Will Smith - Mountains of Blame

The literature on climate change emerging from sociocultural anthropology has begun to move beyond tired debates on mitigation and adaptation, coping with disasters, and the creation of climate refugees who are displaced and driven from homes and livelihoods. Along the way it has become increasingly nuanced in considering historical, moral, and politically inequitable processes through which climate disruption is experienced, explained, and countered. In this vein, Will Smith has produced a study that is attentive to longer histories of indigenous people in the forested uplands of Palawan Island, a part of Mindanao in the Philippines. The region and its residents are no strangers to the climate variations produced by El Ni o currents and the storms that beset the South China Sea. But in the last few decades, they have observed new weather patterns that are perceived as linked to the social transformation they have undergone in reorganizing their agriculture and immediate relations to plants, soil, and society.

With empathy and care, Smith examines the self-awareness and critical evaluations of their own actions and responses by the indigenous people of Palawan. The injustice of the way in which native people have borne the brunt of climate changerelated disastersand before that, the rapacity of extractive industries in their territorieshas generated studies critiquing such ravages in emic indigenous terms (see, e.g., Povinelli, 2016; De la Cadena, 2015), even as they analyze the limitations of liberal social theory in synthetic, often sweeping, arcs (e.g., Tsing, 2017; and a proliferating literature on the Anthropocene). Smith moves beyond analyses that fail to differentiate between experiences of environmental risk and disruption across societies and their particular histories. Such histories, while learning to be more attentive to the place and role of nonhumans, remain distinguishable by local cultural processes and world-connecting forces that emerge from human action and sensibility.

In that respect, this work is more akin to that of Tania Li (2014) and Karine Gagn (2019) in its patient and respectful attention to the way local perspectives on larger environmental forces and economic processes are dynamic, steeped in self-appraisal, and generative of commentary on both wider conditions and personal foibles as a product of the changes that have enmeshed human lives.