This edition first published 2014
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell .

The right of Michael R. Dove to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author(s) have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-118-38355-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-118-38300-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Central Javanese farmer assessing the prospects for essential rain from distant clouds. Photo by © Michael R. Dove.
Cover design by Nicki Averill Design.

Acknowledgments to Sources

1 Broad, Kenneth and Ben Orlove. 2007. Channeling Globality: The 1997–98 El Niño Climate Event in Peru. American Ethnologist 34(2): 285–302.

2 Burger, Richard L. 2003. El Niño, Early Peruvian Civilization, and Human Agency: Some Thoughts from the Lurin Valley. In El Niño in Peru: Biology and Culture Over 10,000 Years. J. Haas and M. O. Dillon, eds. Fieldiana Botany 43: 90–107.

3 Carey, Mark. 2008. The Politics of Place: Inhabiting and Defending Glacier Hazard Zones in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca. In Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society . B. Orlove, E. Wiegandt, and B.H. Luckman, eds. pp. 229–240. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

4 Colson, Elizabeth. 1957. Rain-Shrines of the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia. In The Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia): Social and Religious Studies . pp. 84–101. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, for the Institute for Social Research, University of Zambia.

5 Cruikshank, Julie. 2007. Melting Glaciers and Emerging Histories in the Saint Elias Mountains . In Indigenous Experience Today . Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn, eds. pp. 355–378. Oxford: Berg.

6 Hippocrates. 1923. Airs, Waters, Places . W. H. S. Jones, trans. In Hippocrates , Volume I, pp. 71–73, 105–137. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

7 Ibn Khaldûn. 1958. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Franz Rosenthal, trans. Frontispiece and pp. 103–109 and 167–183. New York: Bollingen Foundation.

8 Janković, Vladimir. 2007. Gruff Boreas, Deadly Calms: A Medical Perspective on Winds and the Victorians. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.): S147–S164.

9 Lahsen, Myanna. 2004. Transnational Locals: Brazilian Experiences of the Climate Regime. In Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance. Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth L. Martello, eds. pp. 151–172. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

10 McGovern, Thomas H. 1994. Management for Extinction in Norse Greenland. In Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. Carole L. Crumley, ed. pp. 127–154. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

11 Meggers, Betty J. 1957. Environment and Culture in the Amazon Basin: An Appraisal of the Theory of Environmental Determinism. In Studies in Human Ecology. pp. 71–89. Washington, DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington and the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States.

12 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de. 1989. Book 14: On the Laws in Their Relation to the Nature of the Climate. In The Spirit of the Laws . Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, Harold Samuel Stone, trans./eds. pp. 231–237, 242–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original: Esprit des loix . Geneva.)

13 Ratzel, Friedrich. 1896–1898. Nature, Rise, and Spread of Civilization. In The History of Mankind . A. J. Butler, trans. pp. 20–30. London: Macmillan.

14 Sanders, Todd. 2008. The Making and Unmaking of Rain and Reigns. In Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania. pp. 69–102. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

15 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2005. The Disaster and its Doubles . Anthropology Today 21 (6): 2–4.

16 Schneider, David M. 1957. Typhoons on Yap. Human Organization 16: 10–15.

17 Shaw, Rosalind. 1992. “Nature”, “ Culture” and Disasters: Floods and Gender in Bangladesh. In Bush Base, Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development . Elisabeth Croll and David Parkin, eds. pp. 200–217. London: Routledge.

18 Solway, Jacqueline S. 1994. Drought as “Revelatory Crisis”: An Exploration of Shifting Entitlements and Hierarchies in the Kalahari, Botswana. Development and Change 25(3): 471–498.

19 Spillius, James. 1957. Natural Disaster and Political Crisis in a Polynesian Society: An Exploration of Operational Research II. Human Relations X: 113–125.

20 Theophrastus. 1926. Concerning Weather Signs. In Enquiry into Plants, and Minor Works on Odours and Weather Signs, Volume II, pp. 391–407. Sir Arthur Hort, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

21 Weiss, Harvey and Raymond Bradley. 2001. What Drives Societal Collapse? Science 291(5504): 609–610.

22 Zimmermann, Francis. 1988. The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine. Social Science & Medicine 27(3): 197–206.

About the Editor

Michael R. Dove is the Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Director of the Tropical resources Institute, and Curator of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, Yale University. His interests include the cultural and political aspects of natural hazards and disasters; political dimensions of resource degrada tion; indigenous environmental knowledge; and the study of developmental and environmental institutions, discourses, and movements. He is author of The Banana Tree at the Gate: The History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo (2011), co-editor of Complicating Conservation: Beyond the Sacred Forest (2011) and Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader (Wiley Blackwell, 2008), and editor of Southeast Asian Grasslands: Understanding a Folk Landscape (2008).

Preface

The purpose of this volume is to illustrate the contributions that anthropology can make to contemporary research and policy regarding climate change through reprinting, discussing, and putting into conversation with one another a number of key, canonical works in the history of the anthropological study of climate and society. I have evenly divided my selections among early anthropological works, recent ones, and those in between. I have selected papers that are, or will become, classics, by prominent scholars, which make important contributions to academic and policy discussions concerning climate change and, often, to wider theoretical and policy debates as well. I have selected works that are still not only readable but interesting and relevant. I have tried to select “memorable” works, which deliver an argument in such a way that a reader will still recall it five or ten years hence. I have selected works that are neither strictly theoretical essays nor derivative critiques of the works of others, in favor of original, ethnographic, case studies. I have selected works that have a clear, central theme, which relates to one of the four major sections of the book. This approach stems in part from my decision to organize this volume not around historic eras or schools of climate research, but around a number of persistent, cross-cutting, and inter-linked themes, which span eras. I have selected papers that can be thematically linked to multiple other papers in the volume, thereby constituting a sort of intra-volume “dialogue” that reflects the larger one that has characterized the development of the field of climate studies itself. To further this dialogue, I have organized the volume into a series of paired papers, each one of which speaks to the other in a way that is hopefully stimulating for the reader. In some cases, this “conversation” extends across decades, centuries, or millennia, which makes it all the more powerful. I have selected works with balanced, global coverage. I have restricted my selection of papers to those written by anthropologists, defined as scholars either trained as anthropologists or whose work came to focus to such a degree on anthropological topics as to give them a professional identity as anthropologists, with the exception of a number of pre-twentieth-century scholars whose work marks them as the intellectual ancestors of modern anthropologists. Inevitably, there are gaps in the coverage afforded by the papers selected. I have sought to remedy this with a comprehensive Introduction, which reviews the wider literature on the topics taken up in each reading and on the four wider themes of the book.

I selected papers that could be reprinted in their entirety, without abbreviation or other amendation, so that they can serve as authoritative sources for students and scholars, without the need for recourse to the original publications. For reasons of space, however, I had to violate this rule in a minority of cases, as follows:

Chapter 1 Hippocrates. 5th century B.C. Airs, Waters, Places
This work comprises two distinct parts: following an Introductory Chapter I, Chapters II–XI deal with the effects of local climate upon health, and Chapters XII–XXIV deal with the effects of regional climate upon character. For reasons of space, I reprinted here only Chapters I and XII–XXIV, which focus most directly on Hippocrates’ comparative analysis of climate and society, although Chapters II–XI also are relevant to this volume. Also, I deleted notes from the translator concerned solely with questions of translation from Greek to English.

Chapter 2 Charles de Secondat Montesquieu. 1748. On the Laws in Their Relation to the Nature of the Climate
Montesquieu’s “The Spirit of the Laws” is a large and wide-ranging work on law and society, comprising six “Parts” and thirty-one “Books.” Montesquieu’s thoughts on climate and society extend through Books 14–17 in Part 3, but the material of greatest theoretical interest to this volume’s study of climate and society is in Book 14, titled as above, which contains 15 chapters, of which I have reprinted 1–6 and 13–15 as being of most direct relevance.

Chapter 3 Ibn Khaldûn. 1370. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History
This is a sweeping study of history, geography, ethnography, and political science. The material on climate and society is concentrated in one of its six chapters: Chapter I: Human Civilization in General, which is in turn divided into six “Prefatory Discussions.” The Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Prefatory Discussions are most relevant to this volume and are reprinted here in their entirety, except for the Second, of which only the “Supplementary Note to the Second Prefatory Discussion” is included, the remainder being largely a detailed exegisis of the map reprinted as Figure 3.1.

Chapter 5 Theophrastus. 4th century B.C. Concerning Weather Signs
The text used here is part of a two-volume edition of Theophrastus, “Enquiry Into Plants,” the most extensive botanical treatise of the classical era. “Concerning Weather Signs,” and another work published alongside it, “Concerning Odours,” are not properly part of “Enquiry Into Plants,” but are separate “minor works” dealing largely with non-botanical topics. “Concerning Weather Signs” comprises five sections: “Introductory: General Principles,” “The Signs of Rain,” “The Signs of Wind,” “The Signs of Fair Weather,” and “Miscellaneous Signs.” For reasons of space, only the first two sections are reprinted, although all are relevant to the subject of this volume.

Chapter 20 Todd Sanders. 2008. The Making and Unmaking of Rains and Reigns
This is Chapter 2 of Sanders’ book Beyond Bodies: Rainmaking and Sense Making in Tanzania. The remainder of the book is an ethnography of an African society, focusing on issues of gender and religion. For reasons of space, some of the extensive notes to Chapter 2, many of them dealing with historical matters, were either deleted or abbreviated, retaining just the references to works cited.

The following chapters were not abridged in any way but are part of larger works.

Chapter 4 Francis Zimmermann . 1988. The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine
This is a synopsis of Zimmermann’s 1987 book of the same title, much of which – dealing with the ecological/climatic dimensions of the ancient Vedic teachings – is relevant to the themes of this volume.

Chapter 7 Ratzel, Friedrich. 1896–1898. Nature, Rise, and Spread of Civilization
Ratzel’s three-volume 1885–1888 Völkerkunde, a sweeping study of humankind and civilization, was translated and published in English as the six-volume The History of Mankind. “Nature, Rise, and the Spread of Civilization” is Chapter 4 in Book I, “Principles of Ethnography,” of Division/Volume I of this work. This chapter contains Ratzel’s clearest statements regarding environmental/climatic determinism, but relevant material is also found elsewhere in the six volumes.

Chapter 11 James Spillius. 1957. Natural Disaster and Political Crisis in a Polynesian Society: An Exploration of Operational Research II
This is the second of a two-part article published on this topic by Spillius. The first part is a detailed ethnographic account of the involvement of him and Raymond Firth in disaster relief efforts. This too is relevant to the subject of this volume, but the second part was chosen for reprinting because it succinctly pulls out of the ethnography the ethical issues of scholarly engagement with climate-related disasters.

Chapter 13 Elizabeth Colson. 1957. Rain-Shrines of the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia
This is Chapter 3 of Colson’s monograph, The Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Its subject is the means – one of which is the rain-shrines – by which this “stateless” society is held together.

Michael R. Dove
Killingworth, Connecticut
August 2013

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of the text for this volume were presented and discussed in my advanced seminar in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, “Disaster, Degradation, Dystopia: Social Science Approaches to Environmental Perturbation and Change” (Spring 2010 and Spring 2011), and in an undergraduate class in Yale College’s Environmental Studies major, “Anthropology of Climate Change” (Fall 2012). The students in these classes, and especially my Associate in Teaching Catherine (Annie) Claus in the last-mentioned class, were wonderful interlocutors for my efforts to develop the themes in this book. I have also been ably assisted in my library research for this volume by several research interns, Katie Hawkes, Julia Fogerite, and Emily Schosid. With administrative and financial matters, I have relied upon the industry of two administrative assistants, Laurie Bozzuto and Julie Cohen.

None of the aforementioned people or organizations necessarily agrees with anything said in this volume, however, for which I am alone responsible.

Introduction: The Anthropology of Climate Change

Six Millennia of Study of the Relationship between Climate and Society

Michael R. Dove

Background

Clarence J. Glacken writes, in his magisterial 1967 (p. vii) Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, that Western thinking about humans and the earth has been dominated by three persistent questions:

Is the earth, which is obviously a fit environment for man and other organic life, a purposefully made creation? Have its climates, its relief, the configuration of its continents influenced the moral and social nature of individuals, and have they had an influence in molding the character and nature of human culture? In his long tenure of the earth, in what manner has man changed it from its hypothetical pristine condition?

Glacken further asserts that these questions have been central not just to thinking about the environment, but also to the development of critical thought itself: “In exploring the history of these ideas from the fifth century B.C. to the end of the eighteenth century, it is a striking fact that virtually every great thinker who lived within this 2,300-year period had something to say about one of the ideas, and many had something to say about all of them” (Glacken 1967: 711). That is to say, pondering on the relationship between nature and culture was a key project in the development of civilization in the West (and indeed, throughout the world). However unique modern anthropogenic climate change may be, therefore, a discourse of climate and culture has been prominent within human society for millennia. Indeed, it might be said to have been an integral part of the discourse of civilization itself.

Anthropology has played a central role in this discourse. Thinking of the intellectual forebears of the discipline from the classical era to modern times, as well as anthropology proper over the past two centuries, theorizing regarding the relationship between nature and culture, between environment and society, has been central to the development of anthropology as a field. Consider as an example what is known as “climate theory,” referring to the idea that climate determines human character, culture, and the rise and fall of civilizations. One of its earliest known developments was in the Hippocratic school 2,400 years ago. After it had been periodically reiterated over the succeeding two millennia, a remarkably similar theory was promulgated by two modern scholars who are often claimed as belonging to contemporary anthropology: the French enlightenment political thinker Montesquieu in the eighteenth century and the German geographer and ethnographer Ratzel in the nineteenth. A reaction against simplistic environmental determinism then set in, leading to what Rayner (2003: 286) has called an eighty-year gap in social science studies of climate. By the mid-twentieth century, explicit anthropological studies of climate were limited to very modest analyses of correlations between climate and human biology (Mills 1942; Gladwin 1947; Whiting 1964).

This perceived move by anthropology away from climate was more apparent than real, however. Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists were very much concerned with climate through their studies of subsistence practices of hunting and gathering, fishing, herding, and agriculture (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940; Richards 1948). Classic studies in environmental anthropology by the likes of Steward (1955), Mauss (1979 [1950]), and Conklin (1957) delved deeply into emic or native views of climate. Anthropologists built on this experience when, later in the twentieth century, more explicitly climatic topics emerged, like degradation and desertification (Spooner and Mann 1982; Little and Horowitz 1987). The questions being debated in these studies are as theoretically robust as any that have ever concerned anthropology. More recent, and with more immediate relevance to contemporary concerns about climate change research and policy, has been the contribution of anthropology to a new generation of disaster studies (Vayda and McCay 1975; Oliver-Smith 1996). Rejecting an earlier focus on individual ability or inability to cope with disaster, and the view of disaster as a “break” in the normal (Wallace 1956), the new studies ask how coping ability is affected by the dynamics of the wider society and, further, the role that society plays in determining who does or does not become a disaster victim in the first place (Hewitt 1983; Wisner 1993). As the social dimension of disasters became clear, anthropologists realized that there is a politics of knowledge associated with them (Harwell 2000; Mathews 2005), which historical studies show to have roots in the colonial era (Grove 1995; Davis 2001; Endfield and Nash 2002).

Margaret Mead (1977) is reputed to have been the first anthropologist to talk about climate change. For the past two decades, anthropologists have been involved in a significant way with research on climate change (Crate 2011), whether the involvement is measured by meetings and conferences, or grants and publications, including some noteworthy edited collections (Strauss and Orlove 2003; Casimir 2008; Crate and Nuttall 2009). Initially, this involvement built on traditional anthropological expertise with small, local communities, for example studying issues of risk and vulnerability (Ribot, Magalhães, and Panagides 1995) and the reality or prospects for adaptation (Berkes and Jolly 2001; Finan and Nelson 2001; Eakin 2006). From there anthropologists moved to related topics such as REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), drawing on the field’s expertise on indigenous, forest-dwelling peoples in the tropics (Schwartzman and Moutinho 2008).

A separate and important subgenre of the anthropological study of climate is the emerging field of the history and especially prehistory of human society and climate change. Some anthropologists have drawn on novel oral historical materials to contribute to this study (McIntosh 2000; Cruikshank 2001); but most work has come from archaeology. A long-established interest in the impact of climate change on ancient societies has been greatly reinvigorated by contemporary climate change debates (Bawden and Reycraft 2000), with special interest in the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon as a proxy for climate change (see Chapter 14, this volume).

From these beginnings in familiar ground, anthropologists have moved to such non-traditional topics as the international institutions involved in climate change research and policy, for example the IPCC (O’Reilly 2012), the meetings at which the global climate change community attempts to hammer out policy (Doolittle 2010), and thorny issues of communication and public skepticism (Diemberger et al. 2012). Beyond anthropology, there is a voluminous literature on climate change. Of special interest is apposite scholarship in the humanities on climate beliefs embedded in literature and the arts (Mentz 2010), and collections on global governance and climate change (Jasanoff and Martello 2004; Roberts and Parks 2007; Hulme 2009).

These new directions notwithstanding, anthropologists insist that their work on climate change – which some have called “climate anthropology” (Nelson and Finan 2000) or “climate ethnography” (Crate 2011) – takes advantage of the traditional strengths of the field, which Roncoli, Crane, and Orlove (2009) refer to as “being there” and the capacity to provide insight into perceptions, knowledge, valuation, and response. There are a number of dimensions to contemporary climate change that require these sorts of insights: (i) climate change has a reality at the local level; (ii) global debates about climate change policy are affected by North–South post-colonial histories; (iii) climate change has likely been imbricated in the evolution of human society; and (iv) the knowledge, science, and understanding of climate change is itself a social phenomenon, which affects the prospects for mitigation and adaptation. No other discipline matches the capacity to illuminate such issues of anthropology, which thus has something unique to offer to contemporary debates about climate change research and policy (Magistro and Roncoli 2001).

The aim of the current volume is to illustrate the scope and relevance of anthropological work on climate change, and in particular its intellectual roots and historic development. In none of the contemporary work has there been any effort to examine the history of anthropological work on climate and society, much less earlier apposite traditions of scholarly work on this topic. This is a serious gap in the anthropology of climate change. Scholars with an anthropological bent, and indeed human society in general, have been thinking about climate and society for millennia; and this history is a valuable resource for coping with twenty-first century climate change. To assess this resource, this volume presents twenty-two different examples of anthropological work on climate and society, organized into four principal sections. The first, “Continuities,” presents papers that illustrate intellectual continuities from the classical era, through the Enlightenment, and up to the present, focusing on “climate theory.” The second section, “Societal and Environmental Change,” is dedicated to papers dealing with an important corollary question for climate theory: When climate changes, does society follow suit? The third section of the book, “Vulnerability and Control,” contains papers that ask how societies attempt to cope with the impact of extreme climatic events, and how social differentiation affects this impact. The fourth and final section, “Knowledge and its Circulation,” looks at epistemological issues, in particular the factors that determine how climatic perturbation is interpreted.

In the remainder of this Introduction, I will review in detail these four principal parts of the volume and their contents.

Part I: Continuities

The volume begins with an examination of deep historical continuities in thinking about climate and society, beginning with the “climate theory” of the classical era, then looking beyond the Greco-Roman tradition to other civilizations, and then examining some historical currents in that most anthropological of methods, the ethno-scientific study of other conceptual systems.

Climate Theory

One of the most enduring ways of thinking about the relationship between climate and human society is the so-called “climate theory,” which derives the character of society from climate.

1 Hippocrates. Fifth century B.C. Airs, Waters, Places

Important commentaries on environmental matters have been noted in the writings of many scholars of the classical era, including Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Pliny. But in terms of an extended, in-depth analysis of the relationship between culture and nature, the work of Hippocrates (born 460 B.C.) is perhaps unsurpassed. His Airs, Waters, Places is a seminal work on the linkages between climate, landscape, physique, and temperament: “Some physiques resemble wooded, well-watered mountains, others light, dry land, others marshy meadows, others a plain of bare, parched earth” (p. 42). Glacken (1967: 81–2) calls this “the earliest systematic treatise concerned with environmental influences on human culture . . . .” It was a radical work in explicitly replacing the gods with nature as a causal agent.

The Hippocratic tradition presents two distinct bodies of theory regarding disease and, more generally, the relationship between society and environment. As Glacken (1967: 80) writes, “From early times there have been two types of environmental theory, one based on physiology (such as the theory of the humours) and one on geographical position; both are in the Hippocratic corpus.” The two types of theory are related but still separate; Airs, Waters, Places has different chapters for biological man and cultural man, for medicine and ethnography. The independent variable in the case of biology is seasonally driven variation in weather; the independent variable in the case of culture is latitudinally and topographically driven variation in climate. Health and culture are problematized and explained in this formulation, not nature. Nature is the independent variable, and health and culture are the dependent ones. Explanation of difference in the world was sought by examining the impact of nature on people, therefore, not that of people on nature.¹

Jones (1923: 66) observes that the second portion of Airs, Waters, Places, which is reprinted here, is “scarcely medical at all, but rather ethnographical.” This refers to Hippocrates’ use of the comparative method, which was to enjoy such a long and productive history within environmental anthropology (Steward 1955). In the first, “medical” part of Airs, Waters, Places, not reprinted here, Hippocrates relates human health to the characteristics of the site or locale, whereas in the second, “ethnographic” part, he generalizes from this causal relationship to explain the correlation between the character of entire societies and the regions within which they live: “Now I intend to compare Asia and Europe, and to show how they differ in every respect, and how the nations of the one differ entirely in physique from those of the other.”

Hippocrates uses comparative analysis to explain human difference, not similarity. Early in the ethnographic part of Airs, Waters, Places, Hippocrates (p. 42) informs his readers that “The races that differ but little from one another I will omit, and describe the condition only of those which differ greatly, whether it be through nature or through custom.” His attempt to explain different peoples in terms of different climates was a search for an answer to the age-old question: Why is the “other” different? The earth itself, the geomorphology of which produces not sameness but infinite diversity, has throughout human history provided ready at hand one answer to this question.

Hippocrates’ question assumes an underlying common humanity. The “other” is different but still human. There was neither felt need nor actual effort to explain in terms of climate the difference from humans of the fabled races of antiquity, like the cyclops for example. It was only the existence of “others” like us, yet unlike us in some respects, that posed a question. In contrast, the existence of “others” like us, in all respects, posed no question at all. Hippocrates could have seen like people in unlike environments as posing an equally logical question, but he did not. The historic ramifications of his choice were enormous; as Glacken (1967: 85) notes, “If Hippocrates had shown an interest in accounting for similarities rather than differences, the history of environmental theories would have been entirely different.”

The intent of Airs, Waters, Places is prognostic not programmatic (Glacken 1967: 81): the aim in the first, medical part is to predict the effects of the seasons of the year on human health; whereas the intent of the second, ethnographic part is to predict the effect of the climatic regions of the earth on human character. Hippocrates’ (p. 41) intent is “to show” these differences; it is not to present an agenda for action. By offering an explanation of human differences, including problematic differences, this rationalization of the status quo has proved to be politically powerful down to the present day. As Glacken (1967: 258) writes, this explanation is “serviceable in accounting for cultural, and especially for racial, differences”; and, thereby, it helps to justify privilege. It is all the more powerful because it de-privileges others on the basis not of their own character but rather of that of their environment. The continued power of such explanations can be seen in the great current popularity of works of global geographic determinism (e.g., Diamond 1997, 2005). It perhaps also can be seen in the self-privileging stances being taken by the industrialized nations toward the late-industrializing nations with less historic responsibility for, but greater current vulnerability to, climate change, as in distinctions being made between countries with high versus low “adaptive capacity” (Moore 2010). Today, as 2,500 years ago, therefore, climate is an instrument in segmentary politics.

2 Charles de Secondat Montesquieu. 1748. On the Laws in Their Relation to the Nature of the Climate

The Hippocratic work on climate and society was, as Glacken writes (1967: 502), “dramatically revived” during the Enlightenment by Montesquieu in his The Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu (1689–1755) published this in 1748, and considered it to be his life’s work (Cohler 1989: xi). The writing is clearly reminiscent of Airs, Waters, Places (Montesquieu: p. 48): “You will find in the northern climates people who have few vices, enough virtues, and much sincerity and frankness. As you move toward the countries of the south, you will believe you have moved away from morality itself . . . .”

Montesquieu read widely and although he does not specifically refer to Hippocrates in The Spirit of the Laws, he had a version of Airs, Waters, Places in his library and its impact on his work is generally acknowledged (Levin 1936: 26–39; Cohler 1989: xx). Also suggestive is the fact that one of the key intellectual constructs in Montesquieu’s climate theory is based on his freezing and thawing of a sheep’s tongue, and his observation of the attendant contracting and lengthening of its “papillae,” thereby explaining the supposed greater sensitivity of people in warm versus cold climates – which parallels Hippocrates’ own experiment in freezing and thawing water.²

Anthropologists claim Montesquieu as an intellectual forebear because of the marked element in The Spirit of the Laws of cultural relativism with respect to non-Christian religions and practices like polygamy (Nugent 1752: 6–7; Launay 2010). As Neuman (1949: xxxii) writes, Montesquieu believed that “The reconciliation of might and right must be achieved differently in different cultures.” More generally, Montesquieu developed what seems today to often be a social scientific approach to his subject. Referring to his effort to interrelate all of the elements – morals, customs, principles of government, and the spirit of the nation – that shape the character of a country, Neuman (1949: xlvi) remarks that “It is, as one would say today, an attempt to develop the principles of a cultural anthropology.” The founder of French sociology/anthropology, Emile Durkheim, devoted his 1892 dissertation to an assertion of the foundational contributions of Montesquieu to this field (Neuman 1949: xxxiii, n.4).

In addition to its political thought, The Spirit of the Laws is famed for its theorizing regarding the relationship between nature and culture, in particular between climate and law. Glacken (1967: 653) asserts that “By his advocacy of climatic influences, Montesquieu in the Esprit des Pois had provoked some of the most searching thought on social and environmental questions that had yet appeared in Western civilization . . . .” Montesquieu’s thesis, based on a tradition of thinking that can be traced back to Aristotle and Plato, is that law-making should be suited to the character of the society and that this is influenced by the character of the environment. He writes “If it is true that the character of the spirit and the passions of the heart are extremely different in the various climates, laws should be relative to the differences in these passions and to the differences in these characters” (p. 47). As Neuman (1949: xliv) writes, “He tries to establish a direct, causal relationship between climate, the physiological condition of man, his character, and the structure of political society.”

The ideal relationship between climate and political control, or law, according to Montesquieu, is for the latter to temper the ill-effects of the former. The role of government, thus, is to negate the un-civilizing influences of environment. Montesquieu (p. 49) writes, “That bad legislators are those who have favored the vices of the climate and good ones are those who have opposed them.” Montesquieu wrote in a tradition of thought that has continued nearly unchecked down to the present day, which postulates that one of the achievements of the advance of civilization has been to lessen the vulnerability of human society to the climate, the environment. Accordingly, the tempering effect of law on the effects of climate was thought to be most needed in the less-developed parts of the world: “As a good education is more necessary to children than to those of mature spirit, so the people of these climates [the sub-continent] have greater need of a wise legislator than the peoples of our own” (p. 49).

Since Montesquieu, like those who went before him in developing and applying “climate theory,” compared nature and culture across space, not time, the resulting studies do not easily accommodate cultural change. Hence Voltaire’s challenge to Montesquieu: since the climate has not changed, how does he explain the difference between modern Greece and Athens of the Periclean Age (Glacken 1967: 582)?³ Some modern scholars claim that this charge of determinism is based on a faulty reading of Montesquieu. For example, Neumann (1949: xlv) writes, “That he did not attempt to derive political conditions exclusively or even primarily from climatic conditions is clear to everyone who takes the trouble of reading what he wrote. He was not a geopolitician.” Kriesel (1968: 574) categorizes Montequieu as an early “possibilist” (like Wissler and Kroeber), not an early “determinist” or Ratzelian (see Chapter 7, this volume) .

Montesquieu put the comparative study of politics and environment on an empirical, historical basis (Neumann 1949: x). In several instances he attempts to isolate and examine the influence of what he perceives to be explanatory or independent variables, which distinguishes him from nearly all of his predecessors. For example, he looks at what happens when people living in one environment move to a different one: when the Visigoths migrated from the region of Germany to the Spanish Peninsula; when northern Europeans fought as soldiers in southern Europe in the war of the Spanish succession; and when European colonists reared their children in India. In all cases, Montesquieu maintained, the migrant group took on the character of their new environment.

Beyond the Greco-Roman Tradition

Although little known to audiences in Europe and North America, there are hoary intellectual traditions regarding climate and society outside of the Western tradition, which have had and continue to have an important influence in other parts of the world. McIntosh (2000) represents an unusual effort to tease out from the archaeological record the Mande vision of long-term climatic patterns in West Africa, and Freidel and Shaw (2000) have attempted something similar with the Maya of Central America. The papers reprinted in this section concern equally unusual records from North Africa and the subcontinent.

3 Ibn Khaldûn. 1958. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

Ibn Khaldûn, like Montesquieu, was a scholar-politician trained in law, but in a non-Western tradition. Born in 1332 in Andalusia in southern Spain, to a Moslem family that had migrated there from Yemen in the eighth century, he died in 1406 in Cairo. Formally trained as a faqîh jurist, Ibn Khaldûn was also an adîb or man of letters, and it is for his scholarship that he is still known to us today, in particular his The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. First published in Arabic in 1370 in Cairo, Toynbee (1935: III, 322) has extravagantly called it “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.” Written at the end of the intellectual development of medieval Islam, it captured the historical depth and conceptual heights of this development (Rosenthal, 1958: cxiii).