leadership and management materials with questions

Plan for today’s session

• General overview: key concepts: environment; nature & culture

• What is Environmental Anthropology?

What’s anthropology got to do with the environment?

• Ecological issues like conserving biodiversity and climate change require ‘scientific’ responses, don’t they?

• So what do anthropologists bring to the study of human relationships with nature? And how do anthropologists go about this?

What’s anthropology got to do with the environment?

• human activity impacts on the environment

• humans interact with their environment more intensely than any other species (“we” use vast amounts of carbon, nitrogen, water, and other resources resulting in humans now being the main agents for environmental change)

• In evolutionary terms human societies have moved from various modes of adaptation to general maladaptation

• Humans are self-aware, cooperative, technological and social, not separate from other organisms just more complex in our interactions with our environments

Typologies of Human Adaptation:

• Modes of Subsistence/Adaptation

• Hunting & Gathering/(Foraging)

• Horticulture (or extensive agriculture) simple form of farming without aid of draught animals, ploughs, or irrigation

• Pastoralism : based on herding the products of which (milk, curds, meat, hide, bones, etc.) are consumed directly and or used in exchange with others

• Intensive Agriculture, use of draught animals, ploughs, and/or irrigation. Produces greater per hectare yields with less human labour than horticulturalists

• Industrialism, entails complex division of labour & use of machines /fossil fuels to satisfy needs for food & manufactured goods

Culture & the Environment

• Questions about how people modify, symbolise and adapt to their immediate surroundings have occupied anthropologists since the discipline took form in the late 19th C

• Anthropology in part has studied how humans came to live in such a diverse range of environments, and how they adapt and utilise the different resources these environments have to offer

• Homo sapiens did all this largely through behavioural adaptations: human action in the environment a subtle combination of cultural and genetic processes (Ellen 2001)

• These behavioural adaptations are socially transmitted, meaning they are cultural.

Culture, Nature & the Environment

• All humans have culture in terms of socialised set of assumptions and beliefs about the world and their place in it.

• For all societies culture is a way of being, one dimension of culture is that it is a tool kit for survival in a particular place on the planet.

• Likewise it is problematic to regard some societies as “living in harmony with nature”

Culture: a thorny concept

• culture is “made” by each generation not something organic, nor is it simply reproduced by a body of constraining traditions.

• Culture is a dynamic mix of symbols, beliefs, languages and practices that people create, it is not static or unchanging.

• Culture is not an entity or thing that can be separated off from other aspects of human life; it is a set of processes and assumptions that pervades all our lives and institutions (including scientific institutions).

• Culture has both material and symbolic dimensions.

Nature, Culture & Environment

•Anthropologists and other social scientists typically view nature (like culture) as socially constructed (Ingold 2000: 19-20)

§ “Environment” is a relative term – relative to the being whose environment it is. There can be no environment without an organism and no organism without an environment.

§Environments are never complete, always changing through the actions of living beings, as long as life continues, always being constructed.

§ “Environment” not to be confused with “nature”.

Environments are fundamentally historical in that “they continually come into being in the process of our lives – since we shape them as they shape us – “

Types of Environments

• Biophysical environment (world outside humans)

• Natural environment (emphasis on “ecosystem” inc. all living organisms)

• Built/modified environment (humanconstructed surroundings)

• Social environment (culture & society that people develop)

What is Environmental Anthropology?

And how has this area of study changed over time?

(i) Cultural Ecology (Steward 1930s-1950s)

(ii) (ii) Ecological Anthropology 1960s -1970s -systems approach (Vayda & Rappaport) -cultural materialism (Harris)

(iii) (iii) ‘New’ Environmental Anthropology

(iv) e.g. - political ecology - historical ecology - spiritual ecology - ethno-ecology - - ecofeminism - environmental ethics etc…

Summary: What is Environmental Anthropology?

• The study of peoples’ interactions with their environments

• An area of specialisation within Cultural/Social anthropology

• An ‘umbrella’ term: wide range of methods, theories and specialised research interests in this particular branch of anthropology

• An interdisciplinary branch of anthropology: straddling boundaries of natural and social sciences and humanities

Environmental Anthropology? Trends

• The shift from studies of closed or bounded communities toward recognition of wider political-ecological systems (and questioning notions of boundedness), i.e. transnational flows & local-global nexus (especially in context of climate change & consumption)

• Move from synchronic to diachronic approaches as well as general shift away from notions of equilibrium to assumptions of disequilibrium, EA becoming more interdisciplinary, straddling boundaries of natural and social sciences and humanities. (Kopnina & Shoreman-Ouimet 2011: 6-7)

• Growing recognition and incorporation of social scientific theory and practice (interdisciplinarity) to address ecological problems.

MODULE 1 Discussion Forum

Question 1: What is Environmental Anthropology?

Roy Ellen’s summary is a very useful introduction to Environmental Anthropology.

Why do you think the term “adaptation” is so important to ecological anthropology? 

How is ecological anthropology different to cultural ecology? Can you identify some of the limitations of either of these?

 What is historical ecology and what characterises this approach?