Overview

A moving study of how religion shapes Western climate discourse.   Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we’ve built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why? In A Perturbed System, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we must understand the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis, a result of Christian colonialism that we (religious or not) still struggle to describe without religious language. Climate discourse in the United States and northern Europe, Crockford shows, is framed by the same theological motifs that drove extraction, including ideas about prophecy, mediation, sacrifice, original sin, cult, messiah, and apocalypse. By listening to people on the edge of the crisis, A Perturbed System reveals a world in transition, what happens when worlds end—ecologically, socially, politically, and personally—and how we might live through these endings together. 

Full Product Details

9780226849782

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Reviews

“With witty prose and ethnographic insight, Crockford shows us how discourse about climate change is mediated by religion—its material histories and theological orientations. But the perspective offered here is not merely descriptive; by providing a ‘record of a dying world,’ A Perturbed System also opens space for new worlds and new knowledges to come into being.” -- Evan Berry, Arizona State University “A Perturbed System excavates deep cultural theologies of climate discourse. Drawing on multiyear fieldwork with Dark Mountain and Extinction Rebellion, Susannah Crockford traces how religious tropes shape what can be said, felt, and done in the face of ecological collapse. Part ethnography, part personal reckoning, this is a compelling contribution to the anthropology of religion and climate change.” -- Willis Jenkins, University of Virginia “Crockford offers a fresh and compelling ethnography of the end of the world—an end both materially unfolding and imaginatively constructed—tracing climate change discourses to enduring religious traditions and religion-like cultural theologies bound up with extractive colonialism. Analytically incisive and intermittently personal, the book is unsparing about climate collapse while sustaining a measured sense of hope.” -- Lisa H. Sideris, University of California, Santa Barbara

Author Information

Susannah Crockford is a lecturer at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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