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. Students must have previously followed Prof. Vacchiano's course.

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 cultural, political, economic and ecological domains, and will acquire the basic tools and concepts in order to plan 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 will focus on some of the recent concepts used in anthropological theory in order to interpret a variety of case-studies. These include "amerindian perspectivism" - and its related theory of personhood - "bio-agro-govenmentality", "plantationocene" and the tension between domestication and ferality.
In particular, we will analyze and discuss the following theoretical frameworks:
The ontologic turn
Inter-species ethnography
Plantationocene
Ferality and domestication

De Castro, Eduardo Viveiros. (1998) "Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism." Journal of the Royal anthropological Institute : 469-488.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Chapter 2. Univ of California Press.

De la Cadena, Marisol. (2010) "Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond “politics”." Cultural anthropology 25.2: 334-370.

Bonifacio, Valentina. (2013). »Building up the collective: a critical assessment of the relationship between indigenous organisations and international cooperation in the Paraguayan Chaco." Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 21.4: 510-522.

Haraway, Donna, et al. "Anthropologists are talking–about the Anthropocene." Ethnos 81.3 (2016): 535-564.

Scott, James C. 2008. Seeing Like a State. Chapter 1. Yale university Press.

Wolford, Wendy. "The Plantationocene: A lusotropical contribution to the theory." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111.6 (2021): 1622-1639.

Chao, Sophie. (2018) "In the shadow of the palm: dispersed ontologies among Marind, West Papua." Cultural Anthropology 33.4: 621-649.

Chao, Sophie. "Children of the palms: growing plants and growing people in a Papuan Plantationocene." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27.2 (2021): 245-264.

Bubandt, Nils. (2017) "Haunted geologies: Spirits, stones, and the necropolitics of the Anthropocene." Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet : 121-141.

Blaser, M. (2018). Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku: Diffractive and divergent multiplicities and their cosmopolitical orientations. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 1(1), 47-64.

Lyons, Kristina M. Vital decomposition: soil practitioners and life politics. Duke University Press, 2020.

Hetherington, Kregg. (2013) "Beans before the law: Knowledge practices, responsibility, and the Paraguayan soy boom." Cultural Anthropology 28.1: 65-85.

Hetherington, Kregg. "Agribiopolitics: The health of plants and humans in the age of monocrops." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38.4 (2020): 682-698.

Braun, Veit. (2020) "From commodity to asset and back again: property in the capitalism of varieties." Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism : 203-224.

Beilin, K. O., & Suryanarayanan, S. (2017). The war between amaranth and soy: Interspecies resistance to transgenic soy agriculture in Argentina. Environmental Humanities, 9(2), 204-229.

Blanchette, A. (2015). Herding species: Biosecurity, posthuman labor, and the American industrial pig. Cultural Anthropology, 30(4), 640-669.

García, M. E. (2019). Death of a guinea pig: Grief and the limits of multispecies ethnography in Peru. Environmental Humanities, 11(2), 351-372.

Bonifacio, Valentina (2023) Of feral and obedient cows: colonization as domestication in the Paraguayan Chaco. Cultural Anthropology.

Rosenberg, Gabriel N. "No Scrubs: Livestock Breeding, Eugenics, and the State in the Early Twentieth-Century United States." Journal of American History 107.2 (2020): 362-387.

de La Cadena, Marisol, and Santiago Martínez Medina. "In Colombia some cows have raza, others also have breed: Maintaining the presence of the translation offers analytical possibilities." The Sociological Review 68.2 (2020): 369-384.

Weiss, Erica. (2016) "‘There are no chickens in suicide vests’: the decoupling of human rights and animal rights in Israel." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22.3: 688-706.
Raffles, Hugh. (2010) Chernobyl. In: Insectopedia. New York: Vintage.

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 consists of an essay on one of the topics analyzed in class.

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 "Natural capital and environmental quality" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development