AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

A Changing Climate for Anthropological and Archaeological

Research? Improving the Climate-Change Models

Paul Roscoe

ABSTRACT Climate change is the latest in a dismaying series of challenges that industrialism and modernity have

gifted to humanity. To date, anthropological and archaeological responses have focused largely on the culturally

particular—that is, on the interactions of climate, environment, cultural schema, and social systems in specific

locales and eras. In this article, I urge a complementary response that capitalizes on archaeology and anthropology’s

holistic and universalistic investigative aspirations and expertise. For two decades, the Intergovernmental Panel

on Climate Change (IPCC) has overseen major efforts to model human social dynamics and their implications for

future climate change. These models are technically sophisticated but economically reductionist and substantively

crude. Here, I review these efforts and provide three examples of how established and future archaeological and

anthropological research could improve them. Recent changes to the IPCC’s modeling regime make this an opportune

moment for such a project. [climate change, climate modeling, IPCC, emissions scenarios]

RESUMEN El cambio climatico es el ultimo en una serie de preocupantes retos que el industrialismo y la modernidad

le han regalado a la humanidad. Hasta la fecha, las respuestas antropologicas y arqueologicas se han centrado

largamente en lo culturalmente particular—es decir, en las interacciones de clima, ambiente, esquema cultural, y

sistemas sociales en locales y eras especıficos. En este artıculo, urjo una respuesta complementaria que capitalice

en el conocimiento y las aspiraciones investigativas holısticas y universalistas de la arqueologıa y la antropologıa. Por

dos decadas, el Panel Intergubernamental sobre Cambio Climatico (IPCC) ha monitoreado grandes esfuerzos para

modelar dinamicas sociales y sus implicaciones para el cambio climatico futuro. Estos modelos son tecnicamente

sofisticados pero economicamente reduccionistas y substantivamente aproximados. Aquı, reviso estos esfuerzos y

proveo tres ejemplos de como investigacion arqueologica y antropologica establecida y futura los podrıa mejorar.

Cambios recientes al regimen de modelizacion del IPCC hace este un momento oportuno para tal proyecto. [cambio

climatico, modelizacion climatica, IPCC, escenarios de emisiones]

I n less than nine decades, if nothing is done, global meantemperature could rise by 3½ –4°C or more. Higher

latitudes will see 20 percent more precipitation; Africa andsouthern Europe, 20 percent less. The intensity and fre-quency of heat waves, flooding, and tropical cyclones willhave increased; the Arctic ice cap likely will have vanished,along with 30 percent of the world’s coastal wetlands; and30 percent of all species will be teetering on the edge of

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 116, No. 3, pp. 535–548, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2014 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12115

extinction (Pachauri and Reisinger 2007; see also Andersonand Bows 2011; New et al. 2011). Or maybe not. The at-mosphere may have warmed by no more than 1.9°C, withonly modest changes in the distribution of precipitation, thefrequency of extreme weather events, sea-level rise, andecosystemic damage (Pachauri and Reisinger 2007).

These are uncomfortably large uncertainties to enter-tain about so existential a potential threat, and they stem

536 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 3 • September 2014

FIGURE 1. IPCC modeling of GGEs and their impacts.

from severe limitations in the models used to project andmanage climate change and its effects. These models areof two kinds: physical models of climate and environmen-tal dynamics, and social models of human processes thatdrive or are affected by climate change. Past reports of theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pro-vide an example of how physical and human models getlinked together to predict climate futures (Figure 1). Theprocess begins with a model of global society that projectshow greenhouse gas emissions (GGEs) will develop over thecourse of the 21st century (see Figure 1, left-hand box).These projections are then fed into physical climate modelsto produce a range of scenarios about future temperatures,precipitation regimes, and other climate phenomena (seeFigure 1, center box). These outputs, in turn, serve as inputto still-other human and physical models to assess the effectson physical and biological environments and on humans (seeFigure 1, right-hand boxes; see also IPCC 2007).

There are major shortcomings in both the physicaland human models used to project climate change andits effects. Uncertainties about the dynamics of ocean-atmosphere heat and carbon transfer, for instance, aremajor challenges in modeling the physical climate, and thereare clear deficiencies also in models of sea-level rise (e.g.,Rahmstorf et al. 2012; see also Lahsen 2005:897–901).These complications are dwarfed, though, by the difficultiesof modeling human society and its developmental dynamics.Human thought and behavior are as complex as anyphenomenon in the natural world; the social sciences haveas yet only a limited purchase on their workings; andresearch to improve them “remains a ‘cottage industry’with very little funding and few mechanisms in place tobuild the international and interdisciplinary communityneeded to discipline ungrounded conjectures with carefulempirical analysis” (Rosa and Dietz 2012:4).

Faced with these deficiencies, IPCC researchers reliedin the past on “explorative” scenarios to forecast futureGGEs. Scenarios are “stories” that mix qualitative narra-tives with quantitative modeling; explorative scenarios are astrategy that manages uncertainties about the future by map-ping out all—or, at least, all of the more probable—thingsthat could happen (Borjeson et al. 2006:725). To produce

these explorative scenarios, the IPCC contracted the In-ternational Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA),a nongovernmental operational research institute based inLaxenburg, Austria, and the results appeared as the Spe-cial Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES; see Nakicenovic andSwart 2000). The SRES is a triumph of technical sophisti-cation, but its modeling of human social dynamics accountsfor a large fraction of our current uncertainties about fu-ture global warming. Over the course of the 21st century,the SRES projected, total cumulative carbon emissions fromall sources could be as little as 770 GtC or as high as 2,540GtC, a difference of more than 300 percent (Nakicenovic andSwart 2000).

A number of anthropologists and other social scientistshave critiqued these sorts of modeling exercises, examiningamong other things how they are socially produced, the dis-tribution of certainty that surrounds them, how they helpmanufacture consent in the face of scientific uncertainty, andhow—despite these uncertainties—they become authorita-tive instruments of social policy (e.g., Hastrup and Skryd-strup 2013; Lahsen 2005; Rayner and Malone 1998:59–74).These are necessary and useful critiques and carry particularforce when applied to the SRES’s human models, where thetechnical sophistication that confers authority helps to maskthe analytical shortcomings at their core.

For archaeology and anthropology, though, these lim-itations are an opportunity for more than critique alone.To date, the balance of anthropological and archaeolog-ical research on climate change has focused on the cul-turally particular: that is, on the interactions of climate,environment, cultural schema, and social systems in partic-ular locales and eras (e.g., Castro et al. 2012; Crate 2011;Crate and Nuttall 2009; Fagan 2000; Hastrup 2009; Hastrupand Fog Elwig 2012; McGovern 1994; Orlove et al. 2008;Schwartz 1957). As disciplines holistic in their theoreti-cal aspirations, and cross-cultural and transtemporal in theirempirical reach, however, anthropology and archaeology arealso ideally positioned to improve the human models used inclimate-change simulations (see also Barnes et al. 2013). It isnaıve, of course, to imagine that any discipline could modelwith precision the dynamics of human social life. However,there are multiple areas in which we can pare down some of

Roscoe • Improving Climate-Change Models 537

the capacious uncertainties associated with current modelsof humanity’s role in and response to climate change.

A central problem with the SRES and other humanscenario projects is the disciplinary reductionism at theircore. IIASA emissions scenarios were developed primarilyby economists, econometricians, and operations analysts,and they essentially reduced human society to its economicdomain, deploying variables such as economic and popula-tion growth, technological and infrastructural development,and land use and land cover that are easily quantified andarticulated with physical models of climate dynamics. Re-flecting “the extraordinary place that economics currentlyholds in the social sciences,” where “it is treated as a kind ofmaster discipline” (Graeber 2012:90), technocratic policy-making has now all but “naturalized” this kind of economicreductionism. The problematic effect, though, is to allowdomain-specific knowledge, methods, and techniques to de-fine what is (and by default what is not) relevant to under-standing human–climate interactions (Orlove 2009:160–161; Rayner and Malone 1998:61). The impact of otherrealms of human thought and behavior—the psychological,social, political, and ideological—are treated either as uncer-tainties or as though they had no autonomous effects at all onGGE production or the human response to climate change.As Eugene Rosa and Thomas Dietz (2012:4) observe, evenreasonably robust findings about the social, political, and ide-ological drivers of GGEs have had no perceptible influenceon IPCC emissions scenarios.

Neil Adger and colleagues identify a major reason forthese failures and omissions: “Methods for studying culturetend to be qualitative, frequently including ethnography andparticipant observation, and data from these methods donot sit comfortably with the quantitative approaches preva-lent in other social and natural science on climate change”(2012:112). These methodological differences, though, areless of a challenge for scenario construction, which reliesheavily on qualitative “narratives” and therefore provides anatural portal for incorporating the less-quantifiable findingsof disciplines like anthropology and archaeology.

To illustrate how our disciplines might contribute tosuch a project, I provide three examples of how establishedand future disciplinary research could shrink two major un-certainties at the core of SRES efforts to envision futureGGEs. The first illustrates how existing anthropological andarchaeological knowledge of past and present human systemsmight have reduced a key SRES uncertainty about futureglobal economic trajectories. The two other examples con-cern areas of anthropological and archaeological research thatcould substantially reduce a second major SRES uncertainty:the degree to which concerns about the environment willmoderate future economic growth. I suggest that researchon the dynamics of human status competition, its culturalrefractions, and the circumstances under which it manifestsas consumerism could illuminate one of the most powerfuldrivers of future economic growth. Concomitantly, cross-cultural research on the role of human ideological systems in

shaping perceptions of the environment in general and theclimate in particular is a prerequisite for gauging the impor-tance that humans will attach to protecting the environment.In conclusion, I suggest a few of many other ways in whichanthropological and archaeological findings could improvethe IPCC’s emissions scenarios and inform the generation ofless reductive, more holistic scenario frames.

It is an opportune moment to consider such propos-als because the Fifth IPCC Assessment Reports, which havejust appeared, seek to accelerate the scenario developmentprocess by opening it up to a broader, interdisciplinary re-search community (Inman 2011; Moss et al. 2010). Thevehicle for the new strategy is a new climate scenario suite,the representative concentration pathways (RCPs), whichare normative rather than explorative scenarios (Borjeson etal. 2006:725). Instead of addressing what could happen toGGEs in the future as the SRES attempted, they “backcast”from imagined GGE futures to assess how different globaldevelopments and policy decisions might take the worlddown one climate-change path rather than another.

The social dimensions of the new scenario suite haveyet to be detailed, and it is for this reason that I focus hereon the SRES scenarios to demonstrate how anthropologicaland archaeological research can improve human models ofclimate change. The SRES case, however, remains relevantto the new RCP scenario suite. Although modelers willuse the RCPs to backcast from the future, whereas theSRES scenarios sought to forecast the future, the backcastingexercise still relies on human models of GGEs. These modelsare called the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), and toget their development underway, it has been proposed thatthey incorporate major components of the SRES scenarios(e.g., O’Neill et al. 2014:388–389, 397; see also Hallegatteet al. 2011:152–154; Kriegler et al. 2012:812–819).

PROJECTING CLIMATE FUTURES FROM THE PASTTo project future anthropogenic GGEs, SRES researchersstarted from a premise that their principal drivers arepopulation trends, technological change, energy demands,economic development, and agriculture and land use. Theteam constructed 40 scenarios to explore how these driversmight develop and interact over the 21st century. Theygrouped them into four qualitative “storylines” that capturedwhat they saw as two key uncertainties about the future. Onewas the degree to which national economies will “converge”in the coming decades, producing a “homogeneous” world,or “diverge” to create a “heterogeneous” one. The otheruncertainty was the extent to which nations will seek tobalance environmental concerns against economic growth.Storyline A1 envisioned rapid economic growth coupledwith global economic convergence; A2, slow economicgrowth and little or no convergence; B1, global solutionsto economic, social, and environmental sustainability,combined with economic convergence; and B2, a worldof regional economic fragmentation and intermediateeconomic growth (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:169–170,

538 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 3 • September 2014

179–183). Future GGEs and temperatures generally rosehigher and faster under the A1 and A2 storylines than underthe B1 and B2 storylines (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:7).

Critical evaluation of these scenarios has centered largelyon technical issues such as the exchange rates used for in-ternational comparisons, assumptions about future fossil-fuel availability, and how to refine scenario spatial scalesfor use in local and regional analyses (e.g., Castles andHenderson 2003; Gaffin et al. 2004; Hook et al. 2010).From an anthropological perspective, though, the more ar-resting deficiencies stem from the strict economic approachthey adopted in modeling human action.

Consider, for instance, the first key uncertainty thatstructured the SRES storylines: the degree to which nationaleconomies would “converge” or “diverge” in the 21st cen-tury. To calculate future GGEs, the SRES team used theso-called IPAT (or Kaya) identity, one component of whichis “affluence” or “economic development” (measured as percapita GDP) (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:105). The un-certainty involved the degree to which per capita economicproductivity in less developed regions of the world would“converge” over time toward that of industrialized countriesto produce a “homogenous world” as opposed to persistingat (or even deteriorating from) current levels of dispar-ity, resulting in a “heterogeneous world” (Nakicenovic andSwart 2000:169–174).

The SRES researchers saw “convergence” resulting fromadvances in transport and communication technologies; in-creased social and cultural interactions; growth in interna-tional mobility of people, ideas, and technologies; and thedevelopment of national and international institutions thatenhance productivity growth and technology diffusion. Theyassociated a “heterogeneous world” with a stasis in, or rever-sal of, these infrastructural, institutional, and internationaldevelopments. Because they deemed it uncertain whether—and to what degree—the world would follow a convergent,static, or divergent path, they therefore managed the uncer-tainty through explorative scenarios that sought to map outall of the possibilities (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:177–183).

To this end, the team surveyed a range of academic,commercial, and “educated layperson” literature that at-tempted to predict the course of future world developmentsbased on recent and contemporary global affairs. Thesesources varied from UNESCO’s World Culture Report of1998 and Samuel Huntington’s (1996) Clash of Civilizations(which appears to have heavily influenced global fragmen-tation scenarios), through works and scenario constructionsby journalists, corporations, and popular press pundits,to the writings of Teilhard de Chardin (Nakicenovic andSwart 2000:173, 179–183). As best as can be ascertained,however, the team failed to consult a single source from theenormous anthropological and archaeological literature thatexists on the direction and processes of human social-culturaldevelopment over the course of the Holocene. It was an un-fortunate omission. These works identify the essential social

and cultural processes responsible for economic divergenceor convergence, and equipped with such a tool kit, the SRESteam could have markedly reduced its uncertainties aboutthe trajectory of global economic inequities. The last fewcenturies have seen polities converge economically, not re-main static or diverge, and there are theoretical reasons tobelieve this trend will continue into the future.

The Holocene, as archaeology and anthropology longago established, has seen a geometric expansion in the ter-ritorial and demographic scale of human social systems andthe reach of economic, social, political, and ideological re-lationships. Hundreds of thousands of small, egalitarian for-ager communities that existed 10,000 years ago have sinceconsolidated into just 200 politically centralized nations.Economic, social, political, and ideological relationships thatonce extended no farther than to a handful of nearby commu-nities now reach across the face of the earth. Going forward,some scholars speculate that the entire human race couldbecome a single political entity within 500 to 3,000 years(Carneiro 1978; Hart 1948; Marano 1973; Naroll 1967;Peregrine et al. 2004).

The dynamics of this expansion and integration have yetto be fully understood, but there is wide agreement thatit was the product of enlightened self-interests that gener-ated cooperation and collective action, egocentric intereststhat promoted exploitation and coercion, or both (for re-views, see Carballo et al. 2014; Claessen and Skalnık 1978).Throughout the Holocene, at least some individuals andsome collectivities have had interests in expanding the struc-tures and networks of relationship in which they were em-bedded to capitalize on economies of scale, markets andprofits, increased defensive strength, political or militaryreach and power, or congregations and religious influence.These expansionist and integrative pressures have sometimesprovoked spatially and temporally localized resistance, butno interests ever seem to have emerged that created anequally persistent, universal pressure toward global stasis orfragmentation.

Over time, agents and groups with interests in systemicand relational expansion have managed to transform theseinterests into a social reality through humanity’s increasingcapacity to interact with other humans. In the first half ofthe Holocene, when human interaction was face-to-face andbrought about largely on foot, the principal vector of inter-actional expansion was demographic packing. By reducingtravel times required to effect human interaction, increas-ing population density, nucleation, or both expanded thenumber of agents potentially capable of interacting with oneanother, facilitating a demographic increase in social systemsize (Roscoe 2013).

In the latter half of the Holocene, mechanisms of time-space compression—developments in transportation andcommunication that “reduced the friction of distance andfacilitated interactions among places” (Warf 2011:435)—greatly expanded not just the number of agents capableof interacting but also the range, nature, and scalability of

Roscoe • Improving Climate-Change Models 539

their interactions. Technological and organizational innova-tions in transportation (the horse, wind and mechanicallypowered watercraft, automobile, rail, and air) expandedthe range of face-to-face interaction. Similar developmentsin communication (signaling, writing, printing, radio, TV,and the Internet) facilitated the time-space “distanciation”of interaction (Giddens 1984). For the first time, social ac-tivity could be disconnected from face-to-face interaction,facilitating the “stretching” of social systems and relation-ships across time-space. For their part, printing and elec-tronic communications greatly amplified the capacity forinteractional scaling—that is, the ability of one agent to in-teract simultaneously with many others (Roscoe 2013; seeHarvey 1990:260–307, for some of the cultural implica-tions).

Motivated by human interests in expansion, these in-frastructural and institutional developments confer the di-rectionality we see in human social-cultural developmentthrough the Holocene: a consistent trend toward ever morepopulous, territorially extensive, and organizationally com-plex social systems and toward ever more wide-rangingsocial relationships.

The implications of these social-cultural processes foreconomic convergence–divergence have received little an-thropological or archaeological attention, and as a result,they are poorly understood. One plausible scenario, how-ever, suggests a complex trajectory, one dominated initiallyby increasing economic heterogeneity but then transitioningto economic convergence.

Although it seems antic to apply capitalist concepts ofeconomic productivity to deep history, the human economicworld was relatively “homogenous” (in SRES terms) un-til the beginning of the Holocene because hunter-gatherereconomies were universal. As the Holocene progressed,though, some systems developed intensified levels of eco-nomic production and complexity, resulting in a hetero-geneity that escalated as time passed. This heterogeneitywould have reached an apogee around the time when thefirst intensive agricultural states emerged. At this point,these states would have constituted the high productivitypole of a spectrum of economic regimes that had low pro-ductivity hunter-gatherers at the other end and pastoralistsand extensive cultivators in between.

Having driven the emergence of economic heterogene-ity, however, the processes propelling political integrationwould now cause the economic trend to reverse, fromdivergence to convergence. This is because the numberof human systems on the planet is finite and because, asthey expand, systems with higher economic productivity(states) swallow up and incorporate the dwindling numberof smaller scale, lower productivity systems that remain.1

A homogenous world that began as tens of thousands oflow productivity systems before diverging into marked eco-nomic heterogeneity, in other words, is now converg-ing toward a homogenous world of higher productivitysystems.

FIGURE 2. Drivers and mechanisms of convergence. (Mechanisms of time-

space compression are developments in transportation and communication

that facilitate human interactions at a distance.)

On theoretical grounds, it is difficult to pinpoint whenthis reversal occurred. Certainly, though, the incorpora-tion of low productivity systems into high productivityones would have been underway some time before inno-vations in communication and transportation had enabledat least some industrializing states to extend their impe-rial, incorporative reach around the globe. Angus Maddi-son’s (2007:382) widely cited—albeit contested—historicalestimates of inter-regional spreads in per capita GDP sug-gest, in fact, that it occurred sometime between 1820 and1950.

The processes that drove these developments remainoperative today, and there is no obvious analytical reasonwhy they should halt or reverse in coming decades. At leastsome humans and collectivities continue to have interestsin expanding the systems and networks in which they areembedded, and these interests, in turn, motivate the preser-vation and improvement of the time-space mechanisms thattransform them into a social reality. The result is a systemin which economic convergence seems more probable overthe next century than stasis or divergence (Figure 2).

Although the macro trend is now toward economic con-vergence, it might be objected that stochastic “noise” in thetrend can lead to short-term reversals. History and prehis-tory are replete with instances of localized “collapse.” Priorto 1900, Akkadian, Angkor, Mayan, Roman, Ottoman, andmany other kingdoms and empires peaked and then de-clined. The 20th century, the era during which we havereason to believe that global economic productivity began toconverge, has in fact seen the number of independent nationsrise, not fall, as colonial nations surrendered their empires atmidcentury and the Soviet Union collapsed toward the cen-tury’s end. Depending on definitions, in fact, the number ofautonomous political entities in the world may have almostquadrupled, from 55 in 1900 to 192 in 1999 (Graber 2004).Economic convergence may be the long-term rule, but per-haps the SRES was correct to conclude that economic stasisor divergence is just as likely over the shorter term?

540 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 3 • September 2014

This conclusion seems unlikely. The political events ofthe 20th century—and, arguably, the “collapse” of civiliza-tions in other centuries, too (McAnany and Yoffee 2010)—were hardly as transformational as terms like collapse or aquadrupling in polity numbers suggest, and their economiceffects were less dramatic yet. The political changes of the20th century involved political realignments and reorganiza-tion but not massive political and economic disintegrationsor systemic “devolution.” Leaders, governmental forms, andbalances of power changed, but centralized organs of gov-ernance persisted. Networks of relationships that connectedthese institutions to one another and to foreign powers wereoften radically redrawn, but they were not erased. Con-comitantly, although these changes clearly had economicimplications, economic structures and organizations largelyremained in place, with only limited effects on per capitaeconomic productivity and global economic convergence.

The effects of these disruptions on global economicconvergence were also diluted by those political entitiesthat did not fracture over the course of the 20th centurybut, rather, continued their systemic expansion and inte-gration. Furthermore, the century saw numerous suprana-tional political and military blocs emerge and expand: theLeague of Nations, the United Nations, the North AtlanticTreaty Organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organiza-tion, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Peaceand Security Council, and a host of other alliances. On this“supranational” scale, in fact, the number of political blocs or“federations” in the world dropped from 55 in 1900 to justfour in 1999 (Graber 2004:153). At the economic level, inthe meantime, innovations in automobile and air travel andin electronic communications vastly expanded the interna-tional economic institutions and global economic integrationthat the SRES saw as promoting economic convergence. Inrecent decades, the European Union, the World Trade Or-ganization, and numerous other trade blocs have arisen andexpanded. Business corporations have moved from nationalto multinational platforms, with some seemingly on theverge of transcending national boundaries altogether. Theresults are as we might predict. Despite the imperial “col-lapses” that characterized the latter half of the 20th century,Maddison’s data (2007:382) show inter-regional spreads inglobal per capita GDP slowly converging from 21.3:1 in1950 to 18.2:1 in 2006.

Concerned with credibility issues, SRES authors stressedthat none of their scenarios should be considered a “mostlikely, ‘central,’ or ‘best-guess’ scenario” (Nakicenovic andSwart 2000:11). “All are equally valid,” they explained, “withno assigned probabilities of occurrence” (Nakicenovic andSwart 2000:4). They acknowledged that past scenario workpredominantly favored a “globalization” storyline—a con-vergent future—but they defended their equal weighting ofthe A2 and B2 storylines on the basis that some scenario workprojected the reverse (Nakicenovic and Swart 2000:173).

This studied neutrality, David Groves and RobertLempert (2007:74) complain, did a disservice to policy mak-

FIGURE 3. Estimated CO2 emissions and SRES marker scenarios, 2000–

2010. (Note: Annual industrial CO2 emissions in gigatons of carbon per

year [GtC yr−1] for 2000–2010 [black dots] fall between the A1B and

B1 Marker Scenarios [CDIAC 2013; Manning et al. 2010; Nakicenovic

and Swart 2000].)

ers, the media, and the public because it suggested that futuregrowth in GGEs and global warming would as likely be min-imal as it would be dire. Placing the SRES scenarios withinan anthropological and archaeological understanding of theprocesses driving economic development also suggests it wasa mistake. Although we cannot be certain that convergencewill characterize the remainder of the 21st century, thisbackground knowledge indicates it is far more probable thannot. Absent an asteroid strike, a thermonuclear holocaust,an abrupt climate change, or some other global catastro-phe of the kind that the SRES explicitly excluded fromtheir modeling, emissions scenarios based on the A1 and B1storylines—those that foresee economic convergence—aremore realistic than those developed from the A2 and B2storylines, which envision economic stasis or divergence.

This conclusion, as it happens, finds support in CO2

emissions over the decade since the SRES’s projections firstappeared (Figure 3). Between 2000 and 2010, emissionswere in line with the A1 and B1 rather than the A2 and B2marker scenarios, a finding thrown into even-starker reliefbecause the SRES was charged with assuming the counter-factual that no climate mitigation efforts would be enactedduring this period.

A CONSUMING ISSUE: STATUS COMPETITION ASA DRIVER OF GGESThe global convergence–divergence issue demonstrates howeven basic anthropological and archaeological knowledgecould have improved the SRES’s emissions projections. Inthis and the next section of this article, I consider how furthercross-cultural and transtemporal research might inform the

Roscoe • Improving Climate-Change Models 541

second key uncertainty in its modeling: the degree to whicha 21st-century world will emphasize affluence and economicgrowth over environmental sustainability, or vice versa. Inthis section, I focus on the dynamics of economic growth andon how a better understanding of status competition (vari-ously referred to also as status rivalry, status seeking, envyprovocation, and contests for position) and its role in humanaffairs could improve our ability to forecast (and perhapsmitigate) the growth and spread of consumerism, one ofthe more environmentally destructive drivers of economicgrowth. In the next section, I briefly consider research thatwould inform our capacity to model attitudes to climate-sensitive sustainability initiatives.

Consumerism is arguably the most potent driver of an-thropogenic GGEs: it is so powerful, Richard Wilk warns,that we risk “consuming ourselves to death” (2009; see alsoWilk 1997). The key question, Wilk observes, is this:

What makes human wants and needs grow? How do things that wereonce distant luxuries—say, hot water—become basic necessitiesthat people expect on demand for civilized life . . . ? Air condition-ing in personal automobiles, an expensive and uncommon optionjust twenty years ago, is now standard—even on cars sold north ofthe Arctic Circle in Norway! Why do Western consumers expecttheir standard of living to keep rising? [2009:268, emphasis inoriginal]

“Anthropology,” Wilk continues, is well positioned to grap-ple with these questions because it provides “the scope andsweep of time to step back and offer a bigger picture ofhow the human species got itself into its present dilemma ofrapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions” (2009:268; seealso Mullins 2011).

If we knew why wants and needs grow over time,it would clearly enhance our ability to predict futuregrowth in global economic and GGE rates. Unfortunately,even the terms themselves—wants and needs—carry stagger-ingly complex philosophical baggage (see, e.g., Rayner andMalone 1998: ch. 3). Not least, they are polyvalent in ev-eryday language, referring among other things to both thedesires experienced by an agent and the goods and servicesperceived as satisfying those desires. Adopting the latter us-age, however, we may observe that wants and needs varyin their expansionary dynamics: some increase at a fasterrate than others, with more serious implications for climatechange if their production, consumption, and disposal gen-erates GGEs.

In industrialized nations, desires for existential wantsand needs such as food and water and utilitarian de-sires for goods and services such as hot water and air-conditioning have clearly increased over time. However,status competition—the impulse to maintain social-politicalstanding (“keeping up with the Joneses” in Western cul-ture), to achieve superior status or prestige (“keeping aheadof the Joneses”), or both—provokes wants and needs thatare intrinsically more vulnerable to inflation (Kempton andPayne 1997). One can consume only so much water, food,heating, cooling, and other existential and utilitarian goods

and services, but one can never have enough of those com-modities that confer status. If status comes from taking heads,distributing pigs, or possessing luxury cars or private jets,for instance, each additional or higher quality head, pig,or extravagant vehicle has as much value or more than theprevious one. If esteem comes from ritual purity, each addi-tional quantum of pureness is as—or more—valuable thanthe last and so on. Even if the aim is only to keep up with theJoneses rather than outdo them, status competition guaran-tees its own intensification: as others catch up with them,the Joneses are motivated to ratchet up the stakes, primingthe cycle to repeat and expanding the level of commoditiesrequired to satisfy status aspirations.

All of this would matter little to climate change if thesatisfaction of status aspirations had negligible effects onGGEs—and for most contemporary and past societies, thisis (or was) the case. In many aquatically adapted lowlandcommunities of contact-era New Guinea, for instance, head-hunting was the dominant mode of male status competition,but its impact on GGEs was negligible and possibly even neg-ative given its effects on regional population levels. Othermodes of status competition have only modestly greaterGGE implications. Among the Northern Abelam of NewGuinea, males produced (largely inedible) long yams to gainstatus, but the forest area cleared and burned—and hencethe GGEs generated—were no more than about 12 percentof that required for subsistence production (Lea 1964:96).

Matters are very different in the Anglo-American world,wherein the principal mode of status competition is con-spicuous consumption. The GGEs generated by this modeof status competition are all but impossible to estimate:quite apart from the gargantuan scale of the accountingrequired, there is the methodological difficulty of differ-entiating status-related and nonstatus consumption desires.Suffice it to say, the per capita GGEs that consumerismgenerates dwarf those associated with status competitionin small-scale societies. Consumer societies chew throughresources at intensifying velocities as fashions and trends—in clothes, cars, household appliances, interior decoration,and so on—result in the disposal of many goods long be-fore their utilitarian life is over. This “improvidence” likelyaccounts for a sizeable chunk of the difference in per capitaGGEs (measured as CO2 equivalent for 2005) between theUnited States and Canada (26 tons) and Europe (11 tons),on the one hand, and South Asia (3 tons), Africa (4 tons),and Latin America (8 tons), on the other hand (Pachauri andReisinger 2007:37).

Sociology and psychology have both identified thedynamics of status competition in consumerist societyas an important area for future climate change research(APA 2010:37–40; Nagel et al. 2009:15, 47, 87), andanthropology and archaeology are uniquely positioned toadvance these enquiries. As Wilk observes, we have al-ready amassed “magnificent cross-cultural and long-termdata on human societies” that can be used “to think syn-thetically about the problem of growth and consumption”

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(Wilk 2009:269). Combining this databank with furthertargeted archival, archaeological, and ethnographic investi-gations, we can address four issues critical to forecasting(and perhaps mitigating) future climate change.

First, we need to clarify the terminological thicket thatsurrounds the concepts of status and status competition.It is far from clear whether terms such as status, repu-tation, dominance, distinction, prestige, fame, symbolic capital,and so on should be treated as synonyms for a single phe-nomenon or (more probably) as referents to more than one(e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Henrich and Gil-White 2001:166–167; Hill 1984). Second, we need to consider the follow-ing question: Why do humans manifest status competition?Ethnographic reports suggest that some form of status andstatus competition are either universal or nearly so. If thisis so, what role do they play in human life? To what ex-tent is the pursuit of status an enculturated (and thereforepotentially labile) trait as opposed to a genetically encoded(and therefore less flexible) behavior? Social scientists havedevoted a lot of attention to these questions, but as yetthere is little agreement on answers (but see, e.g., Alexan-der 1987; Bliege Bird and Smith 2005; Henrich and Gil-White 2001; Panchanathan and Boyd 2004; Riches 1984;Roscoe 2009:103–105; von Rueden et al. 2011). Third,we must explore these queries: How has status competitionevolved in the course of human history, and what conditionsintensify or moderate it? The pursuit of status appears tointensify with the scale of social and political systems, butthis trend has yet to be empirically confirmed or explained.

Currently, very little empirical or analytical attentionhas been paid to the fourth issue, the one most relevant toclimate change: Why is status competition refracted into dif-ferent forms in different societies—headhunting, as opposedto pig production, as opposed to consumerism? Ethnographicevidence indicates that, in any one community, humans mayaccrue status through a range of channels, but a subset of theseinvariably receives particular cultural emphasis. Material dis-tributions and warriorhood, for instance, seem to be espe-cially prominent pursuits in small-scale societies (Haydenand Villeneuve 2011; Roscoe 2000:89–91); consumerism isthe favored channel in U.S. and European nations. Why dodifferent communities emphasize different avenues to status?Within a community, moreover, what determines an indi-vidual’s pursuit of one mode rather than another? Althoughconspicuous consumption dominates the pursuit of status inthe United States, for instance, some citizens nonetheless ab-jure consumption, pursuing status through spiritual avenuesor competing to be seen as environmentally conscious.2

Answers to these questions are of intrinsic value to an-thropology and archaeology, but consumerism is so potent adriver of GGEs that they are particularly important if we areto robustly model the human dimensions of climate-changeprediction. A robust theory of the conditions under whichconsumerism becomes a dominant mode of status compe-tition would substantially improve our ability to forecastwhether and at what pace consumerism, economic growth,

and GGE production will spread under the forces of glob-alization (Wilk 1997). It could also illuminate the dynamicsand climate implications of an entirely new phenomenon: theglobalization of status competition. In the last few decades,mechanisms of time-space compression have expanded thesphere of competition from national to global scales, with thepotential to intensify vastly both status competition (e.g., byplacing elaborate homes around the world) and economicgrowth rates.

As a further benefit, a solid theory of status might il-luminate ways of channeling consumerism and other GGE-intensive modes of status competition into less atmospher-ically damaging forms (though see Isenhour 2012 for aSwedish example of the challenges involved). For the samestatus increment, for instance, collecting artwork producesfewer GGEs than possessing a Hummer or a private jet. Sucha project has to be sensitive to class issues: academic elites,who traffic in cultural capital themselves, must be carefulto avoid treating materialism as “a vulgar form of status-claiming” (Holt 2000:246–248). Even so, psychological re-search does seem to show that materialistic values—“I shop,therefore I am,” as the ironic slogan has it—can be detrimen-tal to measures of subjective well-being. Policies to reduceconsumerist-driven status competition therefore could havepayoffs not only for the planet but also for consumeristagents themselves (APA 2010:37–40; see also Kempton andPayne 1997).

THE IDEOLOGICAL CLIMATEThe second key uncertainty generating the SRES’s fourstorylines was concerned not just with rates of global eco-nomic growth in the 21st century but also with whether—and to what degree—the world would balance that growthagainst concerns with environmental sustainability. Havingbriefly reviewed archaeological and anthropological researchthat could illuminate the former, I turn now to research thatmight advance our understanding of the latter. What shapesattitudes toward environmental sustainability in general andtoward climate sustainability in particular?

The SRES’s terms of reference stipulated that its sce-narios should not take into account future GGE mitigationinitiatives, the idea being to establish baseline global warm-ing forecasts against which to measure the effectiveness offuture climate policies. In referring to the value that a futureworld might place on environmental sustainability, in otherwords, the report had in mind protection of the environ-ment in general, not the atmosphere in particular. With thepending transition to RCPs, however, scenario developmentwill now include climate mitigation policies (a change thatwas central, in fact, to favoring normative over explorativescenarios in the forthcoming reports [Inman 2011]).

Whether aimed at the environment or the atmosphere,current sustainability policies remain dismayingly blind tocultural difference. The IPCC’s mitigation reports, for in-stance, seem to presume that political and technocratic elitesin the non-Anglo-American world will function as successful

Roscoe • Improving Climate-Change Models 543

cultural brokers to enact climate policies developed primar-ily in Anglo-American cultural worlds. Even in Europe andthe United States, however, governing elites confront beliefand value systems that are unreceptive, if not hostile, to cli-mate policies. An understanding of cultural schema—localunderstandings of the material and social worlds and howthey work—is thus critical to sustainability efforts and, inthe case of climate, to forecasting future climate change.

To be effective, climate-mitigation policies have to en-gage the populations they target, which requires in turn thatthey be tuned to local cultural models, their dynamics, andhow they shape perceptions of the environment and cli-mate. For this to work, a population must recognize at aminimum that (a) climate can potentially change; (b) humanactions can precipitate these changes; (c) human actions canmitigate them; and (d) mitigation policies are viable andlegitimate. If a local cosmology fails to validate even oneof these conditions, then a community will see no reasonto moderate its climate-changing activities. Despite expo-sure to media narratives that they may soon become climaterefugees, for instance, very few residents of Funafuti Atoll inTuvalu are reportedly interested in emigrating because of areligious conviction that God will not break the promise Hemade, following the Biblical deluge, never to flood the Earthagain (Mortreux and Barnett 2009:109–110). Among U.S.Evangelicals who acknowledge the reality of climate change,attitudes are split between those who view mitigation asordained by Christ’s command to “be proper stewards ofHis creation” and others who see climate change as a signof the End Times to be accepted or encouraged rather thanmitigated (Peifer et al. 2014). Cosmologies may also af-fect people’s responses to climate change. If climate changeproves abrupt or severe, many communities may locate thecauses in moral transgressions or apocalyptic prophesy andthe solutions in redemptive eschatology. These communi-ties will probably not be enchanted with mitigation policiesadvocating reductions in carboniferous fuel use.

The conclusions here are obvious. If climate mitigationpolicies are to work, they must attend to local worldviews—in particular, how locals conceptualize climate, weather, andtheir dynamics. Ethnographers have already amassed a largequantity of ethnometeorological data on numerous com-munities around the world, and more recently anthropolo-gists have conducted nuanced field research focused specifi-cally on cultural models of climate (for reviews, see Adgeret al. 2012; Crate 2011). As noted earlier, though, most ofthese studies are culture specific. We need now to collate,systematize, and expand this information into a database,which we can then use to generate an improved theoreticalunderstanding of ideological dynamics as they impinge onthe perception and production of climate change.

The dynamics of belief are by far the most intractable ofhuman phenomena to model, but they are no less importantto predicting and mitigating GGEs and climate change. At aproximate level, the “climate-denial industry” in the UnitedStates provides a graphic instance of how vested interests,

power, and media control can manipulate perceptions of cli-mate change. These efforts have only succeeded, however,because they take account of, and capitalize on, pre-existingideological systems. Efforts to predict and manage climatechange need to follow suit, but currently we have almost noidea what parameters might affect a community’s ideolog-ical inclination to accept that climate can change and to bemotivated enough do something about it.

Ezra Markowitz and Azim Shariff (2012) have made auseful start by identifying six characteristics of “the humanmoral judgement system” that leave it poorly equipped toidentify climate change mitigation as a moral imperative.Unfortunately, they argue from an assumption that the U.S.moral judgment system exemplifies “human” moral judg-ment systems in general. Nevertheless, their research de-serves cross-cultural expansion, not least to identify whichof these characteristics might indeed be generalizable, whichare culturally particular, and why. The “cultural theory ofrisk perception” of Dan Kahan (2012) and his colleagues(Kahan et al. 2011) provides a complementary startingpoint. Drawing on the grid-group analytical frame that MaryDouglas (1973; see also Douglas and Wildavsky 1982) orig-inally deployed to understand the distribution of ancestorcults, demons, and witchcraft in Africa, Kahan and col-leagues’ analytical scheme seeks to map cultural worldviews,connect them to cultural perceptions of hazards such as cli-mate change, and promote collective management of theserisks.

It would be useful also to map and analyze thesociopsychological contours of ethnometeorological sys-tems. Which elements of these symbolic structures are coreor key (in the sense of critical to social or psychologicalsecurity), and which are more peripheral (in the sense of be-ing “secondary elaborations”)? Answers would advance ourcapacity to model and manage climate change in two ways.Core beliefs and values may be more resistant to modifi-cation than peripheral ones. Attempts by policymakers torevise them, therefore, may be fruitless, counterproduc-tive, or even problematic in their sociopsychological conse-quences. Peripheral beliefs, in contrast, may be more labileand their modification less detrimental to social and psy-chological well-being. In a future of demonstrable climatechange, core and peripheral beliefs may also provoke differ-ent responses. If dramatic temperature increases, sea-levelrise, and other physical disruptions impinge primarily on pe-ripheral beliefs, climate change could reduce local resistanceto mitigation policy. Conversely, if they impinge on core be-liefs, they may be more likely to provoke ideological crisesand apocalyptic or other responses that impede mitigationand adaption efforts.

These are challenging issues, and it is unfortunate thatanthropology has shown a decreasing appetite in recentyears for general theorizing about the ideological realm,the principal exceptions being in evolutionary psychologyand cognitive anthropology (e.g., Atran 2002; Boyer 2001;Whitehouse 2004). There would seem to be scope, though,

544 American Anthropologist • Vol. 116, No. 3 • September 2014

for elaborating and applying more mainstream anthropo-logical theories to ethnometeorological systems, for exam-ple, theories that the body is a focal influence on humanperceptions of, and interactions with, the natural world(Blacking 1977; Strauss and Orlove 2003:4–6). Changesthat modernity and globalization have provoked in these re-lationships (Besnier 2011) may provide a further, fruitfularea for investigation.

BACKCASTING TO THE FUTUREAs noted in the introduction to this article, we are at apivotal moment in emissions scenarios development, as the“top-down” resource concentration pathways (RCPs) de-veloped in the latest IPCC assessment reports displace the“bottom-up” SRES approach deployed in the last two re-ports. This new approach stipulates four RCPs—potentialemissions futures—chosen to cover a wide range of pos-sible emissions futures, and the challenge is to establishwhat developments and policies might bend the emissionsfuture toward one pathway rather than another. One (con-troversial) pathway stipulates an immediate plateauing ofemissions, followed by a decline to zero by about 2080,and then turning negative (i.e., meaning greenhouse gasesget pulled out of the atmosphere and locked away), a tra-jectory that would require extraordinary social changes andthe implementation of draconian policy measures to becomereality. At the other extreme, emissions trajectories are en-visioned as almost quadrupling by 2080 before stabilizing(Inman 2011:8). The “challenge” to achieving this future isminimal: we do little or nothing to stop it.

Whatever RCP we focus on, we can only backcast thedevelopments and policies that would bring it into beingby using models of how human actions impinge on GGEs.These will be provided by a set of so-called shared socioe-conomic pathways (SSPs), currently in development. Later,these models will be paired with sets of mitigation and adap-tation policy scenarios (shared policy assumptions) to matchparticular greenhouse gas trajectories (the RCPs). The SSPsare intended to capture not only the dynamics of humanemissions activities but also the socioeconomic capacities ofdifferent societies for climate-change mitigation and adapta-tion (Kriegler et al. 2012; O’Neill et al. 2014). They willalso seek to incorporate processes omitted from the SRES,such as urbanization rates and economic inequalities within aswell as among polities and regions. Nevertheless, in the earlystages of their development, the SSPs will still incorporatethe SRES’s two core axes of uncertainty: “The SRES devel-oped four families of socioeconomic futures that span thedimensions of globalized vs. regionalized development andeconomic vs. environmental orientation. A similar specifica-tion of narratives for the SSPs will be needed in an early phaseof SSP construction” (O’Neill et al. 2014:397; see also Hal-legatte et al. 2011:152–154; Inman 2011:9). Thus, ElmarKriegler and colleagues (2012:815, 817) envision an eco-nomic dimension to the SSPs that “would range from rapideconomic growth through a globalized economy on one end

of a continuum to modest economic growth based on local-ized systems on the other end”—that is, convergence versusstasis or divergence. They suggest that one SSP could repre-sent a scenario involving rapid economic growth combinedwith low investments in sustainability, while another refersto a world in which investments were made in environmen-tally friendly processes (Kriegler et al. 2012:817)—that is,economic growth versus environmental concern. DifferentSSPs, in other words, can be indexed to analogues in differentSRES marker scenarios—namely, A1T, A1FI, A2, and B1(O’Neill et al. 2014:398; see also Kriegler et al. 2012:817–818). The anthropological findings and research sketched inthis article, in other words, will be as relevant to developingmore sophisticated human models for future IPCC reportsas they might have been in fortifying those of the past decadeand a half.

CONCLUSIONManaging climate change will be a protracted and disquietingprocess. Devising and implementing effective policy is adrawn-out project to begin with, and in the case of climatechange, mitigation and adaptation measures are only likely topay off in the long run, even if they prove effective. If climatechange is indeed “an existential challenge for the wholehuman race” (Ban 2012), then we surely need a researchprogram of Manhattan Project proportions and urgency onthe human dimensions of climate change.

In this article, I have sought to make clear that theeconomic models of humanity currently used to assess andmanage the threat of climate change do not alone providea sufficiently robust basis for predicting (or backcasting)climate trends. I have tried to illustrate with three exampleshow anthropological and archaeological research, with itsintegrative and universalist approach to social analysis, hasthe potential to improve these trends.

For practical reasons, these examples have focused onemissions scenarios used to date and on the two axes ofuncertainty that have played an outsized role in structur-ing the IPCC’s emissions scenarios: (1) economic conver-gence versus divergence and (2) economic growth versusenvironmental concern. The recent transformations of theIPCC’s modeling efforts notwithstanding, these axes willremain important elements of emissions modeling in theimmediate future. There are many other ways, however,in which archaeological and anthropological research couldreduce uncertainties in the models. Archaeological and ur-ban anthropological research could greatly improve the poorunderstanding we currently have of the rates at which ur-banization progresses, a crucial variable in establishing theimpact on GGEs of population growth, land use, transporta-tion patterns, and resource use (Rosa and Dietz 2012:3).Cross-cultural work on the political, social, and ideolog-ical dimensions of reproductive decision making can helppredict and in some measure perhaps mitigate the GGEimplications of future population growth. An anthropologi-cal understanding of what affects perceptions of time could

Roscoe • Improving Climate-Change Models 545

enhance our capacity to model the valuation of time relativeto natural resources and the consequences for environmentalpreservation (APA 2010:39). Anthropology could also do alot to improve the cultural resolution of global projectionand mitigation modeling. Current IPCC models aggregatenation-state data into regional blocs, but even scaling at anation-state level is questionable in the case of postcolo-nial nations, which commonly encompass multiple ethnicand cultural groupings within artificially imposed politicalboundaries.

Anthropological and archaeological research also has agreat potential to “complexify” the IPCC’s models—thatis, to insert elements that current scenarios simply fail totake into account. These include the intricate, transnationalteleconnections that constrain and shape local, national, andinternational distributions and trajectories of developmentand consumption, as well as the GGE implications of in-trapolity economic inequalities (though there are indicationsthat the new SSPs attempt to address this issue [O’Neillet al. 2014:396]).

There are a number of points at which such findingscan be fed into future climate-change modeling efforts.The first is the “generative” phase in which scenarios arefirst envisioned, collected, and harmonized (Borjesonet al. 2006:730–733). Anthropologists and archaeologistswere conspicuously absent from the tables at which theIPCC’s emissions scenarios were initially generated, and itis unclear to what degree the shift to RCPs will allow themto be radically reworked. If and when they are, however,anthropology and archaeology can do a lot to increase theirrobustness.

A second, tailor-made point of integration is to useanthropological and archaeological findings to refine andreduce the uncertainties associated with the narratives onwhich scenarios are based. What we know about the social,economic, and political dynamics of human societies, for in-stance, indicates that economic convergence is considerablymore probable than stasis or divergence. Anthropologicaland archaeological research on the dynamics of status com-petition may resolve major uncertainties over whether andin what degree non-Western nations will emulate Westernconsumerism (Wilk 1997). Together with a better knowl-edge of what kinds of ideological systems favor environmen-tal protection and what ones do not, these findings couldsignificantly narrow the uncertainties associated with theSRES’s second scenario axis: the degree to which, as the fu-ture unfolds, nations will balance economic growth againstenvironmental concerns.

In developing the new SSPs, in sum, researchers maybe able to de-emphasize—or even discard—some pathwayswhile weighting others more heavily, producing a morerobust suite of models. Finally, to the extent that some ar-chaeological and anthropological findings can be renderedas quantitative, qualitative, or dummy variables, they canbe directly incorporated into the mathematical foundationsof the IPCC’s models. In short, a changing climate for an-thropological and archaeological research is important to the

relevance of our disciplines, but it could offer even more tothe future of humanity.

Paul Roscoe Department of Anthropology, University

of Maine, Orono, ME, 04473; Paul.Roscoe@umit.maine.edu;

http://umaine.edu/anthropology/faculty-staff/jim-roscoe/

NOTESAcknowledgments. For assistance or comments on previousdrafts of this article, I am most grateful to Ulrike Claas, CindyIsenhour, and Kirk Maasch. I also warmly thank several anonymousreviewers for their time, effort, and telling comments. I especiallyappreciate Michael Chibnik’s guidance and wise counsel. None ofthese people, be it noted, bears any responsibility for the errors andidiocies I have surely perpetrated.

1. The paradoxical effect of this incorporative process is that eco-nomic inequalities between the global rich and the world’s poorcan increase even as the world’s economies converge. This isbecause differences in per capita economic productivity amongpolities are replaced by economic inequalities within polities,producing an increment of economic convergence in terms of therelevant SRES metric.

2. Beyond profligate conspicuous consumption fueled by their fi-nancial activities, for instance, insider traders on Wall Streetreportedly vie to outdo one another through their control ofinformation: “The more information you have, the more in theknow you are, the more you’re the master of the universe” (Cohan2011).

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