Weather, Climate, Culture.

Weather, Climate, Culture. Weather, Climate, Culture Sarah Strauss and Ben Orlove (eds)Oxford, New York Oxford is a town in Chenango County, New York, USA. At the 2000 census the town population was 3,992. The name derives from that of the native town of an early landowner from New England.The Town of Oxford contains a village named Oxford. : Berg Publishers 2003. Pp:xviii +307. Although 'talking about the weather' is a ubiquitoushuman activity, anthropologists, until now, have said surprisinglylittle on the subject. Ethnographers have provided details of ritualsrelating to relating torelate prep → concernantrelating torelate prep → bez¨¹glich +gen, mit Bezug auf +accthe weather, such as rainmaking rainmaking,production of rain by artificial means now generally disregarded, though it is probable that rainmaking hastens or increas es rainfall from clouds suitable for natural rainfall. ceremonies, and recordedculturally defined seasonal categories. Some anthropologists haveconsidered the effects of extreme weather or longer-term climate change,and adaptive responses to these. And it could be said that weatherappears, in the background, in many ethnographic accounts. Yet, despiteits omnipresence OmnipresenceSee also Ubiquity.Allahsupreme being and pervasive spirit of the universe. [Islam: Leach, 36]Big Brotherall-seeing leader watches every move. [Br. Lit.: 1984]eyeGod sees all things in all places. , human relationships with the weather have been ratherleft out in the cold as a subject of study. Strauss and Orlove's lively and interesting text is thereforea very welcome addition to the anthropological canon, and immediatelyraises the question as to why such an important and fascinating aspectof human experience has previously been studied so little. As thecollection makes plain, weather affects human lives in many ways,influencing daily activity, social and emotional life, political andeconomic developments. It provides a medium for relating to time andchange, and a focus for aesthetic appreciation. It flows through mythsand metaphors, cosmological and ecological schemes. Offering a collection of case studies from around the world, thevolume explores a range of human interactions with and through theweather. These are organized in three major sections, dealing firstlywith more immediate 'daily' topics, such as the weather as abasis for social discourse in Britain, as the focus for competingepistemologies from folklore and science in Switzerland, as a way ofconceptualising gender complementarities in Tanzania, or ofunderstanding human, spiritual and ecological relationships Ecological Relationships result from the fact that organisms in an ecosystem interact with each other, in the natural world, no organism is an autonomous entity isolated from its surroundings. inChesa peake Bay Chesapeake Bay,inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, c.200 mi (320 km) long, from 3 to 30 mi (4.8–48 km) wide, and 3,237 sq mi (8,384 sq km), separating the Delmarva Peninsula from mainland Maryland. and Virginia. . A 'years' section considers seasonalcategories and cycles, and includes Orlove's own study of 28ethnographic contexts and their forms of seasonal classification, aswell as an essay on weather forecasting in Burkino Faso. It alsoexplores people's aesthetic and pragmatic responses to majorweather events, for example air pollution in London, and drought inPapua New Guinea Papua New Guinea(păp`ə, –y . A final 'generations' section deals withlarger issues of climate change over time, considering its effects forcontemporary farmers in Brazil and Arizona, and providing accounts ofclimate in Inuit oral traditions and medieval Icelandic sagas.Raynor's afterword offers a useful overview of the anthropologythat has been done in this area, and observes the'domestication' of the weather, along with nature in general,in countries where material culture provides a major technologicalbuffer. Thus the volume offers a diversity of subjects and disciplinaryperspectives. This is both a strength and a slight weakness. Thediversity is certainly stimulating, and suggests many potentiallyexciting avenues for further investigation. From an anthropologicalpoint of view, though, some of the chapters from other disciplinaryareas, while offering interesting case studies, do not always bring tothese the kind of analytic approach that meshes readily withanthropological interests. It is also apparent that some of thecontributions are emergent from highly applied interdisciplinaryprojects. Although I would staunchly defend the equal validity ofapplied anthropology and its potential to produce leading edge research,it remains that, immersed in interdisciplinary contexts, it is sometimesdifficult for practitioners to avoid being suborned into producing thekind of atheoretical a¡¤the¡¤o¡¤ret¡¤i¡¤cal?adj.Unrelated to or lacking a theoretical basis. writing that one might describe as'UN-speak' or 'policy report language', and there issome small evidence of this here. However, both of these criticisms areminor: in general, the location of some of the case studies in appliedprojects has produced well grounded and innovative analyses, and theinterdisciplinarity of the text is useful in providing alternativeperspectives and encouraging anthropologists to broaden their scope. On balance, I enjoyed this volume. It brings to the surface someissues of real interest to anthropologists. It offers fruitfulexplorations of different concepts of nature and culture, and ancientand modern forms of ethnoclimatology and ethnometeorology, and usefullylinks these with the political and moral dimensions of social life. Ithighlights the universal importance of weather to human societies, andthe consequent potential for comparative analy sis, thus connecting thework with a central theoretical issue for anthropologists. It considersthe language used in talking about the weather, and its metaphorical-andoften homologous--relationship to a variety of schema. It touches on(though could have said more about) people's sensory and cognitiveengagements with the weather, and considers their aesthetic responses toit. These are all topics that would benefit considerably from furtheranthropological investigation, and this original and interesting textwill, I hope, encourage a storm of research and writing in this area. Veronica Strang University of Auckland Not to be confused with Auckland University of Technology.The University of Auckland (Māori: Te Whare Wānanga o Tāmaki Makaurau) is New Zealand's largest university.