Environment. 2013. in James Carrier and Deborah Gewertz (eds.). Handbook of Sociocultural...

JOHNSON, MELISSA (FORTHCOMING), IN, CARRIER, JAMES AND DEBORAH GEWERTZ. HANDBOOK OF SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY. BERG PUBLISHERS. 1

ENVIRONMENT

Even before anthropology was consolidated as an academic discipline, understanding the relationship between human societies and the natural environments in which they findthemselves was a central concern. Scholarship on the environment has encouraged collaboration among the different sub-disciplines of anthropology, put anthropology in conversation with other disciplines, and has pushed the boundaries of anthropology as a disciplineand of the social theory anthropologists employ. This essay explores the range of environmental scholarship by anthropologists since the 1980s, noting especially the ways in which that work has contributed to development and change within the discipline more broadly.

In the middle of the twentieth century, anthropological interest in the environment focused primarily on material culture and technology (e.g. White 1949; Steward 1955). Late in the 1960s, Rappaport countered this materialist orientation, arguing that ritual and religious belief shaped the culture–environment relationship as much as did material relationships to the natural environment. In an ethnographic study of the Maring people in Papua New Guinea, Rappaport (1969) closely examined the relationship between the year-long Kaiko ritual, pig populations, and yam production. The Kaiko ritual is triggered by interventions from the spirit world that arerelayed through shamans. Rappaport showed that the ritualalso worked to regulate pig populations, ensuring long-term sustainability in yam cultivation and preventing environmental degradation from pig over-population.


Rappaport’s study relied on the notion of the “ecosystem”, the anchoring concept at the time for the field of ecology (see also Netting 1981).

Rappaport used a fairly stable and bounded conception of the ecosystem, which some thought was limiting. Orlove (1980) called for a shift from studies of static ecosystems to a focus on process and larger ecological, political, and economic scales of analysis, following parallel developments in the field of ecology. By the 1980s, with growing public concern about environmental destruction (Earth Day was established in 1970, and environmental movements were blossoming in the US and Europe), anthropologists were investigating societies elsewhere that offered possibilities for imagining more sustainable ways of living.

Kottak (1999) also suggested linking together multiple scales of analysis – regional, national, and international geographic scales, through time and across researchers and disciplines – to better grasp the relationships between societies and natural environments.The issue of scale developed in at least two different directions. One was as a focus within the broader frame of political ecology (discussed below) that re-ignited interest in environmental anthropology (see Paulson and Gezon 2004), and the other was through the use of remote sensing and GIS (geographical information systems) in anthropological analysis (Brondizio 2008; Moran 2010). Atthe same time, historical ecologists stressed examining human–environmental relations across time (Balee 1994; Crumley 1994). Vayda (e.g. 2009) has called for ecological anthropologists to look carefully for the causes of human–environment situations by taking a wide range of methods, scales, and factors into account.


ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY LATE IN THE TWENTIETHCENTURY

While political ecology initiated the main stream ofinquiry in environmental anthropology for the next thirtyyears, two other streams developed alongside it. The first stream, human evolutionary ecology, bridges biologyand anthropology, and hence the subfields of biological and sociocultural anthropology. The second, ethno-ecology, developed out of, and typically remains linked to, cognitive anthropology, and thus connects anthropology with psychology. In this section I will describe these two, and then consider political ecology.

Human Evolutionary EcologyHuman evolutionary ecology (also called behavioral

ecology and evolutionary anthropology) approaches sociocultural traits in terms of fitness, using theories of optimization in evolutionary theory. Although it overlaps with cultural anthropology in its consideration of cultural traits and social phenomena, increasingly it has become located within biological anthropology.

Late in the 1980s, biological anthropologists used optimal foraging theory to model human adaptive strategies in a variety of ecological settings. The premise of optimal foraging theory, widely used in ecology and biology, is that an organism’s foraging behavior maximizes its energy intake and minimizes energyexpenditure. This model has effectively explained variousforaging patterns among indigenous groups in South America (Hill and Hurtado 1986) and marriage patterns andsocial relations in East Africa (Borgerhoff Mulder 2000).Behavioral ecologists researching swidden cultivation in the Amazon, which had been condemned for destroying


tropical rainforests, showed it to be not only highly sustainable, mimicking the tropical forest surrounding it, but also adaptive in an evolutionary sense, yielding maximum nutritional energy from the land for minimal labor and energy input (e.g. Beckerman 1983).

A wide variety of environmentally-oriented human behavioral ecologists explore human practices in the natural environmental in terms of evolutionary theory. Subjects of study range from analysis of lactation and nursing practices in relationship to the environments in which they are found (e.g. Sellen 2007) to factors contributing to obesity (e.g. Brewis and Gartin 2006). Research in biocultural anthropology typically branches across anthropology’s sub-disciplines, overlapping, for example, with medical anthropology (e.g. Orzech and Nichter 2008) and cognitive anthropology (e.g. Bliege Bird, R. and D. Bird 2002).

Ethno-ecologyThe second stream of research that I mentioned,

ethno-ecology, has grown out of cognitive anthropology. Building on earlier work by Conklin (1957), Berlin et al.(1966) analyzed plant classification systems of the Txochitl Maya, comparing these to Western scientific taxonomies. Berlin and Berlin’s (1996) analysis of Txotchil Maya classification systems has also yielded extensive information about Maya ethno-pharmacopeia, which they argue has the potential to develop sustainableagro-ecological programs. Their focus has been to understand native classification systems through reference to Western, Linnaean taxonomy; other ethno-ecologists aim to understand indigenous knowledge on its own terms, and to show how culture shapes cognition and human behavior (Nazarea 1999). Ethno-ecologists have also


been able to show that indigenous and traditional cognitive systems can be linked to effective stewardship of biodiversity (e.g. Garcia-Quijano 2007; Paolisso 2007). Indeed, indigenous gatherer-hunters in the Amazonian region often modified their natural environments in ways that not only increase the availability of resources useful to them, but also maintain or sometimes even enrich the biodiversity of theareas they use (e.g. Posey and Balick 2006). Ellen (2000;2006) has used the study of indigenous environmental knowledge and its transmission across generations to helpidentify solutions to contemporary environmental issues, such as deforestation in Southeast Asia.

Although the documentation and analysis of indigenous or traditional ecological knowledge can ostensibly benefit both local communities and biodiversity conservation, this is not necessarily the case. Hayden (2003) shows how processes that lead to the valuing of particular local or traditional knowledge, often the creation of scientific knowledge for the marketplace, can affect the determination of rights and ownership in ways that make the goal of benefits to localcommunities elusive.

Lansing (1991; 2006) has taken the analysis of indigenous ecological knowledge in another direction, by revealing the complex linkages between water temples and rice cultivation in Balinese irrigation systems. Through computer modeling, Lansing has shown how a long process of co-evolution between Balinese cultural institutions (water-temple networks) and natural environments (systemsof rice cultivation) generated a complex adaptive system that worked successfully through a wide range of stressors, ranging from volcanic eruptions to warfare.


Lansing notes that it was not until the Green Revolution that these systems began to degrade. Through Lansing’s research, the system of water temples in Bali has been able to regain some of its resilience and utility, and tobe seen as part of a valuable and sustainable agricultural strategy.

Other developments in ethno-ecology focus attention on history and power, combining elements of cognitive anthropology and political ecology. For example, Nazarea’s (2006) work on indigenous farming in the Philippines situates ethno-ecological knowledge historically, and explores how social categories like gender, race, and class shape the knowledge held by different groups (see also Zarger 2002). Others in ethno-ecology have sought to understand the relationships between linguistic and biological diversity, their work providing evidence for policy and activism that preservesboth indigenous languages and biodiversity (e.g. Maffi 2001).

Political Ecology and BeyondCultural anthropologists interested in people’s

relations with their environment built upon the directions outlined by Orlove (1980) and brought insightsfrom other fields into their analyses (Robbins 2004; Biersack and Greenberg 2006), most notably geography’s interest in political ecology. Wolf (1972) first used thephrase “political ecology” within anthropology, but the work of two geographers, Blaikie and Brookfield (1985), initially defined the concept and field. Earlier scholarship had focused primarily on how people interact with their environment, either describing their self-regulating capacities or showing how slash-and-burn agriculture destroyed tropical rainforests (Myers 1984).


Blaike and Brookfield, however, posed a new set of questions about human–environment relationships, showing that environmental degradation in developing countries was not the result of farmers’ mismanagement or over-population, but rather stemmed from farmers’ political and economic marginalization. In founding the political-ecological approach, Blaikie and Brookfield drew attention to the ways that political and economic inequality exacerbates environmental destruction, and howclass conflict and the social inequality generated by capitalism affect environments. They defined political ecology as the combination of ecology and political economy, broadly understood, and noted that an analysis of the relationships among classes and groups within a society was essential to making sense of the relationshipbetween societies and natural resources. This approach flourished especially in geography, but several anthropologists also adopted it (e.g. Sheridan 1988). Forexample, contributors to Little and Horowitz (1987) employed a broadly Marxist approach that described how class conflict pushed marginalized populations towards ecological degradation and suggested that the capitalist mode of production itself was destructive environmentally.

BEYOND POLITICAL ECOLOGY

The early 1990s witnessed a powerful shift in a widerange of academic disciplines: the linguistic turn, as some called it, marked the spread of post-structuralist and postmodern thought (see Lindstrom infra) from continental Europe into the US and Britain. With this, the idea that reality exists independently of language was called into question, and the links between power and


language, or discourse, became central to cultural analysis.

Political ecology had emerged at a time of sharp division between neo-Marxist materialism and cultural idealism. The linguist turn began to bridge these divisions, as scholars began to understand the material and symbolic as inextricably intertwined. Peet and Watts (1996: 37), in a highly influential volume, describe how political ecology now explores a “broader conception of forms of contention (from class struggle to social movements to everyday resistance) and a deeper conceptionof what is contended (from ownership of productive resources to control over the human imagination)”. Anthropologists were at the forefront of contributing to this development.

Political ecology’s incorporation of a discursive frame coincided with the initial movement within anthropology towards a concern with environmental justice, an area of scholarly research initiated largely by the work of a sociologist, Bullard (1990). Peña (1997)helped initiate an interest in understanding how systems of privilege and oppression are linked to environmental issues and urged anthropologists to pay attention to questions of environmental justice. Peña also emphasized the importance of collaborating with the people and communities who are subjects of study, of the marginalization of native scholars and scholars of color,and of the significance of this marginalization for the development of knowledge in the discipline. In his ethnographic study of the US–Mexico border, Peña (1997) illuminated the joint processes of environmental and social injustice that accompanied the growth of maquiladoras, “off-shore” manufacturing, primarily by US


firms for the US market.Meanwhile, other anthropologists studied

environmentalism as a practice and set of discourses, partly as a way to bring anthropology “home”, which reflected a growing attention in the discipline generallyto Western societies. For example, Milton (1996: 3) suggested that anthropologists explore “the potential of cultural theory to throw light on environmental issues and on the nature and content of environmentalism itself,as a way of understanding the world”. Relatedly, Guha (1999), an Indian historian influential in anthropology, explored a variety of environmentalisms around the world,reminding us that there is not one, normative form of environmentalism. Taking up this theme, Greenough and Tsing (2003) explored the transformations of Western environmentalism in the Global South, while Brosius (1999a) laid out a critical map of how anthropologists have explored environmentalism as an ideology and social movement. A good example of a close, ethnographic study of environmentalism is Harper’s (2006) work on environmental activism in Hungary, which shows how ideas about the environment and civil society have shifted to accommodate the demise of state socialism.

Other anthropologists began to question dominant understandings of the environment, particularly of environmental degradation. One of the more powerful analyses challenges the idea that African landscapes havebeen deforested by local farmers. Instead, Fairhead and Leach (1999) argued that local farmers themselves createdthe “forest islands” that conservationists erroneously had seen as the last remnants of old growth forests that were being destroyed through those farmers’ actions.

Political ecology brought together a variety of


research in contemporary environmental anthropology. However, many scholars no longer frame their research within it, drawing instead on a wide range of theoreticalorientations from both within and beyond anthropology. Scholarship in environmental anthropology ranges from work on biodiversity conservation to the social construction of nature, the relationship between the state and the environment, the importance of place, health and disaster, environmental justice, indigeneity, science studies, and recent topical interests such as food, animals, commodity chains, and climate change. Eachof these clusters of scholarship engages environmental anthropology across the sub-fields of anthropology, and across different sets of disciplinary boundaries. Some ofthese areas of research put anthropology of the environment at the forefront of the development of socialand cultural theory, some engage anthropology with the problems plaguing humanity today, pushing the discipline to apply itself in public policy and activism. I turn to these clusters now.

Biodiversity Conservation and AnthropologyA richly-developed vein of scholarship in

environmental anthropology addresses the relationship between biodiversity conservation and the local communities it affects (West, Igoe and Brockington 2006; Orlove and Brush 1996). That work ranges from studies of the practices and discourses framing the creation of protected areas to the effects of conservation projects on local people and how those people work with conservation organizations and government entities to implement community-based programs. The analyses of thoseworking in this vein raise interesting questions about the relationship between the local and the global, and


about the role of non-governmental organizations in generating cultural patterns.

For example, Brosius’s (1997) work on the Penan of Sarawak, in Malaysia, provided key insights into the politics and contradictions of international conservationefforts. Brosius argued that the development of local, national, and global environmental institutions was accompanied by discursive formations that favored Westernscientific rationalism. This effectively removed political and moral considerations from environmental interventions, typically to the detriment of local populations (Brosius 1999b). As well, Brosius brought multi-sited research to anthropology of the environment, analyzing how several locations of cultural production worked in conjunction with one another. Brockington (2002), in a study of the creation of the Mkomai Game Reserve in Tanzania, challenged the “fortress conservation” model that demands the banishment of local populations from protected areas on the faulty presumption that local communities inevitably destroy biodiversity in their efforts to provide for themselves.

Brosius et al. (2005) explored the range of ways in which community-based natural resource management (CBNRM)has been implemented, and the assumptions upon which it is often based. They recognized that some of these assumptions can be problematic, such as the idea that local people are more committed to environmental conservation than national governments, or that they are more knowledgeable about their natural environment. However, the volume showed that, depending on the situation and the people involved, CBNRM can be a tool that brings together goals of indigenous rights, social justice, and environmental conservation. Its efficacy


lies in the details of how, why, and by whom it is implemented.

The most recent efflorescence of anthropological inquiry into conservation has focused on how neoliberal policy can affect the relations between conservation projects and local people. In many areas of the world, conservation programs informed by neoliberal assumptions work to expand market capitalism and re-create nature through forms of commodification, which in turn affects relationships among resources, landscapes, and people (Igoe and Brockington 2007). These forms of commodification include tourism that turns “nature” into experiential commodities (West and Carrier 2003, Bandy 1999), as well as small-scale commercial production of things like crafts and honey. Thus, under the guise of community-based conservation programs, local livelihoods and identities become increasingly subsumed under the logic of late capitalism (Sodikoff 2009; Igoe et al 2010).

While much of this recent work is theoretically sophisticated, often it does not take full advantage of the rich ethnographic description that anthropology can offer. Exceptions include West’s (2004) fine-grained exploration of the creation of a protected area in what is now known as Crater Mountain in Papua New Guinea. In aplace where government authority is largely absent, the intrusion of foreign conservationists unintentionally created a set of relationships between local people and conservation NGOs that neither side fully understood. Through this analysis of unmet expectations, West shows how the place of Crater Mountain, the process of conservation, and the subjectivities of the groups involved are socially produced and transnationally


articulated (also see Walley 2004; Cruikshank 2005).Anderson and Berglund (2004: 14) call for

ethnographic studies of conservation that are “sensitive to local turns of phrase” and that are reflexive, cognizant of how knowledge is produced. Thus, they reflect Peña’s call for an attention to who produces knowledge about what, and to the political dynamics of the relationship between anthropologists and the people they study. Anderson and Berglund are calling for developments within feminist anthropology, which prodded the discipline in the 1990s, to be brought into environmental anthropology, which is still not a locus ofliberatory (Harrison 2006), reflexive (Ulysse 2008), or world anthropology (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006), but which still uses more conventional political approaches in its consideration of questions of social justice and inequality.

Anthropological research on conservation walks through political and representational minefields (Brosius 1999a). It is too easy for conservationists to become the bogey-man and for local people to become ecologically-noble savages (Hames 2007). There is also great pressure on scholars to show that community-based natural resource management works, that the goals of biodiversity conservation and social justice can indeed be united. Since most environmental anthropologists are at least partially motivated to make a difference in the world, and many engage in activism or policy work, these dilemmas are highly charged and difficult to navigate.

NaturecultureA theme related to conservation and community that

has also attracted interest is the general question of what “nature” might be, or how to think about the non-


human in ways that do not simply echo the nature–culture divide of Western thought. Feminist anthropologists, suchas MacCormack and Strathern (1980) and Ortner (1974), raised this question when they challenged the idea that there is a universal category of nature with which women are associated. Haraway (1991) pushed the question further, showing how the imagined naturalness of nature and its opposition to culture encouraged ways of thinkingthat justify systems of inequality. A good instance of this approach is by a geographer, Braun (2002), who examined the ways that nature and identity become constructed in the temperate rainforests of British Columbia. Combining ethnographic description with analyses of maps, historical travel accounts, government classification, and regional advertising, Braun shows howcertain conceptions came to dominate popular understandings of Clayoquot Sound as a destination for wealthy tourists, and how these conceptions animated political work to protect these forests.

A classic consideration of the conception of nature is Cronon’s (1996) “The Trouble with Wilderness”, which has strongly influenced environmental anthropologists. Cronon argues that the US conception of wilderness is a social construction, rooted very much in the particularities of that country’s history. Rather than being the antithesis of the human or cultural realm, the content of the idea of wilderness (like that of nature more broadly; see Williams 1980) is a cultural understanding that carries a heavy ideological load. One thread of inquiry in this arena that anthropologists havepursued is examining the relationship between social identities and the ideologically-loaded category of the environment (e.g. Johnson 2003; Kosek 2006; Carrier and


West 2009; Fortwangler 2009).French anthropologists specializing in the Brazilian

Amazon, typically students of Lévi-Strauss, were some of the first to query the category of nature. For instance, in his early work Descola (1994; 1996; Descola and Pálsson 1996) described how the Jivaro Achuar people understand themselves and how their social and cultural institutions incorporate different dimensions of realms that Western thought commonly sees as the natural and thesupernatural. His (2008) recent work draws on social studies of science to produce a more general and abstractconsideration of the limitations of Western ontology for understanding how other civilizations see and experience the world, and how they identify similarities and dissimilarities within it.

Like Descola, Escobar also challenges the universality of the category of nature, arguing for an ‘anti-essentialist’ theory of nature that acknowledges equally the cultural and biophysical. He does so when he (1990) seeks to understand how environments and societies, or, as he puts it, biology and history, are intertwined. In doing this, he identifies three forms of what he calls “socionature”: capitalist, which radically separates nature and culture; organic, which has no ontological separation between the two; and technonature,in which techno-science mediates between biology and history. Escobar sees technonature as having the potential to lead to substantial social change, includinga shift in public concern from expanding the economic realm to improving the social realm.

An ethnographic complement to the analytical work ofDescola and Escobar is Raffles’s (2002) study of Igarape Guariba, in the Amazon. He focused on the mutual and on-


going constitution of socio-natures, formations that are characterized by biophysical and phenomenological fluidity. Raffles supplemented his ethnographic research at Igarape Guariba, a small tributary of the river, with the history and writings of early European naturalists and explorers of the Amazon, the creation of scientific and folk knowledge of the Amazon, and historical researchabout his site. With this, he shows how the Amazon, and the families who settled at Igarape Guariba, together created the tributary that exists today, and so illuminates the complex interplay between humans and non-humans in the making of place, or what is commonly understood as “nature”.

Tsing (2005) also tackled the category “nature”, with her provocative metaphor of “friction”. Exploring capitalist exploitation of natural resources, and especially forests, in Indonesia, and political resistance against this exploitation, Tsing shows how theconventional dichotomies of local and global and of nature and culture do not accurately capture what is happening in that country. Rather, indigenous forest dwellers, timber company operators, Indonesian conservation scientists, and other sets of people simultaneously collide and collaborate in the processes of capitalist extraction and nature conservation. In the friction generated by these interactions, Tsing sees possibilities for generating fresh insight into the natureculture predicaments of the twenty-first century, and for generating change.

Anthropological work that investigates the social construction of nature in anthropology has provided important insights, but is still often limited to imagining the rural, the forested, the more


conventionally ”natural”. Carrier (2004) challenges that tendency by bringing under one analytical frame the urban(pollution in Tokyo), the West (direct action protest in the UK), and the traditional subject of anthropology, small communities in the Global South (e.g. fishing conservation in Jamaica).

States and EnvironmentsConcerns with the relations between states and

subjects, and between larger-scale processes and local specificities and subjectivities, has also engaged a variety of environmental anthropologists (e.g. Dove 1986;Haenn 2005; Nadasdy 2005; Mathews 2009). Like the work onconservation described above, theirs retains the rich ethnographic description of specific human–environmental settings, but also includes careful examination of a group’s position within a country, often analyzing how the cultural understandings of state and other bureaucrats shape interactions between social groups and the natural environment, sometimes in unpredictable ways.One particularly fruitful line of inquiry in this generaltopic concerns itself with understanding property regimesas a way to see the relationships people have with the natural resources they use (e.g. McCay and Acheson 1990).

Some of these studies also examine how both nature and subjectivity are generated by state-level processes. For example, Agrawal (2005) explored how subjectivities are transformed in the context of state forest conservation in India, extending Foucault’s (1982 (2000);1991) ideas about governmentality to the creation of environmental subjectivities. Drawing upon field and archival research in the Kumaoan region of the Indian Himalayas (home to the famed Chipko movement), Agrawal shows how political negotiations that followed violent


village protests against the British colonial creation offorest reserves and other environmental regulations de-centralized state power. This move away from centralized control led simultaneously to the emergence of the “environment” (primarily forest resources) as a category that required management and individual “environmental subjectivities” in the people who lived in Kumoan, such that they worked to conserve their natural environment, and particularly forest resources.

Indigeneity and the EnvironmentEnvironmental anthropology overlaps generously with

the burgeoning of research on indigeneity that occurred early in the twenty-first century (Dove 2006), and has become a fruitful arena for questioning the category of “indigenous” itself. Environmental anthropologists explore who can claim the status of indigeneity, how these claims can affect a group’s political resources, and how such claims link to human–environment relationships (Li 2000; Erazo 2003; Sawyer 2004). The category “indigenous” has become politically potent, and is showing up in places where it had not previously been used. Hathaway (2010) shows how, after international environmental groups inadvertently smuggled the concept of indigenous knowledge and rights into China, Chinese public intellectuals have been trying to use these concepts to foster new forms of environmentalism that arecloser to the principles of social justice. In many cases, becoming “indigenous” can benefit marginalized populations, yet this is not always the case (e.g. Muehlmann 2009).

THE EXPANSION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY

As should be apparent, anthropology of the


environment tends towards interdisciplinarity, bringing into anthropology insights from other disciplines and stretching the discipline of anthropology itself. I want now to describe several of the recent directions of research that heighten that trend, broadening the discipline of anthropology while also broadening what is conventionally understood as “the environment”.

Environment, Health, DisasterEnvironmental anthropologists have begun to

incorporate questions of health and medical anthropology (e.g. Singer 2009), and natural disasters, into the issues they address. For example, Harper (2002) examined the relationship between the declining health of residentpopulations and the establishment of Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar. She shows how conservation policy, intandem with the broader history and politics of the country, intensified social stratification and limited subsistence hunting, gathering, and fishing activities, which in turn contributed to increasing illness and mortality. The nexus of political ecology and health has been studied in the US as well. Harper (2004) analyzed air quality and respiratory health in Houston, with a special focus on different people’s understandings of these links, and on how these understandings in turn affect health practices. The umbrella of environmental anthropology also includes work on “natural disasters” (e.g. Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999). This scholarship uses the frame of political ecology to understand the range of ways in which disasters are generated by human activity and human risk-taking, how their course and effects are shaped by political and economic conflict andinequality, and how the casting of these disasters as “natural” serves to mask conflict and inequality.


Environmental JusticeThe focus on environmental justice in anthropology

has broadened to cross-cultural analyses of the intersection of environmental patterns with race, class, and gender-based inequality. This work also bridges the divides between academic analysis, activism, and public policy, and Johnston (2009) has been influential in this arena, publishing in both the academic and popular realms. Anthropologists working within the arena of environmental justice describe how systems of privilege and oppression shape people’s relationships to the natural environment. 1 For instance, Checker (2005), in an engaging and insightful ethnography, describes how black residents of Augusta, Georgia, were subjected to pollutants, how they mobilized in response to this, and their complicated relationship with national environmental organizations interested in fighting pollution. Similarly, Alley (2002) investigated the interplay between ideas of sacred power, waste, and waterin the context of the increasing pollution of the sacred Ganges River. Additionally, anthropologists have studied the aftermath of nuclear testing in the Pacific (Johnstonand Barker 2008), the impact of mining in Papua New Guinea (Kirsch 2006), the generation of political organization after the Bhopal disaster (Fortun 2001), andtoxic shanty-towns in Argentina (Auyero and Swistun 2009). Anthropologists active in environmental justice have also been at the forefront of pushing the disciplineto be more engaged with activism and with public debate and policy formulation (Checker et al 2010). These developments reflect a long engagement of environmental anthropologists with applied work (e.g. Chicchón 2000).

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Science StudiesSome environmental anthropologists have drawn on

science studies to examine the science that creates Western knowledge of the natural world. One example of this is Lowe’s (2006) description of how knowledge of thebiology of the Togean islands in Indonesia was shaped by the disparate efforts and interests of Indonesian scientists, Western conservationists, and the Sama peoplewho live on the islands. Ideas of nature, nation, and identity were important in this process of nature-making,which was centered on the possibility of creating a national park. Likewise, a recent interdisciplinary collaborative effort (Matsutake Worlds Research Group 2009) to trace the production, exchange, and consumption of Matsutake mushrooms has shown how the production of scientific knowledge about this plant is inflected by land-tenure regimes, racial stratification, and differingunderstandings of socionatures. Other environmental anthropologists engaged in science studies have addressedmore contentious issues, such as Masco’s (2006) masterfulanalysis of the nuclear-weapons industry in New Mexico.

Animals, Food, Commodities, and Climate ChangeAnimal studies, a recent transdisciplinary movement,

is being elaborated cross-culturally in anthropology (e.g. Mullin 1999; Knight 2006; Cassidy and Mullin 2007).Particularly interesting work in the area is exemplified by Kohn, who is trying to develop an “anthropology of life” that situates the human within a broader context that goes beyond the human. In his essay on dogs in the Amazon, Kohn (2009) explored what such an anthropology might be by working on the puzzle of interpreting the meanings of Amazonian dogs’ dreams and, through this, coming to an understanding of the relations that the Runa


people have with other species.Like animal studies, food studies is a growing topic

of interdisciplinary interest that is concerned with a range of issues, from the links between identity and foodto questions of sustainability and the effects of food systems on environments. Scholars are looking closely at alternative food systems, such as farmers’ markets, the Slow Food movement, “natural” and organic production, andmarketing. Studies of agricultural systems and their sustainability have a relatively long history in environmental anthropology (e.g. Stone 1996), but a central focus on food is relatively new (e.g. Anderson 2005). Wilk (2006) brings a range of these considerationstogether in his analysis of shifts in food cultures in Belize from its settlement in the seventeenth century to its position as an ecotourism destination and site of massive emigration late in the twentieth century. For him, the global and local are always mutually constituting, and the task of identifying what kinds of food systems are environmentally and socially sound is more complicated than it might seem. Related to this is the concern with commodity production and commodity chains. While scholars have studied, for example, Coca-Cola (Foster 2008) and tomatoes (Brandt 2002), the contemporary issues of water (Rodriguez 2007; Orlove and Caton 2010) and oil (Sawyer 2004) are worthy of more attention from environmental anthropologists.

Finally, the global climate crisis has generated a new subfield of research and policy work for environmental anthropologists. The volume by Crate and Nuttall (2009) includes three avenues of research in thisarena. They are the investigation of how marginalized communities most affected by climate change will adapt to


the changing environmental conditions they will face, theanalysis of different experiences and understandings of what is significant about climate change, and the ethnographic study of the production and consumption practices in the overdeveloped North that are causing climate change.

PROMISING POTENTIALS

In addition to the areas of work described above, there are several promising developments in environmentalanthropology. Some of these may enable us to move beyond the nature–culture and material–symbolic dichotomies thatstill dominate much work in the field, and indeed in anthropology generally. Other developments call for a questioning of whose knowledge counts, and for a concern with the relevance of the production of knowledge for helping solve environmental and social problems.

PlaceThe concept of place has been used primarily by

geographers and archaeologists. Recently, however, environmental anthropologists have turned their attentionto the investigation of the social, political, and natural meanings and productions of place (e.g. Orlove 2002; Thornton 2008). Escobar (2008) illustrates this, tracing networks among social movements, alternative knowledges, and economic forms in Colombia’s Pacific coast. He focuses on Afro-Colombian activist groups in the region, which has extensive palm plantations and has been the object of capitalist expropriation of rainforestresources, modernist development planning, and “hot spot”biodiversity conservation. He examines the conditions that underlay these developments and how they have shapedAfro-Colombian place-based struggles for justice,


autonomy, and territory.

MaterialityThe discursive orientation in anthropology has made

it difficult for environmental anthropologists to addressthe materiality of the world. As the work of Raffles (2002) and others shows, however, the material and non-material perpetually co-constitute themselves. In his extensive descriptive and analytical writings, Ingold hassuggested ways to approach this co-constitution (Ingold 2000), especially through his conceptions of dwelling andenskillment. For Ingold, humans come into being, into relation with the non-human, and into culture through practical engagement with the world, a process that reflects the fact that humans are at once biological and symbolic. He elaborates this approach in his work on lines (2007; 2011), in which he explores the production and significance of lines to being human-in-the-world. Lines are found in human gestures, in pathways and trails, in writing, and in a host of other human activities, and it is through understanding them that we can develop a broad ecology, or an anthropology of life. Ingold’s approach meshes well with the growing recent interest in the anthropology of the senses and the study of affect. Moreover, combining his approach with political-ecological concern with unequal access to resources and power could be particularly fruitful.

As a number of scholars have suggested, one of the fundamental questions in environmental anthropology is the extent to which we can use Western concepts to make sense of non-Western categories and to critique Western thought (Escobar 1999; Argyrou 2005; West 2005; Escobar 2008; Velásquez Runk 2009). This question is pertinent for the discipline as a whole. However, it is especially


important in environmental anthropology, which rests on an intellectual tradition that sharply demarcates nature and culture. To deal with this, Escobar (1999) and othershave suggested greater attention to the ways in which, the conditions under which, and by whom our knowledge is produced. Or, as Peña suggests, anthropology necessarily has to be co-produced, the subjects and the analyst collaborating as equals in generating understandings of the human and non-human (see Simmons and Ogden 1998).

Furthermore, while environmental anthropologists have spread their interest beyond the small-scale societies that have been so important in the discipline’spast, they need to pay even more attention to the global North (as in Hornborg 2001) and produce the same detailed, ethnographic analysis of it that Rappaport produced for the Tsembaga Maring. Doing this would allow those in the sub-discipline to investigate those parts ofthe global North that are implicated in the production ofglobal environmental problems. This kind of shift, to focusing on areas associated with the most pressing environmental problems, has roots deep in the sub-discipline, but would also put environmental anthropologyat the forefront of efforts to make anthropology more relevant to the world’s problems.

Environmental anthropology will continue to push thediscipline, both by querying the boundaries of anthropology and by ensuring dialogue among anthropology’s increasingly disparate sub-disciplines. Aswell, it will continue to embrace a wide range of subjectmatter. Three aspects of this are likely to be the most intriguing and fruitful. The first is work that challenges the discipline’s fundamental concepts, such asthe distinction between nature and culture and between


the material and the symbolic. The second is work that raises the question of whose knowledge counts, and the related move towards greater equity in the production of knowledge. The third is work that pushes the discipline to make more difference in a world that suffers greatly from problems that are simultaneously social and environmental.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Michael Hathaway and Crystal Fortwangler offered invaluable comments; any shortcomings are fully my own. {I would also like to acknowledge your very wonderful editing help, If you think that would be appropriate!)

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