Documentation and Anthropology in the Anthropocene
Yixuan (Zoey) Liu
Image: Jiatong Jin
When we visit the Scientist Rebellion homepage, we are immediately confronted with a provocative challenge: “Scientists have spent decades writing papers, advising governments, briefing the press: all have failed. What is the point in documenting in ever greater detail the catastrophe we face, if we are not willing to do anything about it?” This statement reflects a Western-centric view that equates meaningful action solely with immediate, measurable intervention while dismissing the value of documentation. In the age of the Anthropocene, when climate and ecological crises threaten our future, this narrow perspective overlooks how documentation can deepen our understanding and ultimately foster real change.
To reply to the provocation posed by Scientist Rebellion, this essay argues that anthropological documentation goes beyond recording events in “greater detail.” Anthropology challenges dominant narratives, uncovers the socio-cultural and political dimensions of disaster, and inspires alternative approaches to resilience and sustainability. Firstly, this essay rethinks the Western-centric notions of catastrophe and action by drawing on Ingold’s critique (2018) and STS perspectives, emphasising the importance of Indigenous knowledge in challenging interventionist approaches. Secondly, Nyugen’s study (2020) of air pollution in Beijing and Bond’s research (2021) on water contamination in New England, state how multisensory ethnography transcends metrics to reveal lived experiences and mobilise communities. Thirdly, through Tsing’s (2015) and Haraway’s (2016) multispecies ethnography, the essay explores how recognising the agency of non-human entities repositions humanity within ecological networks. Then, decolonising anthropology will be analysed by Whytes (2016) and Callison (2015). Finally, the debate on “dithering anthropology” by Hornborg (2017) will be discussed to see how this critique informs our next step.
Rethinking Catastrophe and Action
The assertion, “What is the point in documenting in ever greater detail the catastrophe we face, if we are not willing to do anything about it?” reflects a Western-centric assumption that separates documentation from action. This view suggests that “meaningful” responses or solutions to catastrophes must involve immediate, measurable interventions, often technical or policy-driven. However, I argue that this notion of action not only overlooks the efforts made by all scientists but more importantly, also obscures alternative ways of understanding and engaging with environmental crises with an anthropocentric and instrumentalist worldview. Anthropology challenges this perspective by demonstrating that documentation and action are interconnected processes. Documentation often becomes a form of action, reshaping how crises are understood and addressed.
To rethink the relationship between documentation and action, it is essential to challenge the dominant understanding of action as intervention and control. Western traditions often frame nature as an object to be managed or transformed. As Ingold (2018) argues, this perspective reduces the environment to a material substrate that must be shaped by human imagination before it can be inhabited. Such a view neglects relational and reciprocal ways of engaging with the environment, which is common in many non-Western cultures. For example, in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea, the domestic environment (mbo) and the surrounding wilderness (rømi) are not viewed as separate or oppositional (Strathern, 1998). Rather than dominating them, human activity there focuses on coexisting and caring in these interconnected places. It is believed that planting promotes ties with the land rather than enforcing rules. By arguing that meaningful action might involve preserving equilibrium and building resilience, this viewpoint questions the notion that interventionist action is always necessary.
If action must be redefined, so too must catastrophe. In the context of the Anthropocene, more frequent extreme weather events, and ecological degradation, manifest themselves as physical realities (Chua and Fair, 2019). While the Scientist Rebellion frames catastrophe primarily as a measurable physical reality demanding immediate response, anthropological perspectives reveal that disaster is more complexly understood in sociocultural practice, itself often carrying shifting historical, political, and moral judgments.For instance, an anthropologist found that while working for almost twenty years in Fransfontein, Namibia—learning the language and immersing himself in the local pastoral way of life— residents view rainfall as the outcome of the intersection between two genders and agentive winds. Natural phenomena are situated within a living cosmos where animals, winds, and trees have agentive power. In the same breath, from the land being taken away by the colonial rulers who are considered colonial-era land dispossession, some localities emphasize responsibility while others downplay it (Schnegg 2021). Another case in the Indonesian context is concerned with flooding regarded by residents as more than a natural happening but as with "rejeki"—as livelihood or fortune—since they have grown to utilize the rising floodwaters that are wholly part of the economy and the social-life (Ley, 2021). These examples signal that catastrophe is as much a physical event as it is a concept generated through cultural practices and values. It is in documenting such perspectives that anthropologists provide detailed insights that might serve to contest dominant disaster narratives and provide a basis for more culturally sensitive responses.
Anthropology also renders documentation as it is an important medium of action. Anthropologists document how varied communities interpret and act in the face of disaster, and through this, communities begin to realize that their ways of dealing with crisis are not the only ways. This can be a route to under-represented voices being heard, injustices revealed, and resilience developed. Hulme (2009) challenges the over-confidence of climate science for greater transparency and engagement with cultural contexts. Similarly, Dunlap (2015) calls for a holistic worldview, integrating scientific and local knowledge in dealing with crises. Anthropological documentation supplements these gaps by transforming abstract data into actionable and realistic insights concerning local values.
A good example is the Lampisa system in the Philippines, which is an indigenous water management system. It is governed by community leaders who ensure fair distribution of water for adaptation to the environment. For instance, they will change the rules according to villagers' needs during the drought season, but the local government failed to do so because of a lack of understanding (Nakashima, Krupnik, and Rubis, 2018). Therefore, anthropologists' work by documenting these practices and traditions is meant to preserve and reveal the wisdom and importance of local knowledge.
Rethinking Documentation: Multi-Sensory Ethnography
Multisensory ethnography transforms documentation into action, focusing on the experience of crises through the senses. It unwraps those physical and emotional realities of disaster embedded in documentation to create collective understanding and response. As pointed out by Ingold (2018), anthropology is never passive recording but active, even participatory wherein both researchers and communities jointly investigate and answer the challenge from their immediate environments. That's the point: multisensory ethnography shows in detail the nexus between knowledge and action-what can never be revealed with numbers and graphs.
In "Breathless in Beijing," Nguyen (2020) reveals how documentation through multiple senses captures dimensions of crises that quantitative measurements alone cannot detect and inspires collective social action. She participated in local people’s lives and provided detailed descriptions of their experiences of pollution, from dry throats to labored breathing, and how mask-wearing creates what Nguyen describes as a "reaffirmation of shared dependencies, complicities, and commitments." “reaffirmation of co-dependency, complicity, and commitment.” She wrote that people on social media transform smog from an abstract concept of an “invisible threat” to an expression of sensory experience, such as residents posting photos of smog and describing the discomfort of wearing masks. This description goes beyond simple quantitative indicators and into people’s perceptual world. This shared sensory experience becomes the foundation for collective understanding and resistance against the “slow violence” and “invisible threat”.
Another case is Bond's (2021) ethnography of PFOA contamination in New England, which further contends how sensory documentation can mobilize community response. By documenting not just the measurable contamination levels but also residents' bodily experiences, from the unsettling taste and smell of drinking water, the growing anxiety about health risks, and the profound sense of loss regarding their homes. Bond(2021) shows how environmental harm is experienced through multiple sensory and emotional dimensions. This multisensory documentation helped unite the community in their struggle against corporate and governmental institutions, transforming individual experiences into collective political action.
These cases demonstrate why the distinction between "documentation" and "action" that Scientist Rebellion assumes is ultimately artificial. By deeply participating in local people’s lives and sharing bodily sensations, emotional responses, and everyday negotiations, anthropologists move beyond traditional disaster narratives that privilege visual or quantitative documentation (Ingold, 2021). As seen in Nyugen's description of mask-wearing practices or Bond's account of community mobilization, sensory experiences become the foundation for collective understanding and response. This approach resonates with Tsing's (2015) broader argument about ecological interconnection, where attention to sensory experience reveals networks of relationship and resistance that purely quantitative documentation might miss.
Through multisensory ethnography, anthropological documentation becomes an active process of knowledge creation and social transformation. Rather than merely collecting data about environmental hazards, this approach reveals how communities experience, understand, and resist these challenges. By acknowledging that knowledge production is inherently multisensory and relational (Schnegg, 2021), anthropology shows how documentation can foster empathy, build social solidarity, and inspire collective action. In this way, anthropological documentation does not just record crises – it helps create the conditions for meaningful response and change.
Rethinking Documentation: Multi-species Ethnography
Anthropologists who are doing multi-species ethnography, challenge the anthropocentric perspectives and inform us that there is an alternative way to deal with the crisis, which is to recognize the agency of other species based on collaboration and interdependence with the broader ecological world.
Firstly, multispecies ethnography calls for a departure from anthropocentric viewpoints, emphasizing that vision, representation, and thinking are not exclusively human attributes. It notes how non-human species perceive and interact with humans is integral to anthropological and crisis studies. For instance, Kohn (2013) describes an encounter with a jaguar in which, to avoid becoming prey, humans must transform into a new "we" by returning to and rethinking self-identity through the jaguar's gaze, aligning with the predator's perception of us as a fellow predator, rather than, fortunately, merely as prey or dead meat. Kohn (2013) summarized this experience as "humans suddenly appearing strange," while recognizing that such encounters challenge our conventional understanding of identity and existence, forcing us to rethink our place in the world from a non-human perspective. The jaguar is just a small example of a disaster that humans may face, where the risk of being preyed upon is present. However, this ethnographic account does much more than simply document an encounter with a predator, it demonstrates how the very act of documentation must change when we take non-human perspectives seriously. Our perception of non-human entities, as either prey or predators, influences how we move through our environment and establish our position within the ecosystem.
At the same time, multi-species ethnography encourages us to rethink the boundaries between species by focusing on collaborative, interdependent relationships. Rather than framing nature as a resource for human exploitation, this perspective emphasizes co-creation and mutual adaptation. Tsing (2015) develops this in her work on matsutake mushrooms, which thrive in extremely poor ecological conditions by symbiotically relating to the roots of forest trees. The fungi support the trees in their absorption of nutrition but also nurture economic and social networks among the people who pick and trade them. This collaboration characterizes exactly how intricate human and non-human lives have become in opening onto possibilities of resistance and survival against environmental crises.
Outside the fungal-forest dynamic, another powerful interdependence occurs in the context of the relationship between the Navajo and the Navajo-Churro sheep. Drawing on Haraway's (2016) use of the term "making-with," the sheep—through a process of many generations of selection—were fit to take on one of the harshest of environments within the Colorado Plateau. Such traits, regarding resisting drought, confer beneficial properties in a manner complementary not only to environmental maintenance but also to shaping in meaningful ways the cultural and economic engagements of the Navajo people themselves. The partnership hence underlines how shared histories of adaptation create persistent systems of resilience ecologically and culturally grounded.
Examples of this type surely give a vital blow to dominant representations of survival as possible only through competition or human ingenuity. As Tsing (2015) insists, collaboration across species boundaries can more often yield truly sustainable solutions. In exposing such relationships, multispecies ethnography undermines anthropocentric approaches and invites us to consider the agentive contributions of non-human life. It is only by learning to perceive this interdependence that we will be able to act effectively in the increasingly complex crises of the Anthropocene.
Rethinking Documentation: Decolonizing Anthropology
While documenting sensory experiences and multispecies interdependencies is crucial, addressing crises effectively requires a deeper interrogation of the historical and structural forces that shape both environmental vulnerabilities and the practices of documentation itself. Decolonizing anthropology moves beyond accumulating data to critically examine how colonial legacies and systemic inequalities perpetuate the crises we aim to understand and resolve.
Decolonial critiques challenge dominant climate change narratives that often focus on environmental factors while overlooking the historical contexts of exploitation and marginalization. For example, the United Nations Conference on Indigenous Peoples, Marginalized Populations and Climate Change highlights how Indigenous territories, often small islands, high-altitude regions, deserts, or circumpolar areas, face disproportionate climate impacts due to their resource-based livelihoods (Nakashima, Krupnik, & Rubis, 2018). These observations often link vulnerability with geography but can overlook the deeper historical roots of dispossession and colonialism that have cumulatively increased these risks. These detailed ethnographic studies bring out how these colonial histories impinge directly on the making of synchronous crises. For example, Marino (2012) reports that among the Kigiqitamiut of Shishmaref, Alaska, colonial policies have confined Indigenous communities to marginal lands, dismantled traditional governance systems, and facilitated resource extraction industries.
Similarly, Sawyer (2005), in Pastaza Province, Ecuador, illustrates that without proper consultation, oil companies have built roads and laid pipelines that disrupt indigenous practices and undermine community autonomy. These examples suggest that the extractive colonial systems have not only increased vulnerability to extreme environmental events but also undermined some of the very structures that had hitherto supported community resilience. Whyte (2016) criticizes all frameworks that locate Indigenous climate vulnerabilities in the geographic or subsistence practices. Such framings, he suggests, obscure how colonialism has created vulnerabilities to climate while driving carbon-intensive activities responsible for global warming. Callison (2015) has argued that when legacies of oppression are brought into view, documentation is not a passive practice but one that opens up possibilities to expose and dismantle systemic inequalities. In this respect, the decolonial perspective that anthropology may incorporate would enable it to transcend superficial assessments of vulnerability and ascertain structural injustices responsible for the perpetuation of environmental crises.
This approach complements multisensory and multispecies ethnography by situating the local within expansive systems of power. Decolonising the documentation at the level of inclusion of Indigenous voices and histories challenges the frameworks through which these communities are made disproportionately vulnerable. This requires climate action that is an interplay of addressing systemic inequality alongside historical injustice, contemporary exploitation, and environmental resilience. In such a way, documentation does not serve as a testament of crisis but instead becomes a platform for imagining and building a just and sustainable future.
Dithering Anthropology?
Having analysed the different cases of ethnography and related theories, it is clear that documentation is not just a tool to inspire actions, but also an important way of providing us with new perspectives and revealing hidden inequalities. However, as several critical voices have pointed out, anthropology questions are also growing, with neo-Marxist scholars extending their concerns about the depoliticizing tendencies of the Anthropocene to criticisms of anthropological methodology (Chua and Fair, 2019). For example, Hornborg (2017) uses his “agitated tone” to critique anthropologists on the Anthropocene who often “publish hazy and elusive dithering”.. He especially pointed out Tsing and Haraway, arguing that their writing relies on metaphors and poetic language to cover up theoretical flaws.
However, I argue, firstly, that Hornborg’s critique overemphasises the single criterion of clarity and rigour, ignoring the fact that in the context of contemporary environmental, the traditional framework is becoming harder to reveal the full picture of the problems. I contend that while Haraway (2016) uses literary and poetic language in her writing, this is not to avoid theoretical shortcomings but rather to push the limits of conventional rational reasoning. Readers are allowed to view, feel, and react to the complex problems of the Anthropocene from a fresh angle. At the same time, Tsing (2015) points out that, faced with the diversity of the global ecological crisis, we urgently need an interdisciplinary and contextualised approach to the issue of environmental protection. Rather than insisting that anthropologists adopt overt political stances in every instance, it is crucial to recognize the value of their nuanced narratives.
To conclude, anthropology is far beyond documentation in only greater details, it challenges the dominant narratives, adds details to the socio-cultural and political dimensions of disaster, and inspires alternative approaches to cooperate with locals and other species. From this perspective, the challenge posed by Scientist Rebellion can be reframed: the failure does not lie in the act of documentation itself but in the failure to appreciate its role as a catalyst for understanding and fostering meaningful change.