Abstract
In this chapter, I discuss the issue of comparison as a road towards new climate knowledge. A point of departure is the notion of a knowledge space, as suggested by David Turnbull. When working with social responses to climate change, such knowledge spaces present themselves as apt analytical objects being both located and transcendent. This renders the unfolding of a particular kind of comparison possible, with special reference to exemplars, understood in Kuhn’s sense as shared examples of puzzle solutions, identified tacitly rather than explicitly. The idea is to demonstrate how ‘climate worlds’ can be seen as comparable spaces of particular puzzle solutions, allowing for new forms of theorising.
In this chapter, “climate worlds” do not refer to the collaborative research project based at Bielefeld University (see Heike Greschke’s Chap. 7, this volume), but rather to the idea that the anthropological concern with ‘climate’ in itself co-configures the object of study, as will be elaborated in the course of the argument.
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Notes
- 1.
Waterworlds is a collaborative research project at the University of Copenhagen, studying the social responses to climate change. It is financed by an ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grant and has run for 5 years, 2009–2013 (inclusive). Fifteen researchers have been affiliated with the project, between them covering many hotspots of climate change, ranging from the Arctic to the Pacific and from east to west. I would like to express my deep gratitude to the ERC for trusting me with such possibility for collaborative work, as well as my colleagues for taking it upon themselves.
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Hastrup, K. (2015). Comparing Climate Worlds: Theorising across Ethnographic Fields. In: Greschke, H., Tischler, J. (eds) Grounding Global Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9322-3_8
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