Global Warning. An ethnography of the encounter between global and local.
Title:
Global Warning. An ethnography of the encounter between global and local.
Author:
de Wit, Sara.
ISBN:
9789956762972
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (239 pages)
Contents:
Cover -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of photos -- List of maps -- Acknowledgement -- Acronyms -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Theoretical and methodologicalconsiderations -- The scope of study: From Kyoto to the Bamenda Grassfields and back to Copenhagen -- Social constructivism as an alternative 'lens' -- The power of discourses, or discourses as power? -- 3. Talking climate change into existence - the role of NGOs in disseminating the Green message -- Introduction -- The modern environmental era: The social construction of climate change in historical perspective -- 'Thinking globally, acting locally': Deconstructing Kyoto -- NGOs seen increasingly as authorities in building Green norms and settings global standards -- Climate change mitigation and adaptation in Bamenda -- 4. Translating the climate back and forth - traditional rulers in the fight against climate change -- Part I -- Introduction -- A brief historical overview of the settlements of chiefdoms in the Grassfields -- The ritual, moral and legal patterns of power in the chiefdoms -- The Fons in the colonial state -- Climate change and its discursive 'compatibility' with Grassfields' cosmologies -- Part II -- Climate change as a possible new framework to redefine local discourses and symbolic power -- Cameroon traditional rulers against climate change -- 5. Believing in climate change - a grassroots perspective -- Introduction: How access to discourses changes the weather -- 'We are the climate' - climate trajectories as a societal critique -- The power of indeterminate meaning -- 'We are not God oh!' How a secular discourse fuses with the sacred -- 'Climate change kills, action now!' Eschatological anxieties over the arrival of the apocalypse -- 6. Concluding reflections -- References -- Appendix -- Back cover.
Abstract:
Moving beyond existing approaches that largely deal with the biophysical consequences of climate change realities in Africa, this book explores an alternative perspective that traces climate change as a travelling idea. It focuses on how globally constructed discourses on climate change find their way to the local level in the Bamenda Grassfields of Cameroon, thereby seeking to understand how these discursive practices lead to social transformations, and to new configurations of power. In the translation process from the �global� to the �local� level a continuous modification and appropriation of the idea of climate change takes place that finally leads to a concrete implementation of climate change related projects and sensitization campaigns. Hence, it is argued that in this increasingly interconnected and mediated world people in Africa (and elsewhere in the world) do not solely adapt to a changing climate, but also adapt to a changing discourse about the climate. Travelling between traditional rulers and their palaces, to the world of NGOs, journalists and ordinary farmers this study brings the reader on a captivating journey, that reveals how climate change engages in a variety of ways with different lifeworlds, revitalizes local cosmologies, gives birth to a new development paradigm, and moreover how it evokes apocalyptic anxieties and trajectories of blame at the grassroots level.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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