Paper short abstract:

Drawing on how my informants conversed about maltempo (bad weather) in Sicily, I discuss how their everyday experiences of change may become a temporal discourse, wherein climate change is acknowledged, negotiated or refused. Such dynamic ways of thinking about change, I call tempo experience.

Paper long abstract:

Recently, Sicily has seen an increase in lemon farmers’ transition toward tropical-fruit cultivation. This was often considered a climate change adaptation strategy by media. However, my interlocutors rarely mentioned climate change unless I asked. They instead discussed unusual, unexpected or unwelcome changes, associated with maltempo (bad weather).

The Italian word tempo signifies time, rhythm and weather. As a standalone word maltempo refers to rain, cold temperature or extreme weather events – a disruption of the everyday tempo. While it is a cultural concept, people’s subjective accounts of maltempo becomes a conduit to investigate how changes in the temporal patterning are noticed, and how that becomes part of the place-specific, climate change discourse. One lemon producer once told me that climate change was less of concern than maltempo. The recent hailstorm resulted not only in immediate losses but also delayed devastation, as tempo disruptions occurred in a chain of causality. Maltempo was contrasted with ‘predictable’ climate futures, where his newly started avocado cultivation would benefit from the warming climate.

I learned that the temporality of climate change is protracted and at times punctuated, shaping and shaped by how people envisage futures through the patterning of weather conditions. Thinking together with William Connolly’s (2017) ‘bumpy temporalities’, I call such dynamic and spatial-temporal ways of experiencing and thinking about change, tempo experience. I argue that people’s everyday narratives emerging from their experiences of and ideas about change may become a temporal discourse, wherein climate change is acknowledged, negotiated or refused across temporalities.

References

Connolly, William. 2017. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham: Duke University Press.