Drawing on a combination of perspectives from diverse fields, this volume offers an anthropological study of climate change and the ways in which people attempt to predict its local implications, showing how the processes of knowledge making among lay people and experts are not only comparable but also deeply entangled. Through analysis of predictive practices in a diversity of regions affected by climate change including coastal India, the Cook Islands, Tibet, and the High Arctic, and various domains of scientific expertise and policy making such as ice core drilling, flood risk modelling, and coastal adaptation the book shows how all attempts at modelling nature s course are deeply social, and how current research in "climate" contributes to a rethinking of nature as a multiplicity of modalities that impact social life. "

Drawing on a combination of perspectives from diverse fields, this volume offers an anthropological study of climate change and the ways in which people attempt to predict its local implications, showing how the processes of knowledge making among lay people and experts are not only comparable but also deeply entangled. Through analysis of predictive practices in a diversity of regions affected by climate change - including coastal India, the Cook Islands, Tibet, and the High Arctic, and various domains of scientific expertise and policy making such as ice core drilling, flood risk modelling, and coastal adaptation - the book shows how all attempts at modelling nature's course are deeply social, and how current research in "climate" contributes to a rethinking of nature as a multiplicity of modalities that impact social life.

With empirical touchstones from Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the authors argue that heritage and property represent different approaches to subject formation, produce distinct bodies of expertise, and belong to different rationalities of government in a global patrimonial field: that cultural property is a technology of sovereignty, part of the order of the modern liberal state, but cultural heritage a technology of reformation that cultivates responsible subjects and entangles them in networks of expertise and management. While particular case trajectories may shift back and forth from rights-based claims and resolutions under the sign of cultural property to ethical claims and solutions under the sign of cultural heritage, the authors contend that there is significant analytical purchase to be gained from their distinction. Using a critical, comparative approach, they make the case for a historically grounded and theoretically informed understanding of the difference between the two terms.