Description
Thomas Hylland Eriksen has recently argued that “broader dissemination, popularization and making a social impact have not been given priority in academic anthropology after the Second World War; the urgency of climate change has to be understood as an unequivocal call to arms” (Anthropology Today, 2020). My paper connects anthropology’s potential current role in shaping popular narratives on climate change to earlier, very successful attempts to disseminate anthropological knowledge. At the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists such as A.C. Haddon at the Horniman Museum in London tried to make ethnographic collections educational for a wide public by using them to illustrate socio-cultural evolution, according to which human societies “develop” through technological innovation alone. Their new museum techniques turned objects from other cultures into a metanarrative that offered an apparently scientific explanation for British exceptionalism: the “rise of the West” without Empire. Combined with outreach, lectures, and school trips, the narrative of unilinear stadial evolution through invention helped to raise generations of visitors to think of Britain as a powerful imperial and industrial nation not through colonial conquest and extraction, the transatlantic slave trade, great geographical luck, or imposing favorable trade systems through violence, but through technical (and sometimes explicitly racial) superiority. Such myths are surprisingly persistent and still form a key barrier to action on climate justice, occluding historical explanations for differentials in global wealth and development. The creation of these clear educational narratives offers a compelling model and rationale for anthropologists’ climate action, undoing their own past success.| Period | Dec 5 2023 |
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| Event title | First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies |
| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |