ANTH 378 - Nature, Culture, and Environmentalism

Western epistemology is considered to be based on a strict separation and opposition between nature and culture. While this divide is under increasing scrutiny in the face of the climate crisis in the Anthropocene, anthropology has long been a pioneer in challenging and dismantling this binary. This course examines canonical and contemporary anthropological approaches to the concept of nature and human relations with the natural environment. We will discuss how conceptions of nature are always shaped, transformed, and produced by historically situated social relations and how such conceptions, in turn, shape environmental struggles across the globe. Course materials focus primarily on ethnographies from the global South oriented towards the intersections of political ecology and environmental justice, science and technology studies, postcolonial theory, and more-than-human perspectives. Course topics include the history of the Western nature-culture binary and its critiques and recent environmental scholarship on issues such as agro-food systems, extractive conflicts, toxicity, genetic engineering, climate change, disasters, microbial lives, and multispecies entanglements.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): ANTH 201 or ANTH 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.