Introduction: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change

Abstract

Contemporary Amerindian communities, as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (The Ends of the World. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2017) indicate, with their sustainable technologies open to complex syncretic assemblages, and modest human population sizes, could be considered “one of the possible chances of a subsistence of the future” (2016: 123). In this volume, we consult such communities on whether the world is ending, whether and why it has ended before, and how we can change contemporary practice to make it sustainable. We consider how these communities are ‘equivocating’ their views in cosmopolitical arenas, and compare attempts by modern scientists to create cross-cultural rapprochement. Relationships are fundamentally constitutive of the landscapes described, composed of cross-species networks of interacting agentive actors, visible and invisible. The communities clearly concur that worlds end when we do not respect the spirits and other species layered into landscapes, and indeed within what modernity might term ‘natural resources’. Sharing with other humans and animals that partake in these relational networks is key to entertaining their approval. Animist views, or relational landscapes, are crucial to shaping the sustainable lifestyles, everyday practices and survival of these ‘people of the future’.