Paper short abstract:

We address the question of how anthropology can cope with the scale of environmental collapse as a meta-social problem. Inspired by a Yanomami shaman and a Brazilian climatologist, we develop the notion of 'environmental diplomacy' as a form of relational transformation of and at the boundaries.

Paper long abstract:

For many, climate change is the beginning of the end of the world, an ongoing environmental collapse that is not just natural, but a crisis of our atmospheric "society of societies" (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2014). This paper addresses the question of how anthropology can cope with the scales of this climatological and meta-social problem. Inspired by the unexpected connections suggested by a Yanomami shaman and a Brazilian climatologist, we develop the notion of what we call 'environmental diplomacy'. Both the shaman and the scientist are deeply concerned with the relation between Amazonian trees and the climate, and publicly warn about the catastrophic consequences of depleting the forest. We argue that at one scale, the shaman and the climatologist are actually talking about the end of two different worlds. However, as they both strive to reach beyond these respective worlds, they also perform diplomatic gestures towards each other, creating differential connections between their respective environments. Their gestures are constituted in part by the necessary "treason" of any tenacious diplomat, as Isabelle Stengers would put it (2006), and therefore involve an ongoing process of relational boundary modification in order to affect and be affected by an Other who may inhabit another sky, but also needs the rain. We end with a discussion of what an anthropological 'environmental diplomacy' would look like.