Overheating

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Description

The world is overheated. Too full and too fast; uneven and unequal. It is the age of the Anthropocene, of humanity’s indelible mark upon the planet. In short, it is globalisation - but not as we know it.



In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Hylland Eriksen breathes new life into the discussion around global modernity, bringing an anthropologist’s approach to bear on the three interrelated crises of environment, economy and identity. He argues that although these crises are global in scope, they are perceived and responded to locally, and that contradictions abound between the standardising forces of information-age global capitalism and the socially embedded nature of people and local practices.



Carefully synthesising the ethnographic and comparative methods of anthropology with macrosocial and historical material, Overheating offers an innovative new perspective on issues including energy use, urbanisation, deprivation, human (im)mobility, and the spread of interconnected, wireless information technology.
List of Illustrations

Preface

1. Le Monde est Trop Plein

2. A Conceptual Inventory

3. Energy

4. Mobility

5. Cities

6. Waste

7. Information Overload

8. Clashing Scales: Understanding Overheating

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Social Aspects
• Human Geography
• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Anthropocene
• Settlement
• Globalization
• Anthropology
• Refugee

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783719853
• Langue: English

Extrait

Overheating
Overheating
An Anthropology of Accelerated Change
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
First published 2016 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Thomas Hylland Eriksen 2016
The right of Thomas Hylland Eriksen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN  978 0 7453 3639 8   Hardback
ISBN  978 0 7453 3634 3   Paperback
ISBN  978 1 7837 1984 6   PDF eBook
ISBN  978 1 7837 1986 0   Kindle eBook
ISBN  978 1 7837 1985 3   EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the European Union and United States of America
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface

1. Le monde est trop plein
2. A Conceptual Inventory
3. Energy
4. Mobility
5. Cities
6. Waste
7. Information Overload
8. Clashing Scales: Understanding Overheating 131

Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
1.1 World population growth since 1050
2.1 Species extinction since 1800
2.2 World GDP and global trade since 1980
3.1 World energy consumption since 1820
3.2 Energy production and consumption per capita in selected countries, 2012
3.3 CO 2 emissions per capita in selected countries (2014)
4.1 Growth in international tourist arrivals worldwide
4.2 Refugees worldwide (millions)
4.3 Registered Syrian refugees 2012–15
5.1 Urbanisation in the world since 1950
5.2 Projected urbanisation in Africa, 1950–2050
5.3 Immigrant population in Norway, 1970–2014
6.1 Projected global waste production, 1900–2100
7.1 Internet users, 1996–2014
7.2 Photo of tattered page from The International New York Times
Preface
The contemporary world is … too full? Too intense? Too fast? Too hot? Too unequal? Too neoliberal? Too strongly dominated by humans?
All of the above, and more. Ours is a world of high-speed modernity where the fact that things change no longer needs to be explained by social scientists; what comes across as extraordinary or puzzling are instead the patches of continuity we occasionally discover. Modernity in itself entails change, but for decades change was synonymous with progress, and the standard narrative about the recent past was one of improvement and development. Things seemed to be getting better and history had a direction.
In the last few decades, the confidence of the development enthusiasts has been dampened. Modernity and enlightenment did not eradicate atavistic ideologies, sectarian violence and fanaticism. Wars continued to break out. Inequality and poverty did not go away. Recurrent crises with global repercussions forced economists to concede, reluctantly, at least when caught with their pants down, that theirs was not a precise science after all. Although many countries were democratic in name, a growing number of people felt that highly consequential changes were taking place in their lives and immediate surroundings without their having been consulted beforehand. And, most importantly, the forces of progress turned out to be a double-edged sword. What had been our salvation for 200 years, namely inexpensive and accessible energy, was about to become our damnation through environmental destruction and climate change.
It is chiefly in this sense that it is meaningful to talk of our time as being postmodern. The old recipes for societal improvement, whether socialist, liberal or conservative, have lost their lustre. The political left, historically based on demands for social justice and equality, is now confronted with two further challenges in the shape of multiculturalism and climate change, and creating a consistent synthesis of the three is not an easy task. Generally speaking, in complex systems, the unintended consequences are often more conspicuous than the planned outcomes of a course of action.
This book is based on the assumption that the rapid changes characterising the present age have important, sometimes dramatic, unintended consequences. Each of the five empirical chapters focuses on one key area – energy, mobility, cities, waste, information – and shows how changes may take unexpected directions, which were neither foreseen nor desired at the outset.
Just as the insecticide called DDT – which was meant to save crops and improve agricultural output – killed insects, starved birds and led to ‘the silent spring’ of Rachel Carson’s eponymous book, a foundational text for the modern environmental movement (Carson 1962), so does the car lead to pollution and accidents, the information revolution to the pollution of brains and, perhaps, the spread of Enlightenment ideas leads to counter-reactions in the form of fundamentalism. In the coming chapters, I focus on such contradictions, but I also show that the crises of globalisation are not caused by malevolent intentions or any kind of evil, selfish or short-sighted conspiracy. Rather, what we are confronted with is a series of clashing scales which remain poorly understood. Let me give a brief illustration. If you are in a powerful position, you can change thousands of people’s lives far away with a stroke of a pen; but if you spent time with them first, that is likely to influence your decision. The tangibly lived life at the small scale, in other words, clashes with large-scale decisions, and you come to realise that what is good for Sweden is not necessarily good for the residents of the village of Dalby north of Ystad.
Scaling up can be an efficient way of diverting attention from the actuality of a conflict by turning it into an abstract issue. If your colleagues complain that you never make coffee for your co-workers, you may respond, scaling up a notch, that the neoliberal labour regime is so stressful and exhausting that the ordinary office worker simply has no time for such luxuries. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we may think about the workers who manned the gas chambers and effectively murdered incomprehensible numbers of Jews and Gypsies; there is no indication that they loved their family and household pets less than anyone else did. I will show how different the world, or an activity, or an idea, looks when you move it up and down the scales. As one of my informants in an industrial Australian city said: ‘The environmental activists in Sydney are really good at saving the world, but they don’t have a clue as to what to do with real people with factory jobs.’
Being an anthropologist and, accordingly, trained to seeing the world from below, I have often had mixed feelings about the general literature about globalisation. Many widely read authors writing about the interconnected world seem to be hovering above the planet in a helicopter with a pair of binoculars. They may get the general picture right, but fail to see the nooks and crannies where people live. Reading these books, I am always reminded of Benoît Mandelbrot’s article ‘How long is the coast of Britain?’ (Mandelbrot 1967), which is fundamentally about scaling. He shows that the length of the jagged British coast depends on the scale of the map. Measuring with a yardstick would produce a different result from measurements taken with a one-foot ruler. And in order to get to the truth about people’s lives, the bird’s eye perspective is useful, but inadequate. You have to get ‘up close and personal’ (Shore and Trnka 2013).
If you read general overviews about globalisation and identity with the mindset of an anthropologist, there is a chance that you end up with the somewhat unsatisfactory feeling that you had been offered a three-course dinner, and were duly served a sumptuous starter and a delicious dessert, but no main course. With anthropologists, the problem is generally the opposite: They describe local life-worlds in meticulous detail, crawling, as it were, on all fours with a magnifying glass, but rarely attempt a global analysis. By moving up and down the scales, I shall try to do both, and to relate them to each other.
This is a book about matters of great concern to humanity: climate and the environment, urbanisation and improvisational survivalism, tourism and migration, waste and inequality, excess and deprivation. In an attempt to account for the recent failure of the standard modern narrative about development and progress, I look for paradoxes, contradictions, clashes of scale and runaway processes. Both the questions and the concepts are big. Yet this book is modest in size. One reason is that it only marks a beginning. Growing out of the research project ‘Overheating: The three crises of globalisation’, funded by the European Research Council, this is an overture and an overview. It is meant as a stand-alone publication but, at the same time, it introduces topics, concepts and approaches which will be developed in greater empirical detail and theoretical depth in later publications. Overheating consists of a series of interrelated ethnographic projects which aim to produce comparable and compatible data on the local perception, impact and management of the global crises. In this way, both the myopic bias of anthropology and the top-down approach of other social sciences are transcended. The individual ‘Overheating’ projects are scattered across the planet, but they speak to larger issues of global importance as well as maintaining an ongoing conversation with each other, through commitment to a number of shared presuppositions, research questions and concepts.
It might be expected that a book about acceleration and globalisation would delve into such phenomena as financialisation and ideologies of cult