Social Anthropology

‘Winter is coming!’ The ominous phrase punctuating George R.R. Martin’s popular fantasy saga plays as a repetitive warning that there is something out there threatening the world as it is, something the political powers of the time are oblivious to, made shortsighted as they are by their petty quarrels and thirst for power. As much as the warning resounds with contemporaneous anxieties, the underlying message remains anthropo-centred and anchored in warfare concerns – dead people from old wars are coming back lest we constantly keep them at bay. It is tempting to reverse the claim into ‘summer is coming’ to make the point about the actual threat which needs to be addressed by the same shortsighted political powers. It has become common sense that human-induced climate change is a new actor in/of history. Indeed, history has been epistemologically redefined after the popularisation of the Anthropocene in the 1990s to develop into ‘big histories’ that feed global imaginaries about numerous new agentivities (earth, life, nature and also water and ice). History will never be the same, nor the figure of the human. The wintery summer that is upon us warrants our attention. Anthropology has a lot to offer, we believe, precisely by thinking laterally and including agents, forces and materialities that we simply can’t afford to ignore.

The Anthropocene epoch is one where human mastery has left an indelible mark on our planet's geological record. A grand narrative that foregrounds human domination over nature, the Anthropocene should, however, not foreclose agentive capacity beyond the human. This special issue of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale explores engagements with ice, an iconic non-human element of the Anthropocene. The articles demonstrate how recognising ice's vitality and impact on humans challenges dominant epistemologies, transcends the life/death binary, confuses the boundaries of matter, and alters timescales, unsettling popular imaginaries about the climate. Specific in how its vitality is expressed, ice is also here universal as a substance enmeshed in earthly processes that transcend localities. Altogether, these accounts evoke a sense of humility in response to the vitality of ice, urging us to embrace the agency of the non-human, the lack of appreciation for which is indeed inherent to the very conditions of the Anthropocene.

With technological developments, distant Himalayan ice has largely replaced early scientific accounts that emerged from physical engagement. Ice became an abstraction that in contemporary accounts is commonly enmeshed in a climate change imaginary and aims to contribute to knowledge about something happening at the planetary level. This article proposes a shift in narrative scale, drawing on ethnographic research in the Indian Himalayas. It explores stories of entanglement in icy ecologies, portraying ice not as a mere abstraction but as a vital body. In these accounts, ice is at the centre of mundane and intimate encounters with climate change and its materiality induces a relationship between bodies (humans, non-humans) that transcends their ontological boundaries. Recognizing these experiences is a fundamental element in reimagining Himalayan ice, departing from technological limitations, and underscoring the consequences of ice melting within the context of climate change.

Focusing on the life and death of Okjökull, the first of Iceland's major glaciers to disappear because of anthropogenic climate change, this article discusses the complex relationships between cryospheres and human communities in Iceland. It asks how distinctions between non-living entities and living beings can offer insights to anthropology, and transdisciplinarily, as a model for recognising mutual precarities between the living and non-living world in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Detailing the authors’ ethnographic encounters with Ok mountain and Okjökull (glacier), the authors argue that by attending to non-living forms, and by registering their ‘passing’ or loss, we are able to document and better comprehend threshold events in the larger life of the planet.

This article engages with the natural phenomena of meteorite concentrations in Antarctica to explore how ice, particularly flowing, viscous ice, can offer alternative conceptions of change over non-human time. Drawing from historical research at the Smithsonian Institute as well as ethnographic experience in the High Arctic, I foreground glaciological understandings of ice as a monomineralic rock, one that indicates geologic time (rather than climatological crisis). In highlighting the rocky relationality between ice and meteorites, this article focuses on moments of capricious interruption into uniformitarian time: material instances where the geo-logics that underpin scientific conceptions of the non-human past were ‘glitched’. This article argues that the glitches the viscous ice makes visible can help reframe human and non-human time, and Geo-Anthropos relations; a crucial step to better understanding the momentum and meaning of the ‘Anthrop’/‘Capital-ocene’.

Changing sea ice due to anthropogenic climate change demands scientists to revisit their taken-for-granted concepts of sea ice. The ‘rotten ice project’ was one such effort by scientists at the University of Washington's Polar Science Center, which sought to develop novel methods to characterise sea ice as a physical-biological-chemical unit. Rotten ice, however, evaded scientists’ efforts to capture it. Using these ‘escapes’ from scientists’ preconceptions during my fieldwork with the team from 2014 to 2016, I draw on interpretations of Georges Canguilhem's understanding of the relationship between life and knowledge to make sense of what rotten ice demanded. Following Canguilhem's suggestions, I argue that vitalism as an ethos treats concepts as tools for scientists to relate to their environment, challenging them to to remain receptive to the difference that error, experimentation and encounters made to their concepts—and thereby stay open to more-than-human worlds like those found in sea ice.

Worry for the fate of Himalayan glaciers is prominent in climate change research, and encounters with glacial retreat shape imaginings of future ruination. Emotions run high when social scientists concerned with the implications of ice sheet collapse are confronted with the views of select glaciologists who downplay the scope of ice melt. At play in the disciplinary disagreements that arise are different orientations to time, and different imaginaries of Himalayan climate futures based on images of, and data about, glacial retreat. It is the complexity of glaciological knowledge production that this article creates space to understand. At stake is an effort to hold up, for social science audiences, the disparate knowings – between and among disciplines – that impact how Himalayan glacial melt is discussed and imagined.

Goldman, Mara J. 2020. Narrating Nature. Wildlife Conservation and Maasai Ways of Knowing. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. 304 pp. Ebook: US$60.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4194-2.

Winchell, Mareike. 2022. After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 352 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 9780520386440.

Barua, Maan. 2023. Lively Cities. Reconfiguring Urban Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. 382 pp. Pb.: US$30.00. ISBN: 978-1-5179-1256-7.

Stafford, Charles. 2020. Economic Life in the Real World: Logic, Emotion and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 196 pp. Pb. £22.99. ISBN: 978-1-108-71655-0.

Świtek, Beata. 2021. Reluctant Intimacies: Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands. New York: Berghahn. 242 pp. Pb.: US$34.95. ISBN: 978-1-80073-016-8.

Bubandt, Nils, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen and Rachel Cypher (eds.). 2022. Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene. Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds. 432 pp. Pb.: US$34.95. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN: 978-1-5179-1165-2.

Dewan, Camelia. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 224 pp. Pb.: US$32.00. ISBN: 978-0-295-74961-7.

Adams, Vincanne. 2023. Glyphosate & the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 184 pp. Pb.: US$24.95. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1675-5.

Kravel-Tovi, Michal. 2017. When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel. New York: Columbia University Press. 320 pp. Hb.: US$75.00. ISBN: 9780231183246.