Anthropology and the Environment

ANTH S258

This course looks at the ways that anthropologists and ethnographers of various stripes have engaged with the natural world, and asks how applicable these approaches are to contemporary issues in nature-society relations. We will look particularly at environmental and ecological approaches to anthropology and at anthropological approaches to environmental issues. These two approaches provide us with two starting points:

1) Humans are part of nature, and human society exists within the natural world. This remains as true for members of Western, urban, post-industrial societies as it is for forest dwelling hunter-gatherers.

2) Environmental problems are social problems. When we speak of environmental problems--from the scarcity of natural resources to the commoditization of nature to the operation of nature conservation organizations (to name just a few) we are speaking about a social problem that in some way is concerned with human relations with the natural world.

The course is divided into 3 sections. The first section, Cultural Ecology and Ecological Anthropology, examines the ways that humans form part of ecological systems and investigates human ecologies, paying attention the ways that the environment constrains or affects social life and vice versa. The second section, Rights, Resources, and Political Economy, examines the understandings and practices through which contestations over resources are worked out. In this section we will look at questions of scarcity, rights, resources and the politics surrounding environmental problems. We will address how our understandings of such notions as 'nature,' 'culture,' 'production' and 'consumption' are put to work within struggles over resources and political (or other types of) power. In the third section, Environment and Development Poststructural Political Ecologies, we expand the theoretical understandings we have developed in the first two sections of the course. Here we delve into post-structural approaches to questions of nature, identity and advocacy, and apply these theoretical insights to cases drawn from the developing world. In these readings, we trace the connections between international development and the environment, and examine with a critical eye the interventions into human-environment relationships that take place under the rubric of modernization and improvement.