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A methodological follow-up to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.Answering methodological challenges posed by the Anthropocene, this collection retools the empirical study of the socioecological chaos of the contemporary moment across the arts, human science, and natural science. The methodological companion to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, it provides empirical studies of the multispecies messiness of contemporary life that investigate some of the critical questions of our time.

The polar tundra around Kangerlussuaq is the largest ice-free area in West Greenland, stretching 170 km between its borders of the Davis strait and the Greenland Ice sheet. Resting on continuous permafrost, hosting rivers fed by meltwater from the inland ice and glaciers, and dotted by small freshwater lakes, the tundra can be seen (and storied) as one large and dynamic water body, composed by various interconnected streams, rhythmed by geological epochs and by seasons – freeze, thaw, flow - and feeding into social and natural ecologies. This chapter attends to the tundra and its bodies of water by walking and ethnographically storying tundra climes with different perspectives: Geologists who reveal deep time of the tundra and show us ruptures in water-ice dynamics. Hunters and their families who show us the landscape as one of more than human sociality. Entrepreneurs and policy makers who dream of converting climate change into a source of profit, as they work to turn the accelerated melting of ice into exportable products. Resulting from these perspectives is a pluriversal tundra, where ways of making sense of the changing water bodies are conflicting, embedded in contrasting ways of knowing and living climes. This storying leads to methodological questions of how to practice an environmental humanities that attunes beyond the human and analyses across deep, accelerated, and troubled timescales. It also leads to questions of the ethics and politics of storying climes: whose perspectives get heard and whose voices are silenced? And in what ways are stories to be responded? The polar tundra around Kangerlussuaq is the largest ice-free area in West Greenland, stretching 170 km between its borders of the Davis strait and the Greenland Ice sheet. Resting on continuous permafrost, hosting rivers fed by meltwater from the inland ice and glaciers, and dotted by small freshwater lakes, the tundra can be seen (and storied) as one large and dynamic water body, composed by various interconnected streams, rhythmed by geological epochs and by seasons – freeze, thaw, flow - and feeding into social and natural ecologies. This chapter attends to the tundra and its bodies of water by walking and ethnographically storying tundra climes with different perspectives: Geologists who reveal deep time of the tundra and show us ruptures in water-ice dynamics. Hunters and their families who show us the landscape as one of more than human sociality. Entrepreneurs and policy makers who dream of converting climate change into a source of profit, as they work to turn the accelerated melting of ice into exportable products. Resulting from these perspectives is a pluriversal tundra, where ways of making sense of the changing water bodies are conflicting, embedded in contrasting ways of knowing and living climes. This storying leads to methodological questions of how to practice an environmental humanities that attunes beyond the human and analyses across deep, accelerated, and troubled timescales. It also leads to questions of the ethics and politics of storying climes: whose perspectives get heard and whose voices are silenced? And in what ways are stories to be responded?

Based on our experiences from ongoing collaborations with computational engineers over the course of six years and two interdisciplinary research projects, with this article we suggest that building of collaborations between anthropology and computational sciences that alter disciplinary boundaries and bridges epistemic differences can be accomplished through three levels of engagement: a shared research project, shared physical spaces, and an engagement in each other’s theoretical universes. Taking empirical point of departure in our colleagues’ attempt to cross the methodological and epistemic divide between engineering and anthropology through game theory, we introduce how the distinction between the ideal, the real and the actual serves not only as a model of our collaborations, but also as a generalizable model for future collaborations across anthropology and computational sciences.

The Peruvian water resources law of 2009 (Ley de Recursos Hídricos 29338) gathers contrasting - even divergent - intentions and interests; it discursively projects water to be a national common good and an economic good. The ideas behind the law connect to global currents that promote the marketisation of water rights and commodification of water services. This paper will use a historical account of water legislation in Peru as well as detailed ethnographic attention to the implementation of the water law and its infrastructure of governance in the city of Arequipa and the Quilca-Chili River Basin to analyse how the law functions as an interplay between its official text and the ways state officials use it in specific encounters with users and stakeholders. Such encounters vary and have different outcomes, at times presenting openings for groups of actors to gain influence, and at other times excluding participation. A clear-cut analytical common/commodity dichotomy is of little use when trying to understand the dynamics of governance around water in present-day Arequipa and Peru. This paper suggests 'assembling' as analytic to grasp how public and private, marketised and commodified interests come together in the implementation of the law of water resources.