in the face of catastrophic climate change, I am surely not alone in wondering what point there is in writing about phenomena that render thought, action, and language seemingly so futile. Yet, as an anthropologist who has lived and worked in New Zealand, Australia, Sierra Leone, Denmark, and the United States, I have spent many years exploring the practical, ritual, and conceptual ways that people create hope in even the most hopeless situations.
Experience has taught me that the loss and recovery of a sense of certainty, like the loss and recovery of faith or wellness, is sometimes enabled by scientific knowledge, sometimes by magical thinking, and that human beings typically and opportunistically switch between these alternative survival strategies. Despite knowing that we will die, we create myths of invincible heroes, beliefs in reincarnation, concepts of an afterlife, and philosophies based on incontrovertible truth. Or we split body from mind, construing the former mortal and the latter immortal.