ANTHY521-23A (HAM)
Cultural Perspectives on Environmental Issues
30 Points
Staff
Convenor(s)
Fiona McCormack
9317
J.2.02
fiona.mccormack@waikato.ac.nz
|
Administrator(s)
Librarian(s)
You can contact staff by:
- Calling +64 7 838 4466 select option 1, then enter the extension.
-
Extensions starting with 4, 5, 9 or 3 can also be direct dialled:
- For extensions starting with 4: dial +64 7 838 extension.
- For extensions starting with 5: dial +64 7 858 extension.
- For extensions starting with 9: dial +64 7 837 extension.
- For extensions starting with 3: dial +64 7 2620 + the last 3 digits of the extension e.g. 3123 = +64 7 262 0123.
What this paper is about
This paper (30 points) concentrates on anthropological approaches to human-nature relationships. It explores the meanings people give to the nonhuman world and local ways of engaging with the environment, including local and indigenous environmental knowledge. Popular discourses of sustainability, environmentalism and conservation will be explored with a particular focus on the broader political and economic projects in which these are embedded. The paper provides a critical lens through which to understand contemporary environmental governance, for instance, the relationship between property rights, capitalist markets and resource management in fisheries and other extractive industries. The paper also equips students with an understanding of how anthropology can intervene in debates around biodiversity decline and develope equitable and culturally meaningfully responses to the envrionemental crises.
How this paper will be taught
class time, in order to meaninfully contribute to discussions.
Required Readings
Week 1
Theoretical foundations
Readings:
- Michael R. Dove, 2001. “Interdisciplinary Borrowing in Environmental Anthropology and the Critique of Modern Science”. In New Directions in Anthropology and the Environment, edited by Carole. L. Crumley. Walnut Creek, California, USAL: Altamira Press, pp. 90-112.
- Phil Macnaghten and John Urry, 1998. Rethinking Nature and Society. In Contested Natures. London, UK: Sage, pp. 1-31.
- Biersack, A. 2006. Reimagining political ecology: Culture/Power/History. In A. Biersack and J. Greenberg (Eds.) Reimagining Political Ecology. Duke University Press, 3-42.
- Tim Ingold, 2000. “Culture, nature, environment: steps to an ecology of life”. In The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. UK, London: Routledge, pp. 13-26.
- Palmer, C. T. (2017). Culture and Sustainability: Environmental Anthropology in the Anthropocene. Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, 21-34.
Week 2
Traditional ecological knowledge
Readings:
- Mondragón, C. (2004). Of winds, worms and mana: The traditional calendar of the Torres Islands, Vanuatu. Oceania, 74(4), 289-308.
- Arun Agrawal. 1995. Dismantling the divide between indigenous and scientific knowledge. Development and Change 26(3): 413-439.
- Miguel Alexides. 2009. “The cultural and economic globalisation of traditional environmental knowledge systems.” In Landscape, Process and Power: Re-Evaluating Traditional Environmental Knowledge, edited by Serena Heckler, Berghahn books, pp. 19-67.
- Dove, M.R., 2006. Indigenous people and environmental politics. Annu. Rev. Anthropol., 35, pp.191-208.
- Barber, K. (2021). SCIENCE VERSUS INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE? Toward a Dialogical Approach. Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, 18(1), 1-24.
Week 3
Local resource use and environmentalism
Readings:
- Peter Brosius, 1999. Analyses and Interventions: Anthropological Engagements with Environmentalism. Current Anthropology 40(3): 277-309.
- Robin Grove-White. 1993. Environmentalism: A New Moral Discourse for Technological Society? In K. Milton, ed. Environmentalism: The View From Anthropology. London, Routledge, pp. 1-17.
- Paul Nadasdy, 2005. Transcending the debate over the ecologically noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism. Ethnohistory52(2): 291-332.
- Niels Einarsson, 1993. "All animals are equal but some are cetaceans." Environmentalism: The view from anthropology: 73-84.
Week 4
Precarity, risk and farming.
Readings:
- Ofstehage, A. (2020). Farming. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
- O'Connell, C., Motallebi, M., Osmond, D. L., & Hoag, D. L. (2017). Trading on risk: The moral logics and economic reasoning of North Carolina farmers in water quality trading markets. Economic Anthropology, 4(2), 225-238.
- Stensrud, A. B. (2019). Safe milk and risky quinoa: The lottery and precarity of farming in Peru. Focaal, 2019(83), 72-84.
Week 5
Cultural landscapes and ecologies
Readings:
- Stuart McLean, 2003. “Céide Fields: Natural Histories of a Buried Landscape”. In Landscape Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by P. Stewart and A. Strathern. London, UK: Pluto Press, pp. 47-70.
- Case, E. (2019). I ka Piko, To the Summit: Resistance from the Mountain to the Sea. The Journal of Pacific History, 54(2), 166-181.
- Kearney, A., Bradley, J., & Brady, L. M. (2019). Kincentric Ecology, Species Maintenance and the Relational Power of Place in Northern Australia. Oceania, 89(3), 316-335.
- Rose, D., 2005. An indigenous philosophical ecology: situating the human. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 16(3), pp.294-305.
Week 6
Sustainability, Conservation and Protected areas
Readings:
- Brightman, M., & Lewis, J. 2017. Introduction: the anthropology of sustainability: beyond development and progress. In The Anthropology of Sustainability (pp. 1-34). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
- Nicole Peterson, 2015. Unequal sustainabilities: The role of social inequalities in conservation and development projects. Economic Anthropology 2(2): 264-277.
- Jim Igoe. 2010. "The spectacle of nature in the global economy of appearances: Anthropological engagements with the spectacular mediations of transnational conservation." Critique of Anthropology 30 (4): 375-397.
- Paige West, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington. 2006. Parks and peoples: the social impact of protected areas." Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 35 (2006): 251-277.
Week 9
Multi-species ethnography
- Kirksey, S.E. and Helmreich, S., 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural anthropology, 25(4), pp.545-576.
- Radhika Govindrajan, R. 2015. “The goat that died for family”: Animal sacrifice and interspecies kinship in India's Central Himalayas. American Ethnologist, 42(3), 504-519.
- Goldberg-Hiller, J., & Silva, N. K. (2011). Sharks and pigs: animating Hawaiian sovereignty against the anthropological machine. South Atlantic Quarterly, 110(2), 429-446.
- Chao, S. (2019). The plastic cassowary: Problematic ‘pets’ in West Papua. Ethnos, 84(5), 828-848.
Week 10
The Rights of Nature
- Murat Arsel. 2012. Between Marx and Markets. The state, the left turn and nature in Ecuador. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie (Journal of Economic and Social Geography), 103(2), 150-163.
- Anne Salmond, 2014. Tears of Rangi: Water, power, and people in New Zealand. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(3), 285-309.
- Kauffman, C. M., & Martin, P. L. (2018). Constructing rights of nature norms in the US, Ecuador, and New Zealand. Global Environmental Politics, 18(4), 43-62.
- Rawson, A., & Mansfield, B. (2018). Producing juridical knowledge:“Rights of Nature” or the naturalization of rights?. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1-2), 99-119.
- Tănăsescu, M. (2020). Rights of nature, legal personality, and indigenous philosophies. Transnational environmental law, 9(3), 429-453.
Week 11
Saltwater environments
Readings
- Helmreich, Stefan. 2011. "Nature/culture/seawater." American Anthropologist 113, no. 1: 132-144.
- McCormack, Fiona. (2018). Māori Saltwater Commons. Commoning Ethnography, 1(1), 9-31.
- Kearney, Amanda. "Returning to that which was never lost: Indigenous Australian saltwater identities, a history of land claims and the paradox of return." History and Anthropology 29, no. 2 (2018): 184-203.
- McCormack, Fiona, and Jacinta Forde. "Fisheries." In Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Anthropology. 2019.
Week 12
The Anthropocene and climate change
Readings:
- Donna Haraway, D, 2015. Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159-165.
- Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg. "The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative." The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62-69.
- Amelia Moore "Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing contemporary global change." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute22, no. 1 (2016): 27-46.
- Rudiak-Gould, P. (2012). Promiscuous corroboration and climate change translation: A case study from the Marshall Islands. Global Environmental Change, 22(1), 46-54.
- Susan Crate. 2011. "Climate and culture: anthropology in the era of contemporary climate change." Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 175-194
Week 13
Rewilding
Readings
- Tsing, A. (2017). The buck, the bull, and the dream of the stag: Some unexpected weeds of the Anthropocene. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 42(1), 3-21.
- Chrulew, M. (2011). Reversing extinction: Restoration and resurrection in the Pleistocene rewilding projects. Humanimalia, 2(2), 4-27.
- Rippa, A. (2021). Hunting, rewilding, and multispecies entanglements in the Alps. Ethnos, 1-23.
- da Silva e Sá, G. J. (2017). The return of what never left: animals present in future natures. Vibrant. Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, (v14n2).
Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete the course should be able to:
Assessments
How you will be assessed
The internal assessment/exam ratio (as stated in the University Calendar) is 100:0. There is no final exam.