History and the question of causation: North Atlantic lessons on environmental and social change

Abstract

Dealing with processes of environmental change in an anthropological perspective inevitably implicates people. With people come notions of society and history, complicating matters of causation. In this article, I shall present two empirical cases from Icelandic history and current Greenlandic society. These cases shed light on the natural–social entanglements in a long-term historical perspective and in a highly charged present, respectively. My ambition is to open up for a renewed sense of causation in the social domain in view of the manifest complexities with which we are faced in the present era of globalization and rapid social changes. The reasoning is ethnographic rather than conceptual, if not exactly letting the cases speak for themselves, then at least avoiding both linear explanation and other normative stands on causation.

Keywords:

• causation
• environmental change
• Iceland
• the Little Ice Age
• Greenland
• global warming

Acknowledgement

The author wants to acknowledge the Advanced Grant for The European Research Council, of which she is the grateful recipient, and which made the collaborative project Waterworlds possible.