ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 2, APRIL 2011 9 Peter Rudiak-Gould Peter Rudiak-Gould is a doctoral student at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind, University of Oxford. Starting in August 2011 he will be a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, McGill University. His email is peterrg@gmail.com. Climate change and anthropology The importance of reception studies Laments over the non-engagement of anthropology with global warming (see in particular Rayner 1989; Townsend 2004) now appear mercifully out of date. With increasing theoretical sophistication, cross-cultural breadth, and eyes to practical applicability, anthropologists are illuminating the ways in which communities observe, interpret and respond to the local impacts of global warming (see in par- ticular the many case studies in Crate & Nuttall 2009a). What need, then, for yet another exhortation for the dis- cipline to apply its expertise to climate change? Here I suggest that a particular blind spot persists in climate- change ethnography, and that until we eradicate it we will appreciate only half the picture, and the subfield will have attained only a fraction of its potential as both a theoretical and applied endeavour. Existing anthropological investigations of climate change have focused primarily on how frontline and indigenous communities become aware of global warming through first-hand observation of local impacts; they are ‘observation studies’. Yet the observation of local impacts is only one source of climate-change information available to these communities. There is another source of consider- able, and rapidly increasing, importance: the scientific dis- course of global anthropogenic climate change, that is, the climate-altering production of greenhouse gases by human activity. In anthropology, we as yet lack a well-developed understanding of how societies receive, interpret, under- stand, adopt, reject and utilize this latter discourse. ‘Reception studies’, 1 while not entirely absent from the field, remain peripheral to climate-change anthro- pology. In the most extensive anthropological work to date on climate-change perceptions, Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall’s laudable Anthropology and climate change (2009a), we find many fine observation studies, but few, if any, detailed reception studies; none of the chapters inves- tigates, for instance, the cultural and ideological reasons why locals choose to trust or distrust the scientific dis- course of global warming about which they have heard. A few chapters (Crate 2009; Lazrus 2009; Nuttall 2009; Strauss 2009), as well as a handful of other writings by anthropologists (see for instance Huntington et al. 2005), note that locals receive information about climate change via media, NGO and government outlets, but the small percentage of the word count devoted to this aspect of the story, and the relative lack of ethnographic richness and theoretical sophistication in its treatment, show that it is accorded only a marginal analytic role (but see Taddei 2009 for an exception). Furthermore, there have been no significant calls to do otherwise. We have been encouraged to study ‘carbon elites’ (Lindisfarne 2010: 2), write ethnographies of cli- mate scientists (Yearley 2009), illuminate rural adapta- tion to climate impacts (Townsend 2004) and describe how ‘the physical manifestations of change are per- ceived, experienced, interpreted, and negotiated at community levels’ (Crate & Nuttall 2009b), but not to conduct reception studies. Indeed, most of the in-depth reception studies that do exist come from outside anthropology, from disciplines such as geography (Bravo 2009; Connell 2003; Hulme 2009; Mortreux & Barnett 2009), public policy (Grothmann & Patt 2005), psychology (Feinberg & Willer 2011; Feygina et al. 2010; Kahan et al. 2007; Swim et al. 2009) and soci- ology (Carolan 2010), an odd state of affairs considering anthropology’s abiding interest in global/local interfaces. To express the same point in different terms, the anthro- pology of climate change has positioned itself chiefly as a subfield of environmental anthropology, concerned first 1. Michael Bravo uses this phrase once (2009: 265) but, as a geographer, his preferred term is ‘the geography of reception’. Barnett, J. & N. Adger 2003. Climate dangers and atoll countries. Climatic Change 61: 321-337. Boykoff, M. & J.T. Roberts 2007. Media coverage of climate change: Current trends, strengths, weaknesses. Human Development Report Office Occasional Paper. Bravo, M. 2009. Voices from the sea ice: The reception of climate impact narratives. Journal of Historical Geography 35: 256-278. Byg, A. & J. Salick 2009. Local perspectives on a global phenomenon: Climate change in Eastern Tibetan villages. Global Environmental Change 19: 156-166. Carolan, M. 2010. Sociological ambivalence and climate change. Local Environment 15(4): 309- 321. Connell, J. 2003. Losing ground? Tuvalu, the greenhouse effect and the garbage can. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 44(2): 89-107. Fig. 1. A threatened nation. Ujae Atoll, Marshall Islands. PETER RUDIAK-GOULD