Knowing the weather in Namibia: observing, recognizing and understanding

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Schnegg
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 423280253

Indigenous and scientific ways of knowing the weather typically express different ontologies. In arid northwestern Namibia, the rainfall is the most salient weather event. While the Khoekhoegowab-speaking inhabitants (ǂnūkhoen) of the region explain the rainfall as an interaction of loving winds, meteorologists perceive the rotation of the earth around the sun as the cause. Climate campaigns, weather forecasts and weather apps bring those types of knowing into dialogue. The aim of the project is, firstly, to describe these ways of knowing and their underlying ontological assumptions ethnographically and, secondly, to explore what happens when they enter into dialogue. To understand these dynamics, I make use of Heidegger’s phenomenology and his hermeneutic realism. I argue that different ways of knowing coexist in an environmental pluralism and that people draw on specific knowledge in specific situations. To study this empirically, I propose a methodological approach that combines techniques from cognitive anthropology with an analysis of knowledge in-the-place and on-the-move. Through travelling and talking, I attempt to explore, whether and how knowledge is constituted in places and movements. This will also allow showing, if and how it changes. The overall theoretical aim of the project is to contribute to understand how partly contradicting knowledge systems combine and which theoretical models are suitable for describing those processes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants