Frida Hastrup

Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence

After losing his arm in the battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797, Lord Nelson took the pain he felt in his missing limb to be a “direct proof of the existence of the soul” (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998: 1604). What Lord Nelson had experienced was a phenomenon first identified by the physician Silas Weir Mitchell in the late nineteenth century as “phantom pains”. During the American Civil War, Mitchell treated and studied soldiers with nerve injuries and post-traumatic disorders, who described to him the experience of sensing their amputated limbs (Wade 2003: 518). Since then, phantom pains have been medically defined as the painful sensation of missing limbs, i.e. a sensuous experience of something which is materially absent. However, even before Mitchell’s studies and coining of the term, pain felt in missing limbs and the sense that an amputated limb is still attached to the body had been elements in philosophical treatises. Rene Descartes, for instance, argued that sensations in amputated limbs testify to the unreliability of the senses (Wade 2003: 518-520).

Shady plantations: Theorizing coastal shelter in Tamil Nadu

This article explores practices of protection played out in a coastal plantation in a village in Tamil Nadu. I argue that these practices are articulations of different but coexisting theorizations of shelter, and that the plantation can be seen as that which emerges at the intersections between these, as they are realized in social encounters. This calls for a view of theory and analysis as generative of objects in the world, rather than applied to them from some fictitious elsewhere or posterity. Exploring the plantation and the shelter it offers as an intertwinement and simultaneity of practice and analysis, data and theory, I discuss anthropological knowledge-making as a truly lateral endeavour that engages in describing and cultivating a shared capacity for world-making, the challenge then being to find the right story of sameness and difference, without ascribing fixity and inevitability to our objects of knowledge.

Materializations of Disaster: Recovering Lost Plots in a Tsunami-Affected Village in South India

The Asian tsunami that swept across coastal regions all around the Indian Ocean in December 2004 left innumerable affected communities at a loss. Thousands and thousands of people perished, many more were left homeless, personal and household belongings were washed away, and the afflicted populations’ trust in their surroundings was seriously compromised. The South Indian village of Tharangambadi on the coast of Tamil Nadu was one of the places badly hit by the disaster (see F. Hastrup 2008, 2009). Out of the village’s total population of about 7,000, the tsunami killed 314 persons, the clear majority of whom belonged to the 1,200 fishing households settled along the beach lining the Bay of Bengal.

Industrious Landscaping: The Making and Managing of Natural Resources at Søby Brown Coal Beds

Abstract. This article has a twofold ambition. It offers a history of landscaping at Søby brown coal beds—a former mining site in western Denmark—and a methodological discussion of how to write such a study. Exploring this specific industrial landscape through a series of projects that have made different natural resources appear, we show that even what is recognized as resources shifts over time according to radically different and unpredictable agendas. This indicates that the Søby landscape is fundamentally volatile, as its resourcefulness has been seen interchangeably to shift between the brown coal business, inexpensive estates for practically savvy people, pasture for grazing, and recreational forest, among other things. We discuss these rifts in landscape history, motivated by what we refer to as industriousness, to show that, at sites such as Søby, both natural resources and historical developments are made through particular ad hoc perspectives, providing their own means and ends. This view of natural resources and development processes calls for a detailed analysis of shifting landscape projects and has an essential methodological corollary, namely that fieldwork must be improvisational, situated, open-ended, and somewhat random. We thus develop a method of “dustballing,” which implies being blown here and there, combining historical records and ethnographic description in an associative kind of fieldwork that somehow navigates itself. Our aim is thus to let methodology and our story of a ruined landscape mirror one another to attempt a novel kind of natural history suitable for the Anthropocene.

Theory and methodology in causal research: a commentary

Theory in the social sciences can have diverse meanings (Abend, 2008). In a recent paper, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich has suggested that theories, similarly to the empirical matter they are conceived to theorize about, can be seen as things in the world. Helmreich suggests that this approach operates ‘“athwart theory”: that is, as tacking back and forth between seeing theories as explanatory tools and taking them as phenomena to be examined’ (Helmreich, 2011, p. 138). In other words, theories make worlds appear in particular ways as much as vice versa, and as such both data and theory can be seen as intimately located in empirical matters. Both explain and need to be explained, and in consequence, a very clear distinction between data and theory seems hard to sustain, as both domains are, in fact, a product of analysis (Hastrup, 2011). One domain can become a context for the other, and importantly, they can switch places. This idea echoes some of the issues raised in the papers in this volume that examine theoretical perspectives on causal research of climate–society relations. One of the key findings to take away from the papers seems to be just this: an admonition against invoking any one theory as an overarching explanatory frame that ends (or begins) the discussion and is somehow a step removed from its object. Instead, researchers might let the analysis unfold in an iterative manner that simultaneously encompasses empirical puzzles, methodological choices and possibilities and theoretical insights; an amalgam of these may then give rise to new empirical questions to be pursued further by way of and occasioning new insights. There is, then, a sense in which all of these aspects or steps of the analysis occur simultaneously and organically, a fact that may complicate the establishment of clear-cut unidirectional causal relations with regard to not only, say, impacts of climate change from observed transformation to adaptive response but also the very crafting of our analyses. Theory, in other words, need not be seen as an abstracted a priori point of departure, of which the given empirical findings are but an illustration or confirmation (or a negation, as the case may be), nor is it an equally abstracted domain that can be pointed to as the final result of prior processing of empirical data. A more pragmatic and flexible – and indeed contemporary – notion of theory (and by the same token, of data) seems far better suited to account for the many and sometimes paradoxical ways in which environmental change surfaces in local worlds. The promise of this approach is to allow for unexpected relations between causes and effects to enter the picture. As Reenberg et al. (2012) clearly show the people or places that we study often simply do not act as we might expect on the basis of a singular and preconceived theoretical framework. Similarly, abductive causal eventism, as advocated by Walters (2012), takes its point of departure in the explanation of human actions and other events of interest – the ‘effects’ – and from there moves backwards in time to an analysis of alternative possible causes of those events, thereby not privileging in advance any particular explanatory theory or factor. What is at issue here is the need to be able to combine different perspectives, while recognizing that theory, understood as just a perspective, implies partiality in two senses: ‘bias’ and ‘incompleteness’. In this light, identifying causal relations is in itself a theoretical inference on the basis of empirical puzzles that gives way to both new empirical questions and new theoretical suggestions.