Resilience

'Resilience’ is becoming a new policy buzzword. The term describes the ability to recover from expected and unexpected situations, stresses, or threats in order to sustain, thrive, and to move on. As a concept and as an approach, it guides people’s adaptation, persistence, and response strategies to sustainably cope with challenges of all kinds, such as pandemics, political oppression, or extreme weather events related to climate change. This entry highlights anthropological insights into and theoretical antecedents of resilience. Anthropologists have studied resilience in highly diverse contexts, ranging from cybernetics and systems theory, to the study of disaster, human psychology, science and technology studies, and multispecies research. The notion of resilience keeps being expanded and remains diverse. Theoretically, anthropologists have foregrounded the importance of viewing resilience as a practice and as being situated. They also emphasise the complexity of interactions and processes involved in coping with adversities and they often foreground a relational rather than an individualistic understanding of resilience. Importantly, resilience always includes more-than-human actors such as plants, animals, and technologies. How exactly people are able to become resilient is often determined by structural inequalities, (post-)colonisation and prevailing understandings of how the world ought to be. Anthropological research on resilience is much needed in times of adversity, as technological fixes to planetary threats are insufficient to ensure future wellbeing.