Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology

Helen Kopnina, Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317667957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Environmental Anthropology studies historic and present human-environment interactions. This volume illustrates the ways in which today's environmental anthropologists are constructing new paradigms for understanding the multiplicity of players, pressures, and ecologies in every environment, and the value of cultural knowledge of landscapes.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary topics in environmental anthropology and thorough discussions on the current state and prospective future of the field in seven key sections. As the contributions to this Handbook demonstrate, the subfield of environmental anthropology is responding to cultural adaptations and responses to environmental changes in multiple and complex ways. As a discipline concerned primarily with human-environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that we are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioural and often cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of topics presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology; and a broad new range of subjects, such as resilience, nonhuman rights, architectural anthropology, industrialism, and education. This volume enables scholars and students quick access to both established and trending environmental anthropological explorations into theory, methodology and practice.

PART I

The development of environmental anthropology

1
AN INTRODUCTION TO ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet

As so many of us are all too aware, we have entered the Anthropocene, marked by the large and active imprint that humans have made on the global environment. Environmental social sciences, and environmental anthropology in particular, have long focused on the interaction between human societies, cultures, and complex environments – both in physical and symbolic terms. Yet, as the world changes in response to the expansion of human presence and influence, a number of analytical frameworks, as well as ideologies, have been developed to address culture and nature in the era of human-dominated environments. As the contributions to this Handbook demonstrate, the sub-field of environmental anthropology is responding to cultural adaptations and responses to environmental changes in multiple and complex ways. Operating within a discipline concerned primarily with human–environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that they are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioural and often cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of topics presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired both renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology; and a broad new range of subjects, such as resilience, non-human rights, architectural anthropology, industrialism, and education. These studies are illustrated by intensive ethnographic case studies supported by ‘traditional’ anthropological as well as innovative and transdisciplinary methodologies in pursuit of a more ecologically holistic understanding of the human–environment relationship and perhaps even solutions to environmental degradation.

The field of anthropology is broken into four sub-fields: physical/biological anthropology, social/cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology; as well as applied (sometimes called engaged or participatory) anthropology. Environmental or ecological anthropology is a specialization within cultural anthropology that studies historic and present human–environment interactions. Although the terms, ‘environmental anthropology’ and ‘ecological anthropology’ are often used interchangeably, environmental anthropology is considered by some to be the applied dimension of ecological anthropology which encompasses the broad topics of primate ecology, palaeoecology, cultural ecology, ethno-ecology, ethno-ornithology, historical ecology, political ecology, spiritual ecology, human behavioral ecology, and evolutionary ecology. It has been argued that the new ecological anthropology, or what is often referred to in this volume as environmental anthropology, mirrors more general changes in the discipline: the shift from research focusing on a single community or unique culture

to recognizing pervasive linkages and concomitant flows of people, technology, images, and information, and to acknowledging the impact of differential power and status in the postmodern world on local entities. In the new ecological anthropology, everything is on a larger scale.

(Kottak 1999: 25)

This Handbook takes as its point of departure today’s pressing environmental challenges, ranging from climate change to biodiversity loss, and from pollution to the depletion of natural resources, with contributors acknowledging and discussing a number of areas of tension embodied in these challenges. Such tensions exist between local livelihoods and international conservation efforts, between communities and wildlife, and finally between traditional ways of living and ‘modernity’. While traditional ways of living used to be characterized by a relatively moderate effect on habitats due to low population densities and inherently sustainable subsistence practices, advanced neoliberal capitalism is characterized by the commodification of nature and its elements. This volume is thus premised on the idea that while these tensions cannot be easily resolved, they can be better understood by considering both social and ecological effects, in equal measure.

Some anthropologists whose work is presented in this Handbook work towards global sustainability at a time when efforts to conserve biodiversity and reduce carbon emissions that cause climate change correspond with land grabs by large corporations, food insecurity, and human displacement. While they seek to reconcile more-than-human relations and responsibilities in the Anthropocene, they also struggle to accommodate social justice and the seemingly global desire for economic development. One could argue that the expansion of human influence is responsible for the destruction of natural systems, including the current threats to biodiversity, disruption of the planet’s climate, and the large-scale pollution of land, water, and air. Many critical social scientists argue that the discipline of anthropology has not been adequately attentive to these destructive trends, particularly to the expansion of human populations and consumption habits in the context of industrial and economic development. It has also been argued that anthropologists too often discount pressing environmental problems and their causes while focusing on ‘traditional’ anthropological subjects such as the cultural mediation of meaning, and symbolic interaction with nature and its elements. These arguments are reflected in different sections throughout this Handbook, and help to highlight where and how anthropological expertise – attention to cultural specificity and the micro-analysis of human–environmental interaction – can be integrated into a broader locus of environmental change.

Other contributors are more specifically concerned with the continuation and renewal of anthropological interest in what environment, broadly defined, means for people – in material, social, and culturally symbolic terms – and with injustices suffered as a consequence of environmental destruction. Much of this work focuses specifically on the vulnerability of structurally weaker and marginal communities, including many indigenous groups during the appropriation of natural resources by industrial developers, as well as on the effects of climate change, natural hazards, and the increasingly frequent incidence of migration induced by climate change. Largely as a result of the juxtaposition of issues such as cultural and ecological preservation and/or rights, we have begun to see tensions develop between the anthropology of development, or anthropology that focuses on indigenous rights to use and/or profit from nature, and more conservation-minded efforts to protect fragile habitats. While once anthropologists addressed development as something to be avoided based on its sociocultural impacts, it seems to have taken a place among the anthropological subdisciplines as an essential part of human life. As many of the contributors to this volume so aptly demonstrate, however, environmental anthropology is moving towards a stronger recognition of the combined social and environmental consequences of an expanding humanity whose existence is dramatically marked by destruction due to the ‘progress’ of development.

In 2013, Clive Hamilton argued that the dramatic impacts of climate change could mark the end of the social sciences. Hamilton (2013: para. 5) contended that the Kantian dualism of humans and the environment, on which so much social science rests its analyses, “can no longer be sustained, that the natural and the human are mixed up, and their influences cannot be neatly distinguished”. The advent of the Anthropocene, Hamilton warns,

shatters the self-contained world of social analysis that is the terrain of modern social science, and explains why those intellectuals who remain within it find it impossible to “analyze” the politics, sociology or philosophy of climate change in a way that is true to the science. They end up floundering in the old categories, unable to see that something epochal has occurred, a rupture on the scale of the Industrial Revolution or the emergence of civilization itself.

(Hamilton 2013: para. 12)

No longer is environmental preservation the exclusive domain of ecosystem scientists and ecologists; rather, conservation and environmental protection must be addressed by scholars and practitioners in their analyses of palaeo-environments, habitats, fisheries, industries, rural communities, urban settings, and any locale across the earth where expanding numbers of humans remain both reliant and an active force on the environment. Environmental anthropologists are thus specifically called upon to recognize and pay careful attention to the multiplicity of players in every environment, the variety and origin of conservation ethics around the world, and the value of cultural knowledge of landscapes and environmental change. Just as we have learned that no one formula for conservation will be universally applicable in diverse environments, so too are environmental anthropologists demonstrating that no solution to the worldwide environmental crisis can ignore the human element in every habitat.

Environmental anthropology: a sub-field with a goal

Like ecological and other anthropological sub-fields, environmental anthropology addresses both the similarities and differences between human cultures. For many environmental anthropologists, one of the aims of their research is largely to find solutions to environmental damage, and issues associated with environmental justice, migration, scarcity, and health. To this end, over a decade ago, one of the sub-field’s most environmentally enlightened authors, Kay Milton (1993, 1996, 2002) suggested three main ways in which anthropological knowledge might contribute to the environmentalist cause:

1 The study of human–environment relations, or anthropology as human ecology.

2 Anthropologists as ‘trans-cultural’ interpreters of environmental knowledge and practice.

3 The study of environmentalism itself as a cultural practice, treated as an object of analysis.

Milton argues (1993: 80) that an anthropologist’s engagement should include an “active involvement in the discourse of environmentalism, in the process of defining and implementing environmental responsibilities”. This volume presents the myriad ways that environmental anthropologists are responding to such calls for environmental engagement, study, and advocacy. The following chapters have been organized to demonstrate this dynamism and the pertinence of this ever-evolving study of human–environment interaction. They include examples of interdisciplinary, environmentally focused projects that are bringing anthropology to the forefront of community conservation projects, climate adaptation and mitigation, environmental health studies, and policy initiatives. The contributors to this volume take into account a range of environmental and social issues around the world and present various examples of environmental degradation, ethics, and knowledge, as well as instances of environmental conservation efforts and learning. They furthermore provide valuable methods of accessing such knowledge and insightful theoretical frameworks for assessing and synthesizing cultural and environmental data. The authors seek to demonstrate how environmental anthropologists are contributing to the world’s understanding of how human beings have diversely occupied, interacted with, damaged, and sustained the environment over time; and how environmental anthropology can serve as a policy tool and an applied science to help all of humanity adapt to and remedy current environmental crises.

Introducing the sections

This Handbook is broken into seven parts written by accomplished academics as well as young scholars from anthropology and related disciplines, and demonstrates the range of work currently being conducted within the sub-field, as well as those issues and ideas that the authors believe will, and/or perhaps should, characterize the future of the study. It is our hope that this collection will enable scholars to quickly and easily access both established and trending environmental anthropological explorations into theory, methodology, and practice; and provide students with the opportunity to learn more about the topics that its most prominent researchers consider pertinent to the field and its service to peoples and environments around the world.

Part I introduces us to the development of environmental anthropology as a distinct sub-field and its central theoretical issues; and provides extensive intellectual histories and commentary by the contributors. As these chapters discuss, a number of key developments in the history of environmental anthropology can be identified. First, there is a move from the studies of communities as self-enclosed entities towards recognizing them as part of wider political-ecological systems and questioning their ‘boundedness’. Second, there has been a move away from synchronic and towards diachronic approaches, as well as a general shift in the field away from assumptions of equilibrium towards assumptions of disequilibrium. Third, environmental anthropology is not just becoming more involved with politics, but is starting to become more political itself. Fourth, environmental anthropology has become increasingly influenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Part I The development of environmental anthropology
• Part II Investigations in sub-fields of environmental anthropology
• Part III Ecological knowledge, belief, and sustainability
• Part IV Climate change, resilience, and vulnerability
• Part V Justice, ethics, and governance
• Part VI Health, population, and environment
• Part VII Environment and education
• Index