Different Ways of Feeling Climate Change

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Schnegg
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 565290414

Climate change is a highly emotive issue. Most of what we know about climate emotions comes from studies in the Global North that characterise the feelings of young people and activists using therapeutic categories such as 'climate anxiety', 'solastalgia' and 'grief'. But the Namibian pastoralists I spoke to about climate change mentioned none of these. Instead, people talked about 'collective loneliness' and other shared affectivities. Interestingly, many of these affectivities contain a grain of hope. This project proposes a two-step approach to understanding this. In the first step, I study emotions through people's vocabularies, not through therapeutic categories. In the second step, building on the phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Böhme, I take emotions out of the 'box' of the psyche. In this view, ecstatic relations between human and non-human bodies create atmospheres that also transcend these elements. When atmospheres are created between bodies, they can also change, for example when bodies such as rain, pasture and animals are absent in times of climate change. While the absence of some entities creates an atmosphere of loss, the loss is never final, but an in-between state, waiting to be filled by new relationships. To capture these hopeful attachments, I pay attention to projects of repair through which (some) people re-establish meaningful and hopeful relationships with an increasingly damaged environment. Through this theoretical lens, this project aims to describe different ways of feeling climate change in Namibia and to identify the conditions under which people feel one way or the other.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants