ANTH 218 Anthropology and the Environment: From Conservation to Devastation
This course explores how nature and culture are perceived differently across global societies. The tension between nature and culture informs how human intervention in the environment can have repercussions running the spectrum from conservation to devastation. We begin by visiting the roots of Environmental Anthropology, which is one of the discipline's fastest-growing sub-fields, at the confluence of cultural anthropology, political ecology, ethnoecology, ethnomedicine, and linguistics. We will use this foundation to explore global case studies revealing how the interaction between people and the environment impact consumption practices and landscape management, including deforestation, degradation, warscapes, climate change, and the anthropocene. A major theme throughout the semester is human and non-human agency: how people have the power to structure the world around them, but how that external world also influences human behavior. This class is an invitation to analyze the complexity of the environment from the cross-cultural perspective of everyday life and ordinary practice.