Societies and Ecologies

Colby College, Department of Anthropology
January, 2010

This course is part of Colby's January Program.

Humans' use of the natural environment has been a topic of central importance to the social sciences, and especially to anthropologists, for decades. This course attempts to raise questions about the connections between society and the environment, and to provide students with new analytic tools for seeking to understand those relationships. This is a January-Plan course: the effort here is to immerse ourselves in a few select human-ecosystems, to see how people relate to their environment, and what the politics of those relationships are. To do that, we will borrow from the literature on environmental anthropology and political ecology where it suits our needs, but we won't feel compelled to exhaust the subject.

Our effort will be to cross disciplinary boundaries, not establish them. To do that, we will investigate several critical themes, including the use of the environment by rural societies, the involvement of rural people and indigenous groups in environmental social movements, and the cultural politics of environmental conservation projects in developing countries. In order to focus the discussion, we will explore these themes in three specific settings: among the highland ethnic minorities of Southeast Asia, among the forest-dwelling people (both indigenous and non-indigenous) of the Amazon basin, and, briefly, alongside Arctic people and their advocates. By focusing on a select set of cases, we will be able to explore specific histories and cultural settings in some detail, and we will be able to get a sense of the multiple historical and economic forces that shape environments and human lives in these places. Our effort, then will be to gain an understanding of people's reliance on the environment, their use of natural resources, and their understandings of nature.