A Bog Approach: An Ethnography, Or, An Anthropology Of Climate Emergency

Date
2021-12-03
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Abstract

This dissertation investigates contemporary human, social, and cultural responses to climate emergency. My ethnographic field research localizes vanguardist “solutionist” discourses where marginalized environments and aspirational state actors intersect on “The Flow Country” blanket bogs in the far north of Scotland. The Flow Country is the premier site of the UK’s large scale “forest-to-bog” peatland restoration project, one of the few “natural climate solutions” enacted and institutionalized. My fieldwork (2017-2018) approached a boggy, yet “neutral,” “Net Zero” discourse that might confound traditional environmentalist positions. My findings characterize a local Net Zero cultural form with 1) a latent construction of future uncertainty that manages to reproduce the “estate” of land ownership regimes; 2) a rhetorical imaginary of “plausibility” dominated by positive scenario construction over religious or scientific politics; and 3) a lyrical model of ethnography that enjoins a more open strategy of accountability and interlocution. I describe my findings in four chapters approaching: 1) the marginal imaginaries of bogs; 2) the relationship of experts and elites to apocalyptic and climate solution discourses; 3) the “extra-human” sensorial experience and erotic politics of environmental monitoring; and, 4) the parallelism of expositive and narrative strategies in corporate, public, and individual climate accounting.

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EMBARGO NOTE: This item is embargoed until 2027-12-01
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Type
Thesis
Keywords
anthropology, ethnography, climate change
Citation

Storer, Eliot. "A Bog Approach: An Ethnography, Or, An Anthropology Of Climate Emergency." (2021) Diss., Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/111745.

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