EI Niño and the Anthropological Opportunity

El Niño differs in many ways from other global environmental concerns that have received attention from the social science community. On the time scale of a human life and intergenerational memory, impacts of such environmental phenomena as global warming, deforestation, large scale pollution, or the ozone hole may be indistinguishable from the natural variability of the seasons. Understanding and anticipating sociopolitical reactions to such long term environmental changes can only be done through studying analogous events, simulation models (e.g., economic models, crop production models), and thought experiments. The El Niño phenomenon, on the other hand, recurs on seasonal time scales and has the largest influence on global weather patterns after the seasonal cycle. The oceanic and atmospheric conditions that lead to an event are intensely monitored, its physical mechanisms are relatively well-understood, and its onset is predictable. It has a start and finish and its societal impacts can be studied in real-time, and is thus an interesting subject for anthropological inquiry. The 1997-98 El Niño was one of the strongest events of the century and information about this event was distributed worldwide by sets of knowledge brokers, including national and international scientific organizations, the media, and NGOs. Unlike prior El Niños, a critical mass of anthropologists (and social scientists in general) were poised to study responses to this