(800 words, 3-minute read)

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“We keep our vigils that clouds might live” (Strand & Mark 1999, p. 24)

 

World Without Clouds was conceived for Distribute 2020, a virtual conference organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the Society for Visual Anthropology. It is an experimental, multi-modal piece of speculative fiction that considers anthropological themes for the future. Filmed only with smartphone cameras, the story revolves around five anthropologists in the years 2045-50 who are trying to save clouds from going extinct. Huge swathes of the world will experience extreme weather conditions, while places like Brazil will have been under the control of a Bolsonaro family dictatorship for over three decades. As climate change and authoritarian governments take over the Earth, these “salvage nephologists” invent and use an Ontology Machine to communicate with the last remaining clouds. They hope that these clouds would “speak back” and offer a cloud-centered way to save clouds from dying out. Not all of the nephologists agree on how best to approach the problem but time is running out. Will the clouds respond before their ultimate extinction? 

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The story draws inspiration from science-studies-inflected anthropologists like Ruha Benjamin, Kathryn Yusoff, and Jennifer Gabrys. Yusoff and Gabrys (2011) recognizes science fiction’s “ability as a narrative form to imagine an outside to scientific knowledge, while maintaining a dialectic relation to it, thus making us aware of our epistemic limitations.” The way in which we blend imagination, fantasy, and real world limitations of potential anthropological intervention is also to experiment, to pit the possible against the predictable (Mattingly 2013), with academic scholarship that refuses easy categorization into individual-authored research. We ask what kinds of new (cloud) formations might appear in the future. We flirt -- critically -- with possible anthropological logics that are rooted in century-long practices of ethnographic documentation and salvation.

 

Attention to cloud animacy engages with the many ways that clouds have become a metaphor for describing the perils and promises of connectivity in a global society. These metaphors describe data storage clouds, viral clouds, or disappearing cloud forests in a time of biodiversity loss. They are objects of meteorological science, Romantic poetry, painting, and literary contemplation of reincarnation. Clouds mutate what was previously possible and thinkable, multiplying contexts and producing a surplus that cannot be captured by existing diagnostics, unifying explanatory frameworks, or predictive models, Celia Lowe writes (2010). The cloud, as historian Projit Bihari Mukharji (2012) reminds us, eludes an analytic grasp. Incoherence, arguably, is one of the cloud’s main products.

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We are also thinking with Mel Chen’s idea of animacy, looking at “ramified sites and traces of shifting being” (2012, p. 187) to show how matter changes over time and inhabits different morphologies. Tracking these shifts in being allows analysts to appreciate endangering experiences such as pollution and contamination, in which small traces of matter appear and disappear (like a cloud), escaping regulation or detection while being animated by capitalism and nationalism. Clouds in all their ephemeral shape-shifting morphologies, invite us to sense differently: Why pay attention to clouds? What arts of noticing (Tsing 2015) do clouds invite people to engage in, and what difference does such noticing make in practice, politically, ethically, and socially? How does one describe and hold on to a ceaselessly changing entity? How have (European) humans pinned (down) clouds, both in the past and present? 

 

World Without Clouds is a collaborative product but not without its own internal dissent. During the brainstorming session, there was significant disagreement about the presentation’s ultimate aim. In its initial conception, the themes of the project critically questioned anthropology’s recent interest in the non-human and matter. The anthro-nephologists who deploy a machine that “talks” to clouds implicitly confront the question of whether or not anthropological theories about the elemental, animacy, and multispecies relations in the age of the Anthropocene are similar “ontology machines.” Such ontology machines forget the many tried and true ways that many communities have conversed with and about the weather, including indigenous folk and scientists, who are glaringly absent from the story.

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Group members pointed out that nonhuman others, including plants, rocks, and weather formations, have long been acknowledged as having an influence over human life and experiences by many indigenous communities. Our story should not leave out these narratives and it is perhaps the forgetting or ignorance of such narratives that have caused the extinction of clouds. Achieving complete resolution is not the goal of this collaboration--an issue that we wanted to show in the film itself. While the presentation tries to contain these constant disagreements, they continue to swirl and sometimes overflow the narrative structure.

 

We invite you to experience our presentation and reflect on the systems of knowledges and sensory categories that make some things more alive than others. We want to question long-standing anthropological concerns about animism, scientific knowledge, and the environment: How might anthropological inquiry involving humans and other entities look? And what are their political reverberations? How might we re-envision future political upheavals -- climate change, artificial intelligence, and authoritarian governments?

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