What conceptual frameworks have anthropologists developed for the study of ‘world endings’?
According to the National Geographic Society, the Anthropocene refers to the unofficial unit of geologic time used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. That Earth has moved into a novel geological epoch characterised by human domination of the planetary system has led to anthropological inquiry into how best to qualify this new analytical field. World endings do not refer to the apocalypse, rather, they denote the limbo in which individuals find themselves, attempting to reconcile ideals of modernity, progress, and beliefs in infinite growth and potential, with the reality of ecological demise and political fragility. In reckoning with precarity, both social and ecological, living with the momentum and logics of capitalism becomes not only less achievable, but also less desirable.
This essay will assess the conceptual frameworks developed by anthropologist regarding the study of ‘world endings’. It will argue that, while varied in their approach, the red line tying anthropological ethnography of world endings is a focus on people; chiefly relating to how they take on embodied realities, negotiate their survival, and contend their demise. It will first look at Adams’ (2013) study of the markets of sorrow and labours of faith that emerged in the wake of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, exploring the interplay between ecology and politics. It will then focus on Petryna’s (2003) work on biological citizenship after Chernobyl in Ukraine, asking how accountability manifests in narratives of disaster. Next, it will turn to Weston’s (2016) investigation into the possibility of making visceral sense of living in a high-tech ecologically damaged world, illuminating the embodied and affective realities people contend with when dealing with the limits of infinity. Lastly, it will consider how precarity enables a productive study of ‘what is left’, revealing human potential for adaptability, variability, creativity, and imagination, through Tsing’s (2015) ethnography on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins.
Climate change has precipitated the occurrence of natural disasters in tandem with making their consequences more devastating. Yet, Adams’ (2013) exploration of the recovery after Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans in 2005 evinces that the most burdensome repercussion from the hurricane in fact pertains to the domain of human intervention post Katrina – rather than being about Hurricane Katrina, her book instead centres on how Americans managed to survive ‘a second order disaster that was precipitated by the success of profit-driven solutions to a crisis of need at the turn of the twenty-first century’. Adams’ account of the suffering inflicted by inadequate recovery efforts, inflecting a natural catastrophe with human fault, reveal how responsibility for this ecological disaster created a responsibility limbo, shifting accountability from public to private sectors but also individuals and families. This is reflected in Senator Caroline Reeves’ statement asking ‘why should [we] continue to carry the full burden of this recovery on [our] backs? … We are in a dead standstill, as there is no money for building materials. We were devastated both physically and emotionally … The depression has shifted from the storm to the hopelessness and stress of the Road Home’ (emphasis mine). Exemplar of this is Henry Bradlieu’s five-year long ordeal of trying to acquire money to get his house rebuilt. After being denied federal assistance from the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s Road Home Program for the second time, Henry suffered a stroke, leaving him paralysed in 2008, much like any hope the Bradlieu’s might have had about rebuilding their homes given that by that time their savings were gone and their pensions nowhere near able to sponsor the rebuild. Henry and his wife Gladys were only able to move back into their house in 2010 because a neighbourhood volunteer group had championed their cause and, ‘two years, eight hundred volunteers, and a steady stream of donations from ordinary people’ had taken the matter of the Bradlieu’s recovery in their own hands when everyone else had failed them. Unfortunately, the wait was too long for Henry and he died only six months after moving back in. Importantly, however, his wife claims that ‘it wasn’t Hurricane Katrina that killed him. It was the recovery that killed him … Look at what they did for him. Look at what they did to him.’ Adams furthers this by positing that the political arrangements put in place post Katrina ‘turned recovery into a for-profit endeavour [enabling] private companies to obtain government relief funds while offering little accountability to the people for whom these funds were intended’. Indeed, such arrangements allowed banks to offer loans generating interest-based returns for lenders while driving up debt among victims, as well as allowing insurance companies to curb culpability when refusing to pay for damages yet extracting further insurance payments from people with now inhabitable homes, culminating in recovery being left up to local volunteers, churches, and non-profit charities. Hence, ‘recovery that should have taken a few years [turned] into what locals called ‘a funeral that would not end’’. Ironically, in a time of need that required compassion, empathy, and assistance, need was made into a sector for market opportunism and growth. Adams notes that ‘the problems of need after a catastrophe circulate as emotional calls for the witness of suffering and also as urgent ethical demands to intervene and help’, creating an ‘affect economy’, wherein the ‘job of taking care of the needy, whose numbers grow in the wake of tragedies, is now offered up as a new set of opportunities for profits’, and, as such, ‘new transactional opportunities emerge in the space of suffering’. Adams work thus exposes the (dangerous) juxtaposition of human profit mentality on ecological disasters (already accelerated and worsened by such profit mentality). She maintains that ‘if the hurricane and floods are a story about the consequences of an environmental disaster resulting from policies that favoured fiscal growth and corporate profits over ecological balance and human risk, then the disastrous aftermath is the story of how some of these processes and priorities produced a disaster far worse than Katarina itself’ (emphasis mine). In arguing that arrangements such as federal and state subcontracting policies, allowing for-profit companies to do the relief work, coupled with a lack of government oversight in restricting profiteering created disastrous recovery, reveals the inefficiencies of profit, as well as the dangers of it. Indeed, that these arrangements were endorsed by various policies resulted in ‘a situation in which efforts to recover were organised around profit making at the same time that they were intended to help people in need’. Hence, while Katarina was an ecological disaster, its ramifications were compounded by human greed and an unquenchable desire for profit seeking – the price of which won’t be seen, concealed behind a narrative of individual resilience and heroic strength. Adams work thus outlines the inevitable loneliness and isolation in the face of ‘world endings’, in situations where accountability is lacking, and responsibility detrimentally placed onto individuals. What is more, it allows for scale to be integrated into analysis of world endings, adding texture and dimension, in that it enables analysis to not solely encompass the end of the world but also account for the end to people’s worlds.
Yet, how is accountability defined and measured in scenarios of disaster? The importance of narrative in disasters is explored in Petryna’s (2003) investigation into the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Chiefly, she maintains that disasters are malleable, they are made, shaped, with her ethography capturing a ‘moment in time when a fundamental incompatibility arose between two logics: the shock of survival and the fraught politics of science and the state … [which would] compete for the right to establish the terms on which the meaning and scope of the Chernobyl disaster could be determined’ (emphasis mine).
Illustrating this is the fact that, importantly, the extent of the disaster came down to a political decision, or rather, lack thereof. Petryna stresses that ‘eighteen days elapsed before Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary, appeared on Soviet television and acknowledged the nuclear release to the populace … within that period, tens of thousands of people were either knowingly or unknowingly exposed to radioactive iodine-131, absorbed [in] the thyroid and resulting [in] a sudden and massive onset of thyroid cancers’. Yet, Petryna posits that ‘such onsets could have been curtailed had the government distributed nonradioactive iodine pills within the first week of disaster’. Thus, in withholding the seriousness of the situation to the general public, the Chernobyl disaster became a political arena in which the needs of politicians and politics surpassed in most regards those of the affected public. Further, the variability of the scientifico-legal and medical landscape of the disaster underscores the narrative power of disaster. For instance, the biological threshold dose was subject to manipulation; prior to the Chernobyl accident, Guskova had established the threshold of bodily response at 0.01-1 rem, yet, when faced with ‘the single largest cohort of acute radiation victims’, she raised the threshold of the body’s response to radiation to as high as 250 rem. The adjustability of biological realities to suit political and economic needs hints at the denial of responsibility. Strikingly, a director of the Shelter Complex in the zone told Petryna that, while Ukraine’s Ministry of Health ‘sets annual allowable norms of dose exposures … these norms are not strictly adhered to’. In reference to the plant workers, the director outlines that ‘taking risks is their individual problem. No one else is responsible for it’. What is more, when asked to compare Ukraine’s enforcement of worker safety with those of Western Europe, he admitted that ‘no one has ever defined the price of a dose exposure here. No one has ever defined the value of a person here’ (emphasis mine).
Consequently, the negotiation of survival was delegated to sufferers themselves. Petryna coins the term ‘biological citizenship’ to refer to the social practice that emerged in Ukraine following the shift in responsibility. She suggests that, in Ukraine, where an ‘emergent democracy is yoked to harsh market transition, the damaged biology of a population has become the grounds for social membership and the basis for staking citizenship claims’. She emphasises how absence of adequate policy and counter politics evolved in tandem in the aftermath of Chernobyl.
Indeed, ‘counter-politics’ finds its ground in state failure insofar as ‘widespread unaccounted for radiation exposures, state interventions and failure to intervene, expanding clinical and bureaucratic regimes, and market economic changes’ impacted the rational-technical course of illness and suffering. As such, citizens came to rely on available technologies, knowledge of symptoms, as well as legal procedures, so as to gain ‘political recognition and access to some form of welfare inclusion’. Aware of their diminished prospects in term of both work and health, they inventoried elements in their lives – be it measures, numbers, symptoms – that could be ‘connected to a broader state, scientific, and bureaucratic history of error, mismanagement, and risk’. In as much as drawing these connections could lead to the securing of economic and social entitlement, this move towards ‘illness as counter-politics’ outlines individuals’ sensitivity to how ‘politics shapes what they know and don’t know’ about their illnesses (Proctor, 1995).
Significantly, this awareness allows for the creation of a space where from they are willing and able to exploits such politics in hopes of ‘[limiting] further assaults on their well-being which they see as resulting from a collapsing state health system and loss of adequate legal protection’. Importantly however, while survival is left in the hands of individuals, sufferers’ voices and mobilisation of knowledge often gets lost. Rita, one of Petryna’s informants, who was working at the plant the day of the accident, suffering from intense exposure to radiation, realised that her voice alone failed to make an impact. Despite organising her medical records extremely well and being very knowledgeable of the ways she had been medically accounted for in the ten years following the incident, diagnoses still stood in contrast to her experience, symptoms, and knowledge of pain, sanitising her suffering to fit expected bureaucratic and political outcomes. As a result, novel forms of collective accountability appeared such as funds observing and tracking where money and assistance was said to go and where it would end up. One such fund, the International Chernobyl Disabled Persons Aid and Charity Fund, kept track of hospital food menus, ensuring that sufferers were getting their nutritional norms of beets, milk, poultry, carrots, cabbage, etc. moreover, members of the fund ‘initiated petitions [signed] by patients in clinics and sent to the mayor’s office, the Health Ministry, and Parliament’. For example, one petition stated that ‘today, the state can no longer assist the sick cleanup workers. Specialised clinics can no longer provide medicines and food. We the invalids and sufferers of the catastrophe offer you the following facts: the clinics’ cafeterias do not provide meat or bread. Many of the interned are forced to sign out of the clinic earlier because there are no medications and no food’. Chernobyl funds, which numbered to over five hundred, were, ironically, unlike typical non-governmental organisations, ‘fostered by the state itself to supplement its weaknesses in terms of providing financial and medical resources to sufferers’ (emphasis mine). Thus, Petryna’s work highlights how the narrative power of disasters is met with individual and/or collective (but non-governmental) negotiations of survival and recovery, and illuminates ingenuity and adaptability when the perverse outcomes of disaster are compounded by self-interested rather than suffering-centred policies.
Binding these two ethnographies is not only the prevalence of precarity but its constant worsening. Weston (2016) distinguishes what she terms ‘political ecologies of the precarious’ from apocalyptic narratives, stressing that perceiving that environmental changes are rendering life more precarious stands apart from fatalistic musings. While there exists an interplay between the two, she notes that apocalyptic accounts, comprising climate change, meteor strikes, or nuclear winters, are affectively distinct to discourses on ecological precarity in that such accounts ‘focus on the end game, the time when human history stops, not the insecurities of the now’. Chiefly, Weston contends that while ‘apocalypse looms, then descends, or is headed off by courageous action’, ‘political ecologies of the precarious seduce people into participating in their own demise, often in the guise of working against it’ (emphasis mine). Maintaining that the lyrics to the anthem of development are changing – for decades, ‘modernity rallied people to advance’; now ‘precarity shrugs and says ‘we cannot go back’ – Weston asks what it means to ‘face ‘forward’ with the precariousness of our ecological situation in view’. She argues that, paradoxically, short-termist mentalities, enabled by and emerging from a reliance on infinity – i.e. ‘infinite resources. Infinite progress. Infinite growth’ – detracts from the ability to conceive of alternatives in accordance with the reality of finiteness and stunts the desire for change. Exemplar of this is Weston’s ethnographic study of Venice, Italy.
She writes that Venice is engaged in a battle with climate change, the precariousness of its position evident every time the ‘acqua alta’, or peak tide, inundates entire sections of the city. Yet, despite measures being implemented to combat ‘acqua alta’, notably elevated walkways allowing people to pass as waters rise, in conjunction with officials garnering support for dramatic interventions like the MOSE (or massive gate) project to protect the Venetian Lagoon from the Adriatic Sea, they are fundamentally aimed at deferring rather than deterring. In fact, though it seems that people are facing ecological problems head-on, ‘hopes rest on supplements and substitutions, rather than a concerted attempt to reorganise a mode of production’. Hence, while their efforts are commendable in their creativity, flexibility, and resilience, ultimately, Venetians have ‘embraced [destruction] in order to defer it’ insofar as ‘too many of their efforts preserve the form of whatever is already in place’. In a striking conclusion to her book, Weston warns that unless mobilisation for a different sort of change is attained, ‘someday we – and I mean we – are likely to all be wrapped up in our projects and our plans for sustainability, immersed in what we believe to be another interlude on the way to pleasure or progress or the very next thing, when suddenly ’. Weston’s analysis thus outlines the collective facet of world endings in that any remediation to the problems arising, requires the ability to grapple with long term prospects to promote accountability from current economic, political, and social systems, as well as generate a space to conceive of alternatives to the precarity of the everyday.
Exemplar of this drive away from capitalist, market driven, contours of the day to day, towards a life on their edge, is Tsing’s (2015) exploration of the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Tsing echoes Weston’s claim that ideals of progress and modernity are fundamentally finite and limited, suggesting that precarity is not an exception to how the world works, rather it is ‘the condition of our time’. She maintains that precarity is characterised by vulnerability and lack of control; ‘unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, [remaking] us as well as [others] … [thus] everything is in flux, including our ability to survive’. Interestingly however, she propounds that thinking through precarity changes social analysis in as much as ‘indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible’. Matsiman encapsulates this. Although devoted to his matsutake mushrooms, Matsiman, who lives with his girlfriend and his cats at the top of a hill, does not assume they will suffice to support his needs, thus branching out and experimenting with selling matsutake power as a spice, growing medicinal fungi, or commercially collecting firewood, and understands he has ‘chosen forms of livelihood at the very edge of capitalism’. Tsing highlights that, he, like many mushroom pickers, ‘has explored the limit spaces of capitalism, neither properly inside nor outside, where the inability of capitalist forms of discipline to fully capture the world is especially obvious’. She argues that Matsiman navigates both the problems and possibilities of precarity. Indeed, although precarity suggests not being able to plan, it also ‘stimulates noticing, as one works with what is available’. Thus, Tsing’s work offers a somewhat positive framing of world endings since she evinces the potential for alternatives, contingent on curiosity, adaptability, and flexibility. While it may not be fair that the onus of responsibility vis a vis both the end of the world and the ending of one’s world is located within the individual rather than the systems with further disaster – whether in their outset or their outcome – it is interesting to focus on individuals as they are inherently more flexible and malleable than established systems.
Bibliography
Adams, Vincanne, 2013. Markets of Sorrow, Labours of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moore, Amelia. 2016. Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing contemporary global change. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22(1):27-46
Petryna, Adriana, 2003. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tsing, Anna, 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Weston, Kath, 2016. Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World. Durham: Duke University Press.