Course Description

Since anthropology’s founding over a century ago, two questions have been of vital and enduring concern: How do specific natural environments condition the cultural attributes and possibilities of particular social groups? How do social groups perceive, control, and modify their natural environments? The disciplinary specialties investigating these questions which came to prominence during the mid-twentieth century—among them cultural ecology, human ecology, ethnoscience, and ecological anthropology—demonstrated time and again through close ethnographic description and theoretical analysis that these questions cannot be addressed in isolation from each other, for ecology and culture are entangled in complex ways. Reflecting the discipline’s orientation toward studying small-scale societies, such research focused largely on how diverse kinds of non-Western societies, especially hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and horticulturists, have understood, adapted to, and molded their local natural environments.

Today, anthropologists are still investigating the diverse forms that human-nature relations take. But as apprehension over environmental degradation and appropriate solutions to it has mushroomed globally during the past several decades, anthropologists have expanded their range of interests, approaches, and theories to include research and advocacy on contemporary environmental problems in both Western and non-Western contexts. These include (among others) the politics of biodiversity conservation; conflicts over land use; the discourses and practices of sustainable development; clashes over bioprospecting and intellectual property rights; the causes and consequences of deforestation, toxic waste, and other forms of environmental degradation; the complexities of community-based resource management and the operations of environmental bureaucracies; the rise and spread of consumer-oriented environmentalisms, such as ecotourism, green marketing, and environmental media; and debates surrounding industrial agricultural systems, genetically-modified organisms, and agroecological alternatives.

Such issues involve concerns not necessarily addressed in classic approaches to human-nature relations in anthropology, especially attention to relations of power and inequality associated with capitalist modes of production and global political-economic interactions. In important ways, anthropologists are no longer interested solely in local ecological relations and understanding, but also in the environmental dimensions of contemporary global cultural, political, and economic transformations. The field that encompasses all these concerns—both classic and contemporary, local and global—is environmental anthropology.

This course has two major goals. One of these is to introduce you to the vibrant field of environmental anthropology, considering enduring concerns and issues of present interest. The second goal of this course is to move beyond simply studying about environmental anthropology to engaging directly in its practice, which involves identifying the cultural dimensions of environmental issues and problems, participating in its debates, designing and conducting research, and applying anthropological insights to solving intellectual and practical problems.  

Reflecting how environmental anthropologists actually work, the approach we will take is thus problem-centered. The course is organized around a selective number of important and interesting questions, some of which have been around for quite some time and others that are more recent. The goal of this approach is to: 1) frame learning about human-nature relations as an active process of asking questions about real-world issues and applying disciplinary and theoretical insights to understand them, and 2) help you develop the ability to pose good anthropological questions, and to begin answering them by introducing you to compelling areas of anthropological knowledge, analysis, and methodology. This pedagogy emphasizes the importance of active learning, asking relevant questions, critical thinking, familiarity with theoretical concepts, and the impossibility of simple answers for complex intellectual issues or easy solutions for practical environmental problems. Throughout the course, we will accentuate the problem-centered approach with consideration of how working anthropologists actually get involved in practical environmental problem-solving.

The following required texts are available for purchase at the University Store:

Bates, Daniel (2005) Human Adaptive Strategies: Ecology, Culture, and Politics. Third Edition. Pearson Allyn and Bacon.

Haenn, Nora and Richard Wilk (2006) The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living. New York University Press.

VanWynsberghe, Robert (2002) AlterNatives: Community, Identity, and Environmental Justice on Walpole Island. Allyn and Bacon.

West, Paige (2006) Conservation is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Duke University Press.

 

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