Paper short abstract:

The ways in which ‘human dimensions’ of climate change become the focus of attention from academics, institutional actors and policy makers need critical review.

Paper long abstract:

The core of this paper consists of a discussion of ways in which the human and the climatic become too readily stabilized, and a managerial relationship to the non-human environment is smuggled into varied kinds of interactions between very different human relational worlds and very different sorts of environmental phenomena. To reduce these to an old and tired binary of the kind that a generation of anthropologists and other social scientists have effectively collapsed (Beck 1991, Strathern 1991, Ingold 1992) would seem a retrograde step. It is nonetheless part of the framing by knowledge systems claiming truth status that evidence for climate change can be quantitatively organized to make a case for interventions, and to support not only projections of future impact scenarios, but also development and conservation policies to mitigate and adapt to irreversible climate conditions. In the case of Himalayan climate change phenomena, ethnographic examples from northern Nepal are discussed, which show the intimacy of relational disturbance with the non-human that Tamang-speaking communities are occupied by. Comparing the life-affecting whims of territorial sovereigns of place, and the territorial aspirations of a state undergoing its own multiple crises, leads to a conclusion that climate change performs the social in anthropologically dense conflicts over ethics and control.