Beyond dystopia: Regenerative cultures and ethics among European climate activists

Abstract

In this article, I analyze practices of self-formation among European climate activists. I develop the concept of regenerative cultures as a lens to capture nonspectacular practices that embody intimate forms of activism. Drawing on ethnographic research among climate activists, I show that regenerative cultures employs recursive circuits of practicing, retrospective visions, and subjunctive ecologies in order to enable ethical self-formations geared toward personal or planetary regeneration. I identify two implications of such practices. First, I argue that intimate forms of activism reshuffle the sphere of politics in rendering the intimate a locus of concerted action that is deemed to radiate out. Second, I argue that such ethical labor is situated between what in the anthropology of ethics figures as virtue ethics and endurance. What I identify as utopian becomings instantiated by climate activists' ethical labor embodies attempts to open spaces for caring differently. Moving beyond an understanding of the utopian as prefigurative move, I argue that utopian becomings operate by enabling to become otherwise in affectively loaded encounters.

Archaeology in 2022: Counter‐myths for hopeful futures

“…In the shortening shadow of climate chaos, rapidly rising racist nationalism, and ongoing armed conflicts, it can feel desperate and even futile to try to address problems that the 24‐hour news media constantly reminds us are “unprecedented.” But we, along with thousands of other activists and scholars, urge a more hopeful outlook (see, for example, Harms, 2022; Morgan, 2021; Tsing, 2015). Haraway (2022), argues that the division of past from present is a “frontier myth” that inhibits our ability to build powerful, more‐than‐human relations of care that extend through kin and country, bodies and technologies, to unplanned futures and unexpected generations.…”

“…The arrival of climate chaos heralds a threat to the carefully crafted neoliberal order (we write this as the world experiences the hottest week since people began formally recording the weather). The future from this perspective is persistently imagined as a dystopian time of environmental degradation, nuclear disaster, and total collapse (Harms, 2022; Tsing, 2015). It is tempting to assume that the arc of history bends one way or another, but making the future and choosing what histories in which to anchor it are active processes.…”

Futuros em disputa: abordagens teórico-metodológicas sobre o porvir nas periferias e no Sul global – introdução

“…É verdade que os macroprojetos de transformação da sociedade não têm a força nem a clareza que aparentemente tiveram no passado, mas múltiplas utopias concretas (Bloch 1976(Bloch [1938(Bloch -1947(Bloch ], 1982(Bloch [1938(Bloch -1947(Bloch ], 1991(Bloch [1938(Bloch -1947; Bouchet 2021) e desenvolvimentos utópicos (Harms 2022) articulam esperanças ancoradas nos territórios, nas suas derrotas, pequenos triunfos e práticas possíveis (Godinho 2017), várias delas a partir das ruínas ( Huyssen 2014), das brechas (Tsing 2021), das margens (Bartra 2016), dos sonhos humildes (Contreras 2022), do que permite uma história mais esperançosa e interessante (Graeber e Wengrow 2021) a partir do campo de possibilidades que se estende além das limitações da probabilidade (Appadurai 2015). Como defendeu João Carlos Louçã (2021: 176), "tal como as derrotas, as vitórias incompletas dos movimentos sociais […] não deixaram de lavrar as terras onde os vários futuros se disputam constantemente, em processos que retomam memórias a partir do inesperado.…”

“…Esses novos futuros podem ou não ter uma conexão direta com os passados que os precederam, mas podem explodir de qualquer presente e, desse modo, exigir novas conexões temporais (Ringel 2018), novas formas de tecer o tempo e articular o presente ao passado, possibilitando o surgimento de novas histórias e novos futuros históricos (Boldizsár e Tamm 2021). Essas emergências obrigam a pensar futuros plurais e novos futuros utópicos (Harms 2022), nos quais se encontram compromissos e projetos coletivos, grandes razões e sonhos humildes (Godinho 2023;Contreras 2021), esperança militante e formas íntimas de ativismo, para além do diagnóstico presentista e do colapso paralisante das sombras do futuro no presente.…”

Ethical Endeavours

“…When anthropologists do turn to the past -for instance in studies of memories or past injustices -their analyses mostly tend to focus on how the past aff ects the present, or future, something that is nicely captured in Guntars Ermansons' (2022) notion of 'remembering the future'. 2 A pervasive question, posed by the anthropologists as much as by their interlocutors, is what we can learn from the past to build better -or 'less bad' (Harms 2022) -futures. Th is is widely perceived as an urgent matter; fundamental threats (e.g.…”