Afterword

Abstract

The articles in this special issue of Social Anthropology reposition volatility as a critical concern for anthropological enquiry. At a time of global uncertainty – marked by environmental, economic, geopolitical and humanitarian crises – it seems that everyday life is more volatile than ever. But what does describing it so actually mean? Volatility is commonly understood to be a characteristic of, or a tendency for, things to change quickly and abruptly. It is often a way to describe a person's behaviour or even their character – to account for someone's rapid and perhaps surprising switch to anger and rage, for example. Some may, though, more usually think of volatility as an explanatory term that economists, business strategists and risk managers employ to describe, understand and forecast fluctuations in financial markets, trading and commodity price shocks, or when analysing the boom-and-bust nature of oil production and energy-dependent economies (e.g. Andersen and Bollerslev 2018; Campello and Zucco 2021; Sinclair 2013). Sociologists and political scientists also think of volatility as a useful hermeneutic for analysing the fragility and precarity of societies and political systems, as the editors and contributors of a recent book do when considering the future of democracies in Asia (Hsiao and Yang 2022). Ecologists talk of volatile ecosystems (e.g. Exton et al 2014), the nature of which become more urgent to understand in a rapidly changing world, and although the idea of abrupt change in climate systems and ecosystems is not new, the vast and ever-growing body of scientific literature about it now drips with references to thresholds and tipping points, to uncertainty, unpredictability, and to the transgression of planetary boundaries (e.g. Lenton 2013; Bonan and Doney 2018; Steffen et al 2018).