ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1 MOD. 2

The course is primarily addressed to students of the MA in Environmental Humanities. The participation of students of other programmes can be authorised upon agreement with the instructors.

The course aims at providing the students with the necessary skills to look at the relationship between human beings, society, and the environment through the perspective of social and cultural anthropology. Through the analysis of specific case-studies, they will be able to highlight the connections between the political, economic and ecological domains, and will acquire the basic tools and concepts in order to plan an ethnographic research on these topics. Finally, through group and individual presentations they will enhance their ability for critical and independent thinking.

In order to be able to attend the second module, students are required to have attended the first one.

The relevance of human action in determining the environmental transformations of the last centuries has been highlighted through various attempts to define our era according to a predominant social or political agent: terms like “anthropocene”, “plantatiocene” or “capitalocene” have thus been proposed. Other authors have emphasized the relationship between different species, and between them and humans, and how the deterioration of this relationship has led to the dramatic environmental changes underway, coining expressions such as “chthulucene”, “tangles” or “geontologies”. Another line of studies has investigated the way in which scientific research and technological innovation have changed these relationships in irreversible ways, generating new challenges, including the survival of mankind and life on earth. One of the specific tasks of anthropology is to move across contexts and scales, exploring the singularity of local relationships between human beings and the environment, taking into account the mutual influence of commercial, financial and ideological processes.
Through the study of ethnographic cases from different geographical areas, the course aims to analyse the interaction of environmental, social, cultural and political factors in determining the current relationships between human beings and the environment, the ecosystemic transformations induced by contemporary processes and the possibilities to respond to the challenges of the future.
In particular, the second part of the module will focus on specific authors and geographical areas, Latin America and Indonesia, to address the issues of inter-species relationship, the overcoming the analytical separation between nature and culture (or science and society), and to highlight the relations of power underlying the creation of the different worlds described in the case studies.

Main texts of reference (the list will be expanded at the beginning of the semester)

First module:
Eriksen, T.H. Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. Pluto Press, 2016.
Eriksen, T.H.. An Overheated World: An Anthropological History of the Early Twenty-first Century, Routledge, 2019.
Ingold T. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000.
Maffi L. On Biocultural Diversity: Linking Language, Knowledge and the Environment. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press, 2001.

Second module:
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson, eds. Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. U of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Kohn, Eduardo. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. University of California Press, 2013.
Hetherington, Kregg, The Government of Beans. Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops. Duke University Press, 2018.

Attendance is not mandatory, but attending students are required to follow and participate in classes, intervening and animating the debate on the topics under consideration. Attending students are required to introduce the topic of the day by presenting, in small groups, a review of one article/chapter suggested by the instructor, encouraging questions and generating a discussion among colleagues. The class will then proceed by exploring the questions raised in the presentation and debate, moving progressively toward theoretical analysis.
The final examination is composed both of a written and an oral section. The written part consists of a 6.000-words essay aimed at exploring in depth (that is: combining further references) a topic covered in the course. The essay is then discussed in an oral examination in which the further topics can be assessed. The final grade will take into account the written essay, the appropriateness of contents and language and, for attending students, the level of involvement and participation in classes and the quality of their presentations.

The course is taught through lectures, audio-visual materials, class discussion and group presentations of selected articles.

English

The instructors of the two modules receive students in their office, upon appointment to be previously arranged by email.

written and oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Natural capital and environmental quality" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development