School of Social and Political Science

Introduction

Amongst the broad scientific certainty of a warming planet, uncertainty is the prevailing circumstance under which all observers and trackers of weather and climate data seek to anticipate the future. This sense of uncertainty trickles down to communities who might distrust, question or ponder over these predictions, especially where errors are made, comparing them to their own daily experience of the weather. Daipha (2016) shows us how weather forecasters themselves specialise in managing ‘deep’ uncertainty towards ‘provisional’ coherent predictions, a task that becomes more difficult as the climates becomes more volatile.

Much of the social science research around unpredictable weather focuses on risk and vulnerability. Those engaged in capitalist agriculture are particularly vulnerable to increasing variability and unpredictability in the weather with Matthan providing an ethnographic example in Southern India which she argues has transformed into a ‘generalised climate of uncertainty’ which reproduces social inequalities (2022). Puri (2021) makes parallels with weather insurance schemes observing a centuries old tradition of better on rainfall in Rajasthan, Northern India, a ‘creative’ engagement with weather uncertainty and profit making, where farming is becoming less lucrative as weather becomes less predictable. Investigating rain rituals and the reasons given for their failures, Shaffer (2017) argues that these rituals are a key tool for understanding local vulnerabilities in her field site in Mozambique and across Southern Africa, with uncertain rainfall linked to the cultural uncertainties of her interlocutors who point to a lack of care with tradition and ritual rules as the reason for the absent rains.

Yet for many this uncertainty is fertile ground for a ‘speculative anthropology’. Writing on the parallel uncertainties of climate change and the possible end of settler colonialism in Palestine, Stamatopoulou-Robbins demonstrates how Palestinian Authority Initiatives on climate change open up ‘opportunities’ for speculating on Palestinian futures and ‘performing state-readiness’ making ‘climate strategizing an imaginative process, which in turn makes worlds and ways of thinking possible’ (2018:384).