The Cultural Complexity of Carbon: Green Transformations in Contemporary Society

This volume discusses the transformational role that carbon – both as a concept and as a distinct set of material forms and effects – has come to play in social and cultural life.

As a proxy for greenhouse gas emission data, carbon has grown to become a phenomenon that can no longer be accounted for solely within the technoscientific vocabulary of climate scientists. The Cultural Complexity of Carbon examines the extent to which our knowledge of carbon affects the way that human beings relate to each other and to the climate and/or the environment. It draws on case studies from a diverse range of topics including peatland restoration, religion and energy systems to explore questions that have so far been under-explored in the current literature. These questions include whether the recognition of carbon’s role in climate change leads to an incremental adaptation of lifestyles or to cultural or existential transformations, but also more concretely how carbon is made meaningful, and how these meanings are attached to ideals of cultural change or continuity. Spanning multiple perspectives and disciplinary positions, this volume provides a go-to point for the next generation of ethnographic studies of carbon and climate change. It cuts across what has hitherto been largely separate literatures in anthropology, geography and sociology to provide a meta-level orientation to how contemporary narratives of the role of carbon are being told.

By addressing the intimate social and cultural changes that stem from humanity’s involvement with its natural and climatic resources, this volume is of interest to students and scholars of climate change within the social sciences and environmental humanities.

Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Steffen Dalsgaard is Professor in Anthropology of Digital Technology at the IT University of Copenhagen, where he is heading the interdisciplinary Center for Climate IT.

Andy Lautrup is an ethnographic researcher studying youth climate activism in Scandinavia drawing on insights from anthropology, science and technology studies and cultural theory.

Katinka A. Schyberg is an anthropologist by training and holds a PhD from the IT University of Copenhagen where she is associated with the Technologies in Practice research group (TiP).

Ingmar Lippert, anchor lecturer of Goethe University Frankfurt's STS programme at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, sustains a research focus on environmental governance and its digital reconfigurations.