The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living

504 Pages·2009·3.58 MB·English

by  Nora Haenn

The Environment in Anthropology
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The Environment in Anthropology
A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living
Second Edition
Edited by Nora Haenn, Richard R. Wilk, and Allison Harnish
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2016 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
ISBN: 978-1-4798-9782-7 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-4798-7676-1 (paperback)
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
General Introduction 1
Section 1. So, What Is Environmental Anthropology? 3
1. The Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology 12
Julian Steward
2. Smallholders, Householders 18
Robert McC. Netting
3. False Forest History, Complicit Social Analysis: Rethinking Some
West African Environmental Narratives 24
James Fairhead and Melissa Leach
4. Gender and Environment: A Feminist Political Ecology Perspective 34
Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari
5. A View from a Point: Ethnoecology as Situated Knowledge 41
Virginia D. Nazarea
6. Ethics Primer for University Students Intending to Become
Natural Resources Managers and Administrators 48
Richard J. McNeil
Section 2. What Does Population Have to Do with It? 57
7. Ester Boserup’s Theory of Agrarian Change: A Critical Review 64
David Grigg
8. The Benefits of the Commons 68
Fikret Berkes, David Feeny, Bonnie J. McCay, and James M. Acheson
9. 7 Billion and Counting 75
David Bloom
10. Rural Household Demographics, Livelihoods, and the Environment 79
Alex de Sherbinin, Leah VanWey, Kendra McSweeney,
Rimjhim Aggarwal, Alisson Barbieri, Sabine Henry,
Lori M. Hunter, Wayne Twine, and Robert Walker
11. Carrying Capacity’s New Guise: Folk Models for Public Debate and
Longitudinal Study of Environmental Change 91
Lisa Cliggett
v
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12. The Environment as Geopolitical Threat: Reading Robert Kaplan’s
“Coming Anarchy” 102
Simon Dalby
Section 3. What Are Urban, Rural, and
Suburban Environments? 117
13. The Growth of World Urbanism 124
Charles Redman
14. Economic Growth and the Environment 140
Theodore Panayotou
15. Bhopal: Vulnerability, Routinization, and the Chronic Disaster 149
S. Ravi Rajan
16. The Lawn-Chemical Economy and Its Discontents 159
Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp
17. Addictive Economies and Coal Dependency:
Methods of Extraction and Socioeconomic Outcomes
in West Virginia, 1997–2009 170
Robert Todd Perdue and Gregory Pavela
18. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development” and Bureaucratic
Power in Lesotho 185
James Ferguson with Larry Lohmann
Section 4. How Does Globalization Affect
Environment and Culture? 197
19. How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems?
Science and the Globalization of Environmental Discourse 202
Peter J. Taylor and Frederick H. Buttel
20. Bottled Water: The Pure Commodity in the Age of Branding 214
Richard R. Wilk
21. Indigenous Initiatives and Petroleum Politics in the
Ecuadorian Amazon 222
Suzana Sawyer
22. Land Tenure and REDD+: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 229
Anne M. Larson, Maria Brockhaus, William D. Sunderlin,
Amy Duchelle, Andrea Babon, Therese Dokken, Thu Thuy Pham,
I. A. P. Resosudarmo, Galia Selaya, Abdon Awono, and Thu-Ba Huynh
23. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection 241
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Contents | vii
Section 5. How Do Identities Shape
Ecological Experiences? 245
24. Cultural Theory and Environmentalism 250
Kay Milton
25. Endangered Forests, Endangered People: Environmentalist
Representations of Indigenous Knowledge 254
J. Peter Brosius
26. The Nature of Gender: Gender, Work, and Environment 274
Andrea Nightingale
27. “But I Know It’s True”: Environmental Risk Assessment, Justice,
and Anthropology 286
Melissa Checker
28. Bringing the Moral Economy Back in . . . to the Study of
21st-Century Transnational Peasant Movements 300
Marc Edelman
29. How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time 310
Alex Carr Johnson
Section 6. Can Biodiversity Be Conserved? 317
30. Neoliberal Conservation: A Brief Introduction 324
Jim Igoe and Dan Brockington
31. The Power of Environmental Knowledge: Ethnoecology and
Environmental Conflicts in Mexican Conservation 332
Nora Haenn
32. Radical Ecology and Conservation Science:
An Australian Perspective 344
Libby Robin
33. Stolen Apes: The Illicit Trade in Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Bonobos,
and Orangutans 359
Daniel Stiles, Ian Redmond, Doug Cress, Christian Nellemann, and
Rannveig Knutsdatter Formo
34. Difference and Conflict in the Struggle over Natural Resources:
A Political Ecology Framework 362
Arturo Escobar
Section 7. Is Green Consumerism the Answer? 369
35. The Invisible Giant: Cargill and Its Transnational Strategies 373
Brewster Kneen
viii | Contents
36. Treading Lightly? Ecotourism’s Impact on the Environment 380
Martha Honey
37. What Is Degrowth? From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement 390
Federico Demaria, François Schneider, Filka Sekulova, and
Joan Martinez-Alier
38. Protecting the Environment the Natural Way: Ethical Consumption
and Commodity Fetishism 401
James G. Carrier
Section 8. Okay, Now What? 411
39. Living Up to Our Words 416
Paul Durrenberger
40. Social Responsibility and the Anthropological Citizen 423
Barbara Rose Johnston
41. World Is Burning, Sky Is Falling, All Hands on Deck! Reflections on
Engaged and Action-Oriented Socio-Environmental Scholarship 445
Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Allison Harnish, and Julianne A. Hazlewood
42. A Wonderfully Incomplete Bibliography of Action-Oriented
Anthropology and Applied Environmental Social Science 482
Allison Harnish, Julianne A. Hazlewood, Amanda Bedker, and
Sydney Roeder
Contributors 509
Index 519
Acknowledgments
Nora and Rick would like to thank Allison Harnish, who was the principal edi-
tor for this edition. Without Allison, the second edition was unlikely to come to
fruition. Allison brought to the volume a fresh and compelling body of material.
In addition, Allison honed new entries down to a manageable length, tracked
down copyright permissions, edited for formatting, and served as a liaison with
Fileve Palmer, who penned the volume’s teacher’s guide. Allison improved on
the first edition significantly by authoring each section’s introductory essay and
adding a new section on anthropology’s role in environmental advocacy. As a
consequence, Nora and Rick extend our deepest gratitude to Allison.
Nora would like to thank Lisa Cliggett and Luis Melodelgado for cheer-
ing this project on at crucial moments. Nora also thanks Lana Chiad at North
Carolina State University for helping secure permissions. Students in the spring
2013 course “Culture, Ecology, and Sustainable Living” at North Carolina State
University provided valuable feedback on an earlier table of contents. Finally,
Nora thanks everyone in the NCSU program in Genetic Engineering and Soci-
ety, International Studies, as well as Birgit Schmook, Sophie Calmé, and Claudia
Radel for conversations that continually challenge and refresh her appreciation
for anthropology in interdisciplinary research.
Allison would like to thank Nora Haenn and Richard Wilk for inviting her
to take part in this second edition of The Environment in Anthropology. She also
extends gratitude to Lisa Cliggett for her excellent guidance and inspiration.
Ian MacInnes and Aaron Shuman proofread early versions of this manuscript
and offered vital encouragement. Three wonderful student research partners—
Amanda Bedker, Sydney Roeder, and Emma Planet—served as copyeditors and
assisted with the bibliography; Jillian Putnam helped secure permissions. Garrett
Graddy-Lovelace and Julianne Hazlewood helped give shape to section 8, which
is an exciting addition to this second edition. Cheers to Paul Durrenberger, Bar-
bara Rose Johnston, Stefano Varese, Ben Orlove, and Tsechu Dolma for all their
great work and for allowing us to share their stories. Lastly, Allison would like
to thank the many members of the PESO and EANTH listservs who helped her
to assemble the scholar-advocate bibliography and who remind her daily of why
she decided to become an anthropologist.
Richard, in addition to thanking his coeditors, would like to acknowledge the
influence of Bob Netting on the discipline of anthropology and on his contribu-
tions to it.
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