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Weather from incest: The politics of indigenous climate change knowledge on Palawan Island, the Philippines
Author(s) -
Smith Will
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the australian journal of anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1757-6547
pISSN - 1035-8811
DOI - 10.1111/taja.12270
Subject(s) - indigenous , blame , climate change , geography , politics , traditional knowledge , narrative , ethnography , popularity , state (computer science) , ethnology , sociology , political science , ecology , archaeology , psychology , social psychology , linguistics , philosophy , algorithm , computer science , law , biology
Indigenous peoples' understandings of climate change are often interpreted through an instrumental prism that privileges the ecologically adaptive nature of belief and practice. This paper explores the limits of this perspective by considering the environmental narratives of self‐blame among households in the uplands of Palawan Island, the Philippines. In the south of the island, indigenous Pala'wan widely suggest that cyclical El Niño Southern Oscillation driven variation in rainfall and related food insecurity is the product of a linear change in climatic patterns occurring over the past several decades. This perceived climate change is explained in reference to the popularity of incestuous relationships and a decline in ritualised executions. Through an ethnographic focus on the politics of climate knowledge, I argue that Pala'wan narratives of self‐blame speak as much to ongoing struggles between indigenous people and the Philippine state over control of the forested uplands as it does to the grounded and empirical qualities of indigenous environmental knowledge.