Authors
Jessica O’Reilly
Publication date
2015/6/28
Journal
Climate cultures: anthropological perspectives on climate change
Pages
107-26
Publisher
Yale University Press
Description
As an anthropologist studying how climate science is produced, I find the IPCC to be a challenging organization to think about culturally. To do so, I work with the people who make decisions about the charts, graphs, and text that formally represent the IPCC. While the organization is peopled and placed, with predictable involvement from state governments, NGOs, and universities, the IPCC also performs a sort of cultural erasure. This erasure takes place because of, first, the disciplined scientific writing practice of removing oneself from one’s research, in an attempt to limit bias, and second, the Latourian notion that when one tracks scientific publications all the way to their barest essence—to data, numbers, and citations—it is not people who are revealed but nature itself (Latour 1990). Citations also point to networks that the reference is embedded in, shaping objects and subjects in a particular way, glossed over …
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