This article traces the introduction of the category of climate change into the Indian Himalaya... If the primary category this article works through is “climate change,” then the second one is “conspiracy theory”...
Conspiracy theories, according to this intuition, are bunk, bogus, irrational, the result of paranoid ideation or, frankly, just weird ”
This... follows Sheila Jasanoff in asking “what is at stake when an impersonal, apolitical, and universal imaginary of climate change, projected and endorsed by science, takes over from the subjective, situated, and normative imaginations of human actors engaging directly with nature”...
Beyond the capacious and descriptive utility of conspiracy theory, I utilize it here given its capacity to vividly express political imaginaries in South Asia...
The man-eating leopards of Chamoli
Chamoli district is severely affected by human-big cat conflict... The state claims that a total of sixty-one deaths were caused over three years by man-eating big cats in Uttarakhand...
Table 1: Official accounts from the Chief Wildlife Warden (CWW) on number of human deaths caused by Leopards in Uttarakhand.
Year | Oct–Jan (Winter) | Feb–May (Spring/ Summer) | June–Sep (Monsoon) | Total Deaths |
2004 | 19 | 4 | 4 | 27 |
2005 | 10 | 3 | 2 | 15 |
2006 | 16 | 2 | 1 | 19 |
Total | 45 (70%) | 9 (17%) | 7 (13%) | 61 |
The inexplicably aggressive Himalayan black bear
The final case study is that of the Himalayan black bear...these attacks on humans as tragically senseless for they were unprovoked and did not really result in any obvious benefit to the bear... outlining the hegemonic power acquired by “climate change" [As] Mike Hulme puts it (Hulme, M. (2014). Can science fix climate change?) ... “ a resourceful idea and a versatile explanation which can be moulded and mobilised to fulfil a bewildering array of political, social and psychological functions..."
The mortifying Himalayagate blunder by the IPCC can be read as yet another manifestation of this now-longstanding narrative of imminent crisis...pulled together by Bruno Latour... to make us rethink capitalism and the writing of history...
In The Chronicle of Higher Education,
Zoe S. Todd, a HAU contributor with 20,000 Twitter followers says:
"I am proud of the work many have done in [the] last year to dismantle the violences inherent in North Atlantic Anthro as White Public Space, as a structure of deep colonial capitalist reproduction,”
On the other hand, The Chronicle cautions that:
"Some within HAU... argued that this was all a witch hunt."
