ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1 MOD. 2

The course is aimed at students of the MA 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. Moreover, before taking the module 2 exam, they must have passed the module 1 exam with prof. Vacchiano.

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 module with Prof. Vacchaino.

1 - What is nature?
2 - The nature/culture divide: a critique from anthropology
3 - Beyond nature and culture: amerindian perspectivism
4 - The government of «nature»
5 - Plantations as paradigm
6 - Domestication and its opposites
7 - A thin line: ethics and the culture/nature, human/animal divide

1 - What is nature?

Escobar, Arturo. "After nature: Steps to an antiessentialist political ecology." Current anthropology 40.1 (1999): 1-30.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2004. «Ch. 3_ Natural Universals and the global scale». In: Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

2 - The nature/culture divide: a critique from anthropology

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.
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.


3 - Beyond nature and culture: amerindian perspectivism

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

4 - The government of «nature»

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.
Gutkowski, Natalia. "Bodies that count: Administering multispecies in Palestine/Israel’s borderlands." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4.1 (2021): 135-157.
Braverman, Irus. "Uprooting identities: the regulation of olive trees in the occupied West Bank." PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32.2 (2009): 237-264.

5 - Plantations as paradigm

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, et al. "The Plantationocene as analytical concept: a forum for dialogue and reflection." The Journal of Peasant Studies 51.3 (2024): 541-563.

6 - Domestication and its opposites

Ingold, Tim. "From trust to domination: an alternative history of human-animal relations." Animals and human society. Routledge, 2002. 13-34.
Lorimer, Jamie, and Clemens Driessen. "Bovine biopolitics and the promise of monsters in the rewilding of Heck cattle." Geoforum 48 (2013): 249-259.
Bonifacio, Valentina (2023) Of feral and obedient cows: colonization as domestication in the Paraguayan Chaco. Cultural Anthropology.
Tsing, Anna L., et al. Feral atlas: the more-than-human Anthropocene. Stanford University Press, 2020.

7 - A thin line: ethics and the culture/nature, human/animal divide

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.
Blanchette, A. (2015) Herding species: Biosecurity, posthuman labor, and the American industrial pig. Cultural Anthropology, 30(4), 640-669.
García, María Elena. "Death of a guinea pig: Grief and the limits of multispecies ethnography in Peru." Environmental humanities 11.2 (2019): 351-372.

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. The final exam will consist of a written paper on the topics covered during the course and will be complemented by an oral exam focusing on the content of the texts covered in class. Attending students will carry out an ethnographic exercise during the course.

Teaching is delivered through lectures, discussion groups on the articles covered in the course and, for attending students, ethnographic exercises to be carried out outside the classroom.

English

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

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