Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

This first issue of a new volume of the journal – volume 31 – takes us into the biosciences and into discussions about climate change. In so doing, this issue incorporates a diversity of voices from within anthropology and beyond it.

Drawing on fieldwork in U.K. stem cell labs, where early human development is modelled in vitro using cell culture systems, and cultured cell lines are used to make new diagnostic tools, this article explores a new meaning for the phrase 'conception model'. In the London labs where the author has conducted fieldwork since the 1990s are many examples of how human reproductive cells are being used to manufacture and 'road test' new diagnostic tools. This article explores the recursion involved in modelling early development 'in man' (as opposed to mouse, axolotl or sea urchin), and develops anthropological analyses of living human cell systems grown in Petri dishes that are aimed at illuminating the causes of human pathology. It is argued that several different levels of recursive modelling occur via 'in vitro anthropos', and that these cellular models introduce a useful perspective on the debate over 'reflexive' anthropology, and the more recent turn to a 'recursive' anthropology. However, different kinds of difference are at stake in these two projects. Using cell culture modelling practices, and the 'conception model' offered by dish life as an analytic vantage point, the article offers a 'looped' view to illustrate what the 'recursive turn' might look like, or reveal, as an ethnographic project. In contrast to the 'loopy' view of much reflexive anthropology, fieldwork through the looking glass, including the explicit turn to a recursive anthropology, is argued to be both an empirically robust and a conceptually creative practice.

What’s in the Dish? Comments on Franklin’s In Vitro Anthropos Hannah Landecker

Conceptual Clarity for Conception Frameworks: Comments on Franklin’s In Vitro Anthropos Charis Thompson

Reply Sarah Franklin

This introduction reviews the articles collected in this special section, articles that explore different visions of the environment and how they engender particular ways of seeing evidence of climatic and environmental change. A key aspect of such distinctive understandings seems to be the attribution of agency within conceptions of the environment that in each case are entangled with humans. Notions of anthropogenic and non-equilibrial environments are explored in several of the articles collected here, along with ongoing debates surrounding the concept of the Anthropocene. An awareness of climate change has brought new urgency to the project of grasping our entangled environments in the diversity of their human understandings.

This article explores the predominance of ice and the role of topographical mementos in the High Arctic environment. The ice is its own argument in complex ways: it is an actor in the human/non-human network, as well as in the hunter-scientist relationship. Whatever climate history one wants to tell, it begins and ends with the ice.

In Gamrie, an Aberdeenshire fishing village home to 700 people and six millennialist Protestant churches, global warming is more than just a 'hoax': it is a demonic conspiracy that threatens to bring about the ruin of the entire human race. Such a certainty was rendered intelligible to local Christians by viewing it through the lens of dispensationalist theology brought to the village by the Plymouth Brethren. In a play on Weberian notions of disenchantment, I argue that whereas Gamrie's Christians rejected global warming as a false eschatology, and environmentalism as a false salvationist religion, supporters of the climate change agenda viewed global warming as an apocalyptic reality and environmentalism as providing salvific redemption. Both rhetorics - each engaged in a search for 'signs of the end times' - are thus millenarian.

This article introduces and illustrates the need to reassess the way we conceive of human 'adaptation' to the natural environment. The primary case considered is the south-eastern Baltic Sea region during the mid-Holocene. The article argues for the importance of the notion of a metastable ecosystem in debate about climatic and environmental changes. Through a discussion of the culturally governed choices made by human communities in non-equilibrium ecosystems, we are able critically to examine highly influential theories of environmental determinism.

Through a series of stories about the U.K. National Trust nature reserve known as Wicken Fen, this article seeks to contextualize the coining of the word 'anthropogenic' and to highlight some possible 'resources for a journey of hope' (to use the words of Raymond Williams). Although o en portrayed as 'wilderness' and the last wetland remnant of the drained Great Fenland, Wicken Fen is also acknowledged to be one of the most intensively managed reserves in the U.K. This article is therefore an exploration of human-made nature which seeks to understand what it might mean - and has meant - to live in the Anthropocene.

This article explores what it might mean to interweave social and natural history, taking as its inspiration the work of the English poet John Clare (1793-1864). If Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) is right in suggesting that the recognition that we are now in the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - will force us to re-read human history in the light of planetary history and deep time, John Clare's work provides us with a way of thinking how this might be done. Clare's explorations of human and natural temporalities, and his challenges to our dominant sense of value, may help us to think beyond anthropocentricism and to re-evaluate assumptions of economic progress. With this in mind, we conclude by placing Clare's poetry in conversation with John Locke and his labour theory of value.

This article takes one form of extreme event - namely forest fires - and asks how the ways in which they come to be understood might contribute to core questions about evidence. In particular, I shall suggest that, by considering the moment-ousness of extreme events, we are offered tools for considering the tension between 'rupture' and 'continuity' which emerges throughout the articles of this Special Section, not only at the methodological level but also in terms of understanding these processes themselves. The controversial and often political relationship between evidence, modelling and prediction - that is, taking fragmentary evidence of past events to speculate on future process - is an issue to which we return in the conclusion when the question 'what are scientists for anyway?' comes to the fore. 'Uncertainty' - as a variable, or as a sign of failure - emerges as key in what the article calls a 'clash of modernities'.

This article takes up three issues associated with connecting knowledge with social action. First, we discuss some of the pitfalls of communication and perception that are always there when natural or social scientists present their versions of truth to decision-makers. Next we review how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deals with these pitfalls in producing its global assessments. While there is only one global assessment, there will be thousands helping local communities adapt to climate change. Each will need its own analogue of IPCC, its own 'knowledge action network'. Social Anthropology will play a key role in such networks, and so will have to devise its own ways to cope with the same issues that face climate scientists when they provide advice to action leaders. The way assessments are done at the regional and community levels, especially in the developing world, will necessarily differ from IPCC practice, but the considerations that brought the IPCC into being will still apply.

Drawing on Marilyn Strathern's comparative insights on eating and feeding, we explore the difference between giving food and eating together in Amazonia. These two elementary modes of alimentary life have often been conflated in the Amazonian literature. We distinguish between them by asking what these acts produce, what agentive capacities and perspectives they evince, and what kind of relationships they configure.

P. Sean Brotherton, Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Morgan Y. Liu, Under Solomon’s Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.