Do you?

Recently I often had to think of an observation of a Twitter user in Germany: She or he realised that people do wear masks in public transport or in…

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"Seen from an anthropological view, humanity is at risk of extinction"

What are the connections between climate change, global capitalism, xenophobia and white supremacy? Marc Schuller does in his new book something rather unusual: He asks big questions. Humanity’s Last Stand. Confronting Global Catastrophe is the name of the book that not only analyzes the state of the world but also offers advice about what to do according to an interview on the Northern Illinois University website.

There is a virtual book launch tomorrow 15.1.2021.

It is refreshing to see that Schuller – in contrast to the majority of social scientists – is not afraid of making bold statements.

Asked about the “apocalyptic” title of his book, if “humanity is truly headed toward extinction?” he answers:

Seen from an anthropological view, as a species, the warning signs are clear. This is the mandate of the Anthropocene: Ever more species are becoming extinct, including our closest relatives, primates. As the creators of this catastrophe, we can turn this around but only by taking deadly seriously the existential threats of climate change, proliferating warfare, xenophobia and racism.

Asked about the interconnections between climate change, global capitalism, xenophobia and white supremacy, he explains:

Capitalism was founded on plantation slavery, following Indigenous genocide. Capitalism requires growth at all costs; global capitalism entails colonial expropriation. Resources are taken from colonized peoples to enrich an increasingly small group, which builds literal walls, as well as walls of racism and nationalism, protecting its privilege. Following abolition, fossil fuels replaced slaves’ blood, sweat and tears, heating up the planet.

But there is hope according to him, as “in humanity’s ugliest hours, we have demonstrated our capacity for love, solidarity and justice”.

He suggests cultivating “an anthropological imagination”, which means highlighting the “connections we already have, despite the fog of ideology that keeps us feeling isolated”:

We need to see the human beings behind our food, shelter, electricity and consumer goods. That’s the first step in building a bottom-up platform for making necessary global changes. We will never muster the courage or will while we continue to dehumanize other people and their problems and ignore the consequences of our unsustainable consumption.

>> continue reading the whole interview

In the introduction he explains this concept further:

Before we can act, we need the ability to see how issues such as the Syrian refugee crisis, the mass shootings in Parkland and El Paso, and the rising tide of ultra-right nationalism across Europe and the United States are all connected. Seeing how these global issues are lived and confronted by real, living human beings and how they are connected to other issues and people can be called an “anthropological imagination.”

An anthropological imagination also underscores that these issues are products of human action, and therefore changeable: they are particular local manifestations of the inhumanity of our global political and economic system based on in equality and private profit seeking at the expense of the collective good.

It is clearly an activist book. I am not sure if I like the activist language in some parts of the introduction, though. While I agree with his general message, there is – for my taste – too much “black and white” thinking about who is good and who is bad and too much labelling of people (although he aims for the opposite). But have a look yourself! There is also a useful website about the book with summaries of all chapters including explanations of core concepts, a very good idea!

Schuller has also his own website at http://www.anthropolitics.org/ . He has worked alot within disaster anthropology, especially in Haiti and received the Anthropology in Media Award in 2016:

Schuller embodies the best attributes of the contemporary engaged and activist anthropologist. Last year, he was the recipient of the Margaret Mead Award, presented by the AAA and SfAA. The Anthropology in Media Award similarly honors a scholar who effectively communicates anthropological ideas and research to broad audiences beyond the academy.

His recent project reminds me of an earlier research project by Thomas Hylland Eriksen at the University of Oslo, that I have been involved in as a journalist until 2016: Overheating. The three crises of globalisation: An anthropological history of the early 21st century that explores exactly the same questions. You can read many interviews with the researchers in the News section.

SEE ALSO:

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João Biehl: “Anthropology needs to engage in an activist way”

“Discuss politics!” – How anthropologists in Indonesia engage with the public

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The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

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Iran jails anthropologist for “subversive research”, “seeking cultural changes” and “promoting homosexuality”

What are the connections between climate change, global capitalism, xenophobia and white supremacy? Marc Schuller does in his new book something rather unusual: He asks big questions. Humanity's Last Stand. Confronting Global Catastrophe is the name of the book that…

Read more