杏吧论坛

Dr Mareike Winchell, Dr Gisa Weszkalnys and Dr Andrea Pia

This course is available on the MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in China in Comparative Perspective, MSc in Social Anthropology and MSc in Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

While the ‘environment’ may appear to be whatever is not human, ultimately all human societies shape and have been reshaped by specific environments. Departing from more conventional quantitative approaches to the environment, this course explores theoretical and empirical developments in understanding the relationship of people to the environment, including questions of inequality, race, nonhumans, and ontological difference. With case studies from Amazonia to the Arctic, the Andes to North America, East Asia and Europe, we will examine how different groups respond to the environments they help co-create through social organization and kinship, subsistence practices, conservation, technology, and religion. Topics to be addressed include: political ecology, environmental history, climate change, environmental and climate justice, Black and Indigenous rights, natural resource management, unequal development, cultural ecologies and the ‘loss’ of alternate ecological knowledges, population growth and resource consumption, imaginaries of sustainability and practiced collaborations to address climate change, minoritarian environmentalisms, and growing appeals to plural ontological systems including within Rights of Nature frameworks.

In recent years, a flurry of political activity and scholarship interrogates the ways that cosmo-politics (more-than-humans in political life), new ontologies (emergent ways of being or forms of existence), and broader collaborative zones of social and environmental worlding interrupt familiar concepts of humanity as exceptional. Along with supplying students with a grounding in social scientific debates about environments and the human, this course also historicizes these debates to link them to an older canon of ethnographic and ethnological research concerning pre-colonial religiosities, land management and settlement, property regimes, and exchange networks. By drawing together and building upon classic texts on human ecological adaptations, the co-production of people, culture and place, and recent ethnographies of human/environmental co-articulation, the course aims to historicize contemporary phenomena including eco-politics,