Abstract In South Korea, forest scientists refashion themselves as “climate sentinels” as they confront subtle yet disquieting shifts in plant seasonality brought about by climate change. Unlike traditional sentinels, who watch for external threats from a frontier, climate sentinels face ecological anomalies and surprises—such as untimely flowering—that have permeated everyday spaces. To register such ecological perplexities, they engage in technoscientific entrainments: deliberate, disciplinary, and laborious coordinations of human observers, trees, protocols, institutions, and modular devices into a shared rhythm of attention. These experimental processes redistribute the traditional embodied technique of mokch’ŭk (eye observation) across nationwide phenological observation networks while reanimating the ecological significance of plant seasonality. For these sentinels, confronting climate change requires attending not only to satellites and heavily computed models but also to the distributed, more‐than‐human experiments through which ecological perplexities are made sensible on the ground.
Abstract An anthropology of horror can serve as a vernacular critique of financial speculation. Drawing on fieldwork in San Pedro, Paraguay, I track horror across three registers: pombero tricksters; plata yvyguy (buried money) as a founding myth of postwar finance; and obligations binding sesame farmers to monsters, patrones , and creditors. Horror—a critical ontology and distinctive wonder—arises when obligation becomes undecidable: when one cannot tell whether the forces manipulating time and the future are persons who stand in relation, or how far the liability extends. Paraguay has produced this condition twice, first under the Stroessner dictatorship (1954–89), with its network of civilian informants, and later under climate finance running through the same clientelist orders. As Martha Blache's 1982 study of Guarani folklore helps us understand, finance bears rather than subsumes the moral arrangements of prestation, and horror is a native theorization of speculation rather than a response to an external capitalist threat.
