ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1 MOD. 2

The course is aimed at students of the master's degree course in Environmental Humanities, and has the aim of providing students with the conceptual tools that will allow them to recognize and address environmental issues through an anthropological perspective.

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 course focus on specific ecosystems and non-human subjects in order to analyze them from an ethnographic perspective.
In particular, we will consider the following elements:

- mountains
- deserts
- salmon
- seeds
- palms
- cows
- soy
- forests
- financial markets

Students will also make group presentations on elements of their choice from the "Feral Atlas".

De la Cadena, Marisol. "Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond “politics”." Cultural anthropology 25.2 (2010): 334-370.
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.
Livingston, Julie. Self-Devouring Growth. Duke University Press, 2019.
De Castro, Eduardo Viveiros. "Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism." Journal of the Royal anthropological Institute (1998): 469-488.
Lyons, Kristina M. Vital Decomposition. Duke University Press, 2020.
De León, Jason. The land of open graves. University of California Press, 2015.

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

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