1st Edition

Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology

Edited By Helen Kopnina, Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet Copyright 2017
    508 Pages 28 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    508 Pages 28 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Environmental Anthropology studies historic and present human-environment interactions. This volume illustrates the ways in which today's environmental anthropologists are constructing new paradigms for understanding the multiplicity of players, pressures, and ecologies in every environment, and the value of cultural knowledge of landscapes.

    This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary topics in environmental anthropology and thorough discussions on the current state and prospective future of the field in seven key sections. As the contributions to this Handbook demonstrate, the subfield of environmental anthropology is responding to cultural adaptations and responses to environmental changes in multiple and complex ways. As a discipline concerned primarily with human-environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that we are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioural and often cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of topics presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology; and a broad new range of subjects, such as resilience, nonhuman rights, architectural anthropology, industrialism, and education. This volume enables scholars and students quick access to both established and trending environmental anthropological explorations into theory, methodology and practice.

    Part 1: The Development of Environmental Anthropology

    1. Introduction Helen Kopnina, Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet

    2. History and Scope of Environmental Anthropology Eduardo Brondizio, Ryan Adams, Stefano Fiorini

    3. Ethnobiology and the New Environmental Anthropology Eugene Anderson

    4. Anthropology and the Environment: Beginnings Alan Beals

    5. Ethnoscientific implications of classification as a socio-cultural process David Casagrande 

    Part 2: Investigations in sub-fields of environmental anthropology

    6. Enviromateriality: Exploring the Links between Political Ecology and Material Culture Studies Jose Martinez-Reyes

    7. Historical Ecology: Agency in Human-Environment Interaction Lauren Dodaro, Dustin Reuther

    8. Architectural Anthropology: Developing methodological framework for Indigenous wellbeing Angela Kreutz and Paul Memmott

    9. Beyond "nature": Towards more engaged and care-full ways of relating to the environment Mark Coekelbergh

    Part 3: Ecological Knowledge, Belief and Sustainability

    10. An Anthropology of Nature – or an Industrialist Anthropology? David Kidner

    11. Spiritual Ecology, Sacred Places, and Biodiversity Conservation Leslie Sponsel

    12. The Bible, Religion, and the Environment Ronald Simkins

    13. What’s ontology got to do with it? On the knowledge of nature and the nature of knowledge in environmental anthropology Sian Sullivan

    14. Unsustainability in action: An ethnographic examination Sayd Randle, Lauren Baker, Annie Claus, Chris Hebdon Alder Keleman and Michael R. Dove

    15. Anthropological Approaches to Energy Peter Kirby 

    Part 4: Climate Change, Resilience and Vulnerability

    16. Disasters and Their Impact: A Fundamental Feature of Environment Susanna Hoffman

    17. The Concepts of Adaptation, Vulnerability and Resilience in the Anthropology of Climate Change Anthony Oliver-Smith

    18. Climate, Environment and Society in Northwest Greenland Mark Nuttall

    19. Taking Responsibility for Climate Change: On Human Adaptation, Sustainable Consumption and Environmental Governance Cindy Isenhour

    20. Climate change adaptation and development planning: from resilience to transformation? Bob Pokrant

    Part 5: Justice, ethics, and governance

    21. Justice for All: inconvenient truths and reconciliation in human-non-human relations Veronica Strang

    22. Environmental Ethics and Environmental Anthropology Holmes Rolston III

    23. Battle of the Ecologies–Deep vs. Political: An Investigation of Anthropocentrism in the Social Sciences  Bernard Zaleha

    24. ‘Good governance’, corruption, and forest protection: critical insights from environmental anthropology Pauline Von Hellerman

    25. Cultural ecotourism as an indigenous modernity: Namibian Bushmen and two contradictions of capitalism Stasja Koot

    Part 6: Health, Population, and Environment

    26. Local and organic food movements Ryan Adams

    27. Anthropocentrism and the making of Environmental Health Merrill Singer

    28. Multi-Species Entanglements, Anthropology and Environmental Health Justice Melanie Rock

    29. Challenging the Conventional Wisdom: Breast Cancer and Environmental Health Mary Anglin

    30. Excessive Human Numbers in a World of Finite Limits: Confronting the Threshold of Collapse Kenneth Smail

    Part 7: Environment and Education

    31. Children’s language about the environment Bryan Wee and Hillary Mason

    32. "You have to do it": Creating Agency for Environmental Sustainability through Experiential Education Brenda R. Beckwith, Nancy J. Turner and Tania Halber

    33. Cognition and cultural modeling Kimberly Kirner

    34. Perceiving Nature’s Personhood: Anthropological Enhancements to Environmental Education Robert Efird

    35. Schooling the World: Land-based pedagogies and the culture of schooling Carol Black

    Biography

    Helen Kopnina is assistant professor of environmental anthropology at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She is also a coordinator and lecturer within the Sustainable Business Program and researcher in the fields of environmental education and environmental social sciences at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands.

    Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet is an environmental anthropologist and currently teaches in the Anthropology Department at the University of Connecticut, USA. Her research focuses on human–environment interactions, cross-cultural conservation practices, community response to natural hazards, and the effects of climate change.

    "It is an informative and enlightening read for accomplished academics and new scholars in anthropology, ecology and conservation or similar related disciplines. Although geared primarily toward social anthropologists this book provides a plentiful source of up-to-date references and case studies for anyone with a general interest in environmental anthropology or wishing to delve deeper into associated subject areas, coming from a biological conservation or social science background. It offers a uniquely holistic overview of anthropology, taking as its point of departure pressing environmental challenges, whilst effectively conveying the message that anthropologists should look beyond their subject and adopt an interdisciplinary approach when exploring social and environmental issues."

    Hannah E.Parathian, Centre for Research in Anthropology, Lisbon.