Nordic Institute of Asian Studies - NIAS

Perceptions of Climate Change in North India - Transcript

Aase Book Launch Final

00:00:02

Voiceover (Duncan McCargo)

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

01:15:62

Duncan McCargo

Welcome to the Nordic Asia podcast, a collaboration, sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. So welcome, everybody. We're going to be having a book launch about a wonderful new book called Perceptions of Climate Change from North India. This book has very recently been published by Routledge, and we’re privileged today to be joined by the author, Aase Kvanneid. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo. And we're also going to have some questions and discussion with Aase, which will be conducted by Dr. Rita Brara, who is a senior researcher at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi. She's also the editor of a journal called Contributions to Indian Sociology. I'm Duncan Mc. Cargo. I'm director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and a professor of political science here at the University of Copenhagen, and this is an event that the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies is very happy to be cohosting with the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. We are going to start our discussion of the book. And at this point, I'd like to invite Rita to say something about the book and give us a little bit of background and context, and then we'll go over to Aase to hear more about her book.

Rita Brara

Thank you, Duncan. And congratulations Aase. It is an absolute pleasure to introduce Aase's book today. It is based on a village study set in the Shivalik hills of the Himalayas. Of course, we're all concerned with climate change. And, you know, an early Club of Rome report said good planets are hard to find and we have only this. But what Aase does remarkably well for us is put a human face on the subject in this very fine grained ethnographic account. For a start, she shows that terms such as climate change and global warming are not part of the local lexicon at all. In fact, these terms are associated with school curricula, ironically, and as she points out, these are terms used by well-connected people in well-connected places. On the other hand, and at the same time, what she does show is the impact of climate change at the local level. And here it's reflected in irregular rainfall patterns, landslides and land degradation. These are very much part of a lived experience in the village. And here Aase brings out how the men, the bigger landholders and the higher casts, in fact, get more out of state intervention that are intended to enhance soil and water conservation. But in this sense, the ways, old and familiar of how development and environmental programs have run in India continue unabated. And disappointingly, they do not work for the poorer or the vulnerable sections. As the study moves on Aase compares her experience of climate change in developing countries with the developed countries, and I think she does that really well. She clarifies that it would be reductionist to regard environmental perceptions as spiritual in the East and not so in the West, and that if people want to change their behavior in the wake of climate change or do not want to change it as it happens, this is not peculiar to India. She reiterates that the facts pertaining to climate change in Norway, her home country, for instance, are often met, as some of you might know, with straight denial. So the argument that emerges from her book is categorical. Climate change materializes in a context that is sociopolitical and economic. And her penetrating account sits at the intersection of political ecology and what she refers to as cultural sensemaking, both at her field site and beyond. Again, you know, on another note, after the more recent forays into post-modern ethnographies, I must say that I find it very refreshing to be back on anthropological home ground and complimented here by the contemporary concern with climate change. And just perhaps on this note, I would wind up and ask Aase to tell us about her work in her own words next. And I want Aase to recount what drew her to this research. What got you interested Aase? Studying people's perceptions in the face of scientists forming climate change as an objective scientific fact.

Aase Kvanneid

Thank you Rita, and first of all, before I go on to answer your question, I would just first very much like to thank those of you who has logged on today – it means a lot to me – and to NIAS, Duncan McCargo, and Anna Brueckner Johansen for organising this with the Norwegian Network of South Asia Studies, Kenneth Bo Hansen - I'm very grateful for this opportunity. And, of course, I want to thank you Rita for reading my book. I am enormously grateful and happy that you took the time and your busy schedule at this point of time. I mean, our hearts are leaving for India under the Covid pandemic right now and I'm glad to see that you're here and you're fine. And I'm so thankful that you have read the whole book and for your wonderful introduction. So thank you. I'll try to the best of my ability to answer your question. Because what got me into this research, that is a very big question, because many things did. And as you started out here, I mean, first of all, it’s the scale of the global situation that we’re in, the state of our environment and the probably quite destructive consequences of climate change for all of us. It's the enormousness of climate change as both a physical thing and discursive thing. It transcends national borders. It transcends history. But what I think, what was intriguing me was that it came… When I started to study this in 2011, climate change didn't seem to have an ethic. It didn't seem to have a moral, and I was interested in how that was ascribed by humans. That was very intriguing to me. I guess I really wanted to know, or understand better at least, whether we are in the middle of a paradigmatic shift, in a way, in how we view our humanity, how people negotiate the relationship between themselves and society. So there's a big curiousity on a contemporary issue, you might say. So that's that's what really, drew me in. But then, of course, why approach it the way I did. I guess I have had an uneasiness about climate change as a discourse because there's an urgency to the situation, as you started with, to awake and alert people all over the world, not only in India, but everywhere, showing us with climate science. How does that sit with people? We know science can inform us about the complex relations and practices that fuel carbon emissions, but we haven't really agreed, neither – and here I'm borrowing quite strenuously on Mike Hulme that you might know has written a lot about why we disagree about climate change – but we haven't really agreed the way forward, nor the goal itself. What is it really that we want to achieve after we have made everyone aware in the sense of sensitizing people to the changes that we are witnessing and trying to configure how we see the change of causality, where where are we going? And that is also a debate that really, really interests me.

00:07:52

Rita Brara

Yeah, I can see that Hulme has been important for your thought, but you also discuss the writings of Michel Foucault, Anna Tsing, Henrietta Moore and of course many more. Who influenced your thinking?

Aase Kvanneid

Oh, yes. Trying to avoid, you know, summing up the whole list here, yes, of course, Foucault, Anil Agarwal as well – a lot – the concept of governmentality and environmentality… I think we’ll come back to that later, though. But there's so many as you said or mentioned earlier, there's so many conversation going on that has been both inside and outside academia that has been very inspirational for my way of thinking. But I, I dreaded a bit this question as well, to be honest, because I think that the conversation has been going on for a long time without me listening in. I have actually been out of the academia world for quite some time due to child bearing reasons and other things. So whatever conversation there are right now, I'm kind of rediscovering them in light of my current postdoctoral project, ‘Transsustain’ it’s called, it's you should all check it out. It's very exciting. But I did I did note some some changes though that I thought maybe it'd be interesting to…

Rita Brara

Comment on?

Aase Kvanneid

Yeah, if and maybe see whether you had some of the same observations, because when I left off in the academic world studying climate change research in the social sciences, it was all about mitigation and adaptation. It was finding practical solutions to social and ecological crises. And there was very little ethnographies at that time. This was around 2011. So there was Kari Marie Norgaard and ‘Living in Denial’ about knowledge of climate change. And a little later, I don't know if you read it – Peter Rudiak-Gould on modernity and climate change perceptions from the Pacific Islands and of course, Julie Crookshank. So it was more being inspired, I guess, by ethnographical accounts of climate change. There weren't very many when I started. There were there were a few and they were really good. But then launching myself into that kind of position, trying to ethnographically grasp something so analytically complex and distant as climate change, I needed to position myself theoretically somewhere along the nature culture debate. So what's happened now is that when I came back, all the Anthropocene conversations that had happened and they were not just very marginal in the anthropological community anymore, they had kind of launched onto a much bigger stage. There are genuine conversations outside the whole of academia right now around what it is to be human. And this relates directly to that ethical framework that I observed earlier around 2010, 2011, the ethical framework that climate change conversations were lacking. So you find that in the Anthropocene discussions, and I found them very rewarding, but to be honest, I can't – since I've been away for some bit, I find it's quite a big back catalogue to get into there

00:10:47

Rita Brara

Yeah. So let's turn to the book. So I start with the prologue. I must confess, I find this riveting also because so much of what animates the book comes across in the prologue and yours is revelatory. You relate this absolutely cataclysmic incident of how your living quarters were almost washed down the hill because of the landslide. And it reminded me of Clifford Geertz’ study of the cockfight, which turned out to be a defining experience for his study of Bali culture. So I was wondering if you would like to recount how this cataclysmic incident actually encapsulated for you what it meant to be living in a village under precarious environmental conditions?

Aase Kvanneid

Yes. For those of you that didn't read the book, something happened. It was actually not as with Geertz with the Balinese cockfight – it happened really early on, as far as I can remember. He was there and he observed the cockfight and the police came and rounded them up. I think he became a part of the loc

al village community in a way after that cockfight and, yeah, as far as I remember anyway. But what happened to me, though, was not as cool and dramatic, and it happened very, very late as well. It was – the monsoon had started and it started raining heavily, and I was sitting in the toilet doing my business, and then all of a sudden I hear this sound and it's really immediate. I can - it's not very loud, but it's like a thunderclap, but if it was a thunderclap, it should have been much closer. I feel that it's closer. So when I open the door and I go outside, I just see that, oh, what used to be a patio outside my door is now gone – it’s gone down the hill. And I look up and I see the families coming… But I think what happened there at that moment was more, of course, sensitizing me to the acuteness of the situation and how fragile and how it feels when the land under your feet can shift at any time. It becomes a very, very embodied in a way. But for me, I think it told – it did so much more about how I looked at what I wanted to study, did more to me as a researcher and the questions that I started to ask, because I was already feeling very much part of the village. I had a small a baby with me, a son, and he was the world's best door-opener. So I was always welcome in any house, which is very, very nice and practical. But it was more a reflection on how I viewed their agency, if you understand what I mean. I can try to explain it: before, like during the first six or seven months during the field, I was looking at this climate change issue and I was looking at how climate change influenced the village. And I asked the people around me, what do you think about the weather changing? Who's responsible for that? What do you think about the future? What do you think about the past? And they would give me, all the time, answers like; it would be in the hands of Bhagwan. And it seemed to me that they didn't have a feeling of agency, but there was nothing they could do. It also was about the health of the forest or it was nothing they could do. It was up to Bhagwan. But what happened when this when this landslide happened was that obviously I started asking, shit, why does this happen? What will you do? And since I already knew them and they already trusted me, I was included into the ritual response to the landslide. And it enabled me to ask different questions. Questions that I didn't think about asking before. And also, since they already knew me a bit, it was perhaps easier to open up and I could see that they had a lot of agency in navigating. They don't only try to… As we all do, we try to improve our living conditions by mediating those relations that we have and using the power that we have. And for them, one of these ways was – it’s not just the Behkish to the Indian officer or filling out all these forms and traveling to the distant offices. It's other rituals as well; the Devis and the Devas and everyone. You know, you mediate with the sources of power that you can and they appeared to me as having much more agency than I thought they had to begin with. So it did something with my perception I think. Did that make sense?

00:14:52

Rita Brara

Yes, it does. I think it comes out very vividly in your book and even in your description right now. And I'm going to push you on that a little further. A key concept in your work is awareness, and I found that really intriguing because there's a sense in which the way you preface your actors is very eco sensitive and very aware. You bring out the sensations, the affects, the agrarian practices associated with the succession of seasons. And I wonder if this ethnographic mode made it possible for you to, in a sense, document chronic challenges over a whole agrarian cycle because you’re looking so closely at the seasons. And also in the sense of being aware – you were able to bring out differences between the villagers and their capacities to cope with circumstances. And that's also very important. Villagers, while villagers are not all the same. And you were remarkably sensitive to the fact that, yes, for some the life chances are of one sort and for others those life chances are foreclosed. So, again, I must say I'd like to probe why you picked on this concept of awareness in the sense that elsewhere in the book, you also talk about the fact that state interventions and state programs often viewed villagers as unaware, and people without knowledge. But you make out a very strong and reflexive case for unpacking the concept of awareness. And I must say, I'd like you to dwell a little longer on why you picked the concept and the significance it had for you in your work.

Aase Kvanneid

Thank you Rita, that's a very good question, and I think it's particularly good because I I actually didn't think about using awareness as a concept until now, really, because what I really wanted to do was shy away from using the concept of knowledge, which you said so nicely, that we are positioned in different ways to get access to certain kind of knowledge about the world. And I think what I try to do with using awareness was, unintentionally really, to try to encapsulate that when you are talking about only knowledge, like we are transferring, transmitting knowledge now to you about the state of climate change and your role in it, we can pretend that it's amoral and that it can exist separate from everything else. But what is really at stake here is that we're trying to build an awareness around climate change. And to be aware is to be sensitive to all those intricate relations that have kind of made things appear as they do right now, and also to all the intricate relations that might be necessary to get us out of it. It gets I don't know if I did that very well in my book, but I mean, to be aware of something is to have knowledge, right, of something. And I come from a tradition, in environmental anthropology, this knowledge debate is being quite big – you probably know of it – where we have technical knowledge and you have indigenous knowledge and you have ecological knowledge and what have you. But I found that when I went into the center of it all went, what is it really that they should be aware of? What is it really what kind of relations is it that they don't see? I found myself drawing much more on, for example, David Turnbull’s use of knowledge where knowledge is knowledge really – just different modes. You have a more technical form and more practical form as in xxx. I think perhaps that when you see knowledge as also with Foucault, as entangled with power, then talking about awareness is to indicate that this is about something more. It's a more complete package when you're trying to make someone aware of climate change. “I'm just going to make you aware of the fact that you know…”. So I just found it to be a better concept than knowledge in a way.