‘Winter is coming!’ The ominous phrase punctuating George R.R. Martin’s popular fantasy saga plays as a repetitive warning that there is something out there threatening the world as it is, something the political powers of the time are oblivious to, made shortsighted as they are by their petty quarrels and thirst for power. As much as the warning resounds with contemporaneous anxieties, the underlying message remains anthropo-centred and anchored in warfare concerns – dead people from old wars are coming back lest we constantly keep them at bay. It is tempting to reverse the claim into ‘summer is coming’ to make the point about the actual threat which needs to be addressed by the same shortsighted political powers. It has become common sense that human-induced climate change is a new actor in/of history. Indeed, history has been epistemologically redefined after the popularisation of the Anthropocene in the 1990s to develop into ‘big histories’ that feed global imaginaries about numerous new agentivities (earth, life, nature and also water and ice). History will never be the same, nor the figure of the human. The wintery summer that is upon us warrants our attention. Anthropology has a lot to offer, we believe, precisely by thinking laterally and including agents, forces and materialities that we simply can’t afford to ignore.

It is a happy coincidence, then, that we consecutively publish two special issues, 31(4) and 32(1), addressing the outcomes of climate change and consider, to quote Karine Gagné and Georgina Drew (this volume), ‘how, for some communities, the climate crisis is experienced in a dystopian present’. It is interesting to consider how both issues can be read together as a stimulating dialogue between water and ice, volatility and (im)permanence, and invite to consider a plurality of perspectives on how humans relate to these ‘vital materialities’, a concept carved by Jane Bennett that inspires the present collection. Yet, materiality is not addressed similarly by our authors. Where Franz Krause and Thomas Hylland Eriksen focused on the anthropological lessons to be learned from living in ever-changing and uncertain environments governed by water, Gagné and Drew intend primarily to consider the agency and the materiality of ice as a theoretical point of departure. But this is not a reintroduction of the distinction between fluidity and fixity, now reworked into water versus ice. Instead, we are invited to attune to vitality all around. Thinking from and with an icy world means reconsidering the ontology of matter and things from a vital ‘agentic ice-centricity of ice’.

Both are political projects embedded in philosophical proposals and they contribute to the ‘derailment of conceptual orthodoxies’ (Gagné and Drew). What is striking is the unexpected convergences between the outcomes of the so-called derailment, paving the road for further discussions. Both collections produce an anthropology of ephemerality. It is embedded in ice as matter, constantly changing its forms and internal structure, which can only be captured by ethnographies of icy encounters and of multiple icy objects. Ephemerality is also echoed in the epistemological concept of volatility: the ‘semantic space between flexibility and crisis’ (Krause and Eriksen 2023: 2), which is also a (positive) way of life and not a mere adaptive flexibility. There is even a paradox in considering that when Gagné and Drew insist in un-rigidifying ice as matter, Krause and Eriksen call attention to waiting, stagnancy and recalcitrant obstacles as an under-considered condition for living in volatile worlds. Both collections also offer a strong dismissal of approaching environments simply as constraints as well as of putting humans centre stage. Thinking from and with ice, as the current issue invites us to do, buttresses challenges to entrenched discourses across governance, science or economy. As such, the present issue not only pushes further towards destabilising, or shall we say thawing, established thought patterns. The fascinating case studies also gesture towards the very unmuting of ice and of rediscovering vitality on frozen grounds. People in Westeros never knew when winter was coming or how long it would stay. Similarly, we are starting to think out of geological area, uncertain in their length, where seasonal cycles used to delineate a stable framework for human activities and cosmologies. We don’t know much about the temporalities of thawing ice, or of the Anthropocene. This not-knowing demands embracing volatility and adaptation. It also demands humility to learn from matter, to listen to what ice tells us, to observe, feel with, think with.

Returning from the far north and far south or from high altitudes to the mundane world of scholarly publishing, the editorial team of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale is taking the opportunity in this editorial to thank the hundreds of colleagues from all over the world for the invaluable work they have provided in reviewing articles for our journal in the last year. Some reviews are wonderful pieces of theory and methodology, sometime even worthy of publication as part of an internal scientific dialogue between two colleagues on the implications of an ethnographic analysis. Historians of the discipline should consider foraging in the archives of journals to do justice to some ‘anonymous’ pieces of erudition. Reading backstage, we can only provide a testimony that reviews have been a tremendous help to our authors and us. We deeply and genuinely thank you.

Isabelle Rivoal, Dimitra Kofti and Arne Harms