The choreography of the modern rain dance: weather modification and the embodied attunement

Keywords: Weather modification, choreography, embodied attunement, Anthropocene
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 17

Abstract

Weather is something people experience every day, but experiencing weather is different from touching it. Touching implies reciprocity and to touch the weather means to have a reciprocal influence, instead of simply experiencing the weather. To think of this embodied and reciprocal approach toward the weather is crucial for understanding the mentalities and practices of governing and modifying the weather in the Anthropocene. In this paper, I ask the question of how the weather becomes palpable to the weather modifiers. By following weather modification practices in China, I argue these scientific practices have one thing in common with the ancient rain dance - both relied on an embodied attunement with the weather. Weather modification is not merely about intellectually knowing and intervening in the weather processes. It was done through deliberately arranging bodies and devices and attuning with the spatio-temporal characteristics of the weather—a choreography with and within the weather. Spatially, weather modification took form through particular arrangements of modes of presence—the ways that the meteorologists’ bodies and devices settle, move, and exist at a certain distance. Temporally, weather modification is practiced through attuning with various rhythms of the natural and social and of the past, present, and future. It is through this particular weather modifying choreography that the palpability of the hyperobjective weather disclosed to the scientists in a certain way. This choreographic approach blurs the distinction among knowing, experiencing, and intervening of the weather and provides different ways of thinking the human-weather relation in the Anthropocene.