Post Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Adapting to the Turbulence of a Rapidly Changing World

Author: Professor Luci Attala

The paper presented by Luci Attala, Deputy Executive Director of UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition, at the World Anthropological Union Congress 2024: Post Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Adapting to the Turbulence of a Rapidly Changing World.

Abstract:

Post Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Adapting to the Turbulence of a Rapidly Changing World

‘The fact that the world has the highest number of ‘educated’ people in its history and yet is the nearest to ecological [and systems] breakdown is a stark reminder that ‘more of the same … will only compound our problems’

(The Commons World Collective 2020: 2 citing Orr, 2011: 238).

In a time, fraught with forecasts of global uncertainties, calls for change in economic, social, educational, ethical, political and environmental domains are building in concert with the claim that business as usual is no longer an option. Change is always dynamic, fluid, contested and can create friction, but today’s impacting concerns are generating novel tensions between the local and the global, which is redrawing where power lies and causing positions to become polarised and entrenched. 

This workshop explores the role anthropology plays in generating social change and it does so by considering invitations from post-capitalist, post-growth and post-development manifestos and the actions and effects of local initiatives that challenge national boundaries and the state along with international drives that champion globalised routes out of humanity’s current predicaments.

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Doing your taxes at the end of the world

The paper draws inspiration from the 2022 surrealist comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once—a film about a weary woman working in a launderette in the US, who, while struggling to complete her taxes, finds herself randomly tasked with saving the universe. Feeling ill-equipped for such a monumental task, she journeys through the multiverse, seeking tools and answers, and along the way gathers empathy from her alternate selves. This empathy ultimately helps her confront the overwhelming universal despair that threatens to collapse everything into a cosmic black hole or “everything bagel” as the film calls it—an enormous spinning doughnut symbolising the futility of modern consumerism. 

It’s a frantic, high-octane journey, in which she manages to do her taxes and save us all. At its core, the film is about mundane struggles and how real change comes not from bureaucracy or policy, but from people.

Like the protagonist, we are living in what many now are calling ‘the end of the world as we knew it’. This is a shocking gift that demands our attention and we must take seriously. 

Calls for action and plans to save or improve aspects of the world are announced daily. For example, the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES programme was created to reconsider what we think we know and thereby precipitate change. In concert, the abstract for this paper also emphasises that we are ‘post-everything’— suggesting that maintaining the status quo will only exacerbate existing problems. 

Repeating the same actions and expecting different results is the definition of stupidity. We all know that. And we also know that the materialistic, competitive, neoliberal, and colonial mindsets that shape decisions exploit both people and the planet. The Global North’s resource extraction from the Global South under the guise of development is a parasitic approach, dripping with problems.

The future is local.

As we go about our lives and do our taxes, let’s remember that revolutions often arise from the marginalised and underprivileged, where necessity, not profit, drives action. 

And I’m hoping that micro-localised revolutions will emerge and reject the exploitative - masquerading as development - that drain communities for profit in the name of job creation and growth. To instead create and embrace ecological approaches to business, education, governance and society, that prioritise all forms of life, not just human interests. 

This is the essence of my work: locating ordinary people who are innovating and finding their own ways to adapt to the challenges posed by climate change, often independent of government directives. Why? Because it’s crucial to gather, understand, and share what individuals are trying and doing, as this can inspire resilient change elsewhere.

The role of Anthropology

Anthropology’s role in this is clear. Anthropologists, with their ability to traverse cultural multiverses, view issues from multiple perspectives simultaneously, acting as empathic bridges between bodies of knowledge. They provide valuable social commentary that raises questions and nudges society toward change. This is our superpower at the end of the world.

Please don’t doubt your power. A colleague recently pointed out that insights from our undergraduate studies are now challenging mainstream thought. While she highlighted gender theory, we can also include kinship, economic reciprocity, animism, power dynamics, subsistence, dietary practices, and human-animal relationships. Anthropology captures the complexity of humanity in all its diversity—reminding us that being human is a multifaceted endeavour that homogenised global policies often fail to address effectively. 

BRIDGES invites everyone to engage in a deep process of intellectual, emotional, ethical, and spiritual decolonization, following Kothari and Escobar’s 2019 call in The Pluriverse: A Post-Development Manifesto to foster cultural alternatives that nurture and respect life on Earth. This is a shift away from global directives that wrongly assume a unified human experience, towards a localised approach that acknowledges diversity and taps into local creativity. 

As a result, BRIDGES is consciously seeking to highlight context-specific approaches and unexpected collaborations, drawing from lesser-heard knowledges to develop low-tech, low-cost social solutions that empower communities to adapt to new realities. I believe anthropologists can play a key role in this process.

The future revolution we need will, therefore, be local.

To conclude, let’s revisit the protagonist of Everything Everywhere All at Once as she struggles with her taxes. Anthropology recognises the difference between the global economy and the reciprocal exchanges that uphold relationships on the ground. Yet, the dominant tendency is to evaluate people and nations based on economic performance, ignoring the actual wealth the world holds in terms of relationships, nature, and non-material aspects of life. This approach feeds a system that insists life must be evaluated in terms of price, a delusion that leads us to invest in systems that harm and enslave us. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, “Don’t buy it”—a command and an idiom about belief. Refusal to participate in destructive practices is a moral choice. Don’t buy it. Literally, do not buy things that destroy the world. Instead, empathise. Empathy is a strategy.

In keeping with my call for ecologically framed solutions, let’s remember how many Indigenous groups remind us that land regenerates when forerunner plants create conditions for others to thrive. This isn’t about competing for profit, glory, space, or attention; it’s about working together in a multi-species, multiverse. We already know how to collaborate.