Beginning with Mauss, anthropological engagements with seasons have emphasized their modal quality. As the Earth rotates, societies adopt different subsistence strategies, cultural moods, and even political forms. In this sense seasons foreground the contrasting “possible worlds” that any society can and will compose. Today, there is much to explore in how the Anthropocene both numbs and intensifies the experience of “seasonal modes of existence” (Wengrow and Graeber 2015, 11). We might even think of the Anthropocene itself as a kind of planetary season, a shift into hothouse Earth that affords relatively destructive or reparative possibilities.

Written with Mauss’s student Henri Beuchat, Seasonal Variations ([1906] 2013) describes what he calls the “dual morphology” of Inuit communities in the circumpolar north. In the summer, Inuit families dispersed across the land, fishing and tracking caribou and reindeer. In the winter, they lived together in extended houses, hunting the walrus and seal that congregated around coastal ice holes. These settlement and hunting patterns had any number of social correlates: in winter dwellings were built, repaired, and owned collectively, food was communally distributed, and life achieved a certain kind of sociable lather. In summer, by contrast, individual property rights were enforced and paternal authority was accentuated.

Seasonal Variations presaged Durkheim’s Elementary Forms ([1912] 2001), in effect claiming that winter was a special time when the essence of Inuit sociality came into presence. Yet there were also inklings of a “more-than-human” perspective, as when Mauss spoke of Inuit living in “symbiosis” with animal migrations (Schweitzer 2024)—themes that Evans-Pritchard would reprise in his description of the Nuer seasonal round ([1940] 2011). Others like Lowie (1948) and Levi-Strauss (1944) explored the political dynamics of switching between hierarchical or egalitarian forms along seasonal lines (Wengrow and Graeber 2015).

Like environmental anthropology more broadly, attention to seasons took a neo-functionalist turn in the latter half of the twentieth century. Anthropologists tracked how seasonal fluctuations formed pressures on, for example, birthrates, labor allocations, and herd sizes, all with varying degrees of sophistication and causal complexity in their models (e.g., Morren 1979; Stone et al. 1990; Hurtado et al. 1990; Leslie and Fry 1989). Yet the Maussian strand persisted, enriched by symbolic, phenomenological, and political-ecology approaches (Brondízio et al. 2017). In this literature, seasons are neither hard environmental containers nor collective categories imposed on a blooming buzzing world, but rather bundles of coordinated rhythms—planting and harvesting, fissioning and fusing, moving up and down mountain altitudes, all in tandem with shifts in light, rain, temperature, soil composition, and game (Poudel 2020; Bremer and Wardekker 2024). And alongside these quintessential dwelling activities are characteristic moods. For the Avatip in Papua New Guinea, the spirits of the dead draw near and then recede with seasonal rhythms of leisure and work, weaving an ambiance of backwards-looking nostalgia and forward-looking engagement (Harrison 2001). In Brazil, caboclos (Amazon floodplain dwellers) oscillate between a dry season of abundance, dispersed hunting and fishing, and relaxed socializing, and a rainy season where families are cooped up in stilt houses perched above the river waters, growing thin and restless (Harris 1998).

As Mauss’s now archaic reference to “morphology” suggests, seasons return us to questions of form and mode in human life, with their play of constraints and possibility (Degani 2024; Candea 2025; Heywood 2026). Each season takes human existence within a landscape and modulates it, such that certain activities and experiences become efficacious and appropriate and others just insensible. Idiots sing away the sewing season, repressives deny themselves the surplus (Bataille [1967] 2017; Serres 1982, 91–93). As John Durham Peters (2015, 166) observes, seasons mark time as kairos—as opportunity—rather than as empty chronos. They ask: what can and should be done, now? The constellation of answers to that question shifts with the rotation of the Earth. In a sense to inhabit these shifting organizations of possibility is to inhabit different worlds, or different configurations of world. When Tim Ingold (2010) writes of walking in the ever-turning “weather-world,” he is getting at this sense. Seasons are world-shifters.

Today the Anthropocene puts pressure on seasonal world-shift. Electric light evens out the working day (Gupta 2015); dams even out river discharge (Krause 2013); all-weather roads and indoor climate control create second natures wherein the immediate relevance of seasons can be numbed (Hitchings 2010; Whitehouse 2017). Simon Harrison (2004) argues that seasonal affective disorder is itself a disorder, the expression of a civilization that can only medicalize environmental sensitivity. Sophie Chao (2022, 173–174) describes how palm oil plantations unravel seasonal life cycles of fruit, bird, and fish, halting them indefinitely.

 In other contexts, seasonal rhythms become more jagged. North American wildfire season is now something like megafire season (Petryna 2022), winters spike COVID hospitalizations, and annual Dengue epidemics now swell to “seasonal emergencies” (Nading 2014, 192). What material and semiotic enclosures form in response to these intensifying cycles (McCormick et al. 2025)? What new rhythms of escape and return, grief and denial, do they invite (Reece 2025)?

We can pose these questions of modal adaptation at a meta-level. In some sense the Anthropocene is itself a planetary season, a kind of anti-ice age with its own constellation of possibilities now coming into view. In light of our continued vulnerability to climate-induced pandemics and disasters, for instance, Andreas Malm (2020) has provocatively outlined an “Ecological Leninism”—an authoritarian state that would outlaw wildlife consumption, terminate mass aviation, phase out meat, and nationalize oil companies for carbon capture. In other words, certain ways of relating to the environment would no longer, given the emergency situation, be appropriate or efficacious. This “wartime communism” is one mode of the Anthropocene into which societies could shift; climate fascism is another (Saito 2024). As in earlier seasons of collapsing liberalism (Hobsbawm 1995), the possibility space may once again be “socialism or barbarism” (Luxemburg 2020), each forming complex feedback loops with phenological cycles.