Course description
Anthropologists have long been interested in the relationships between people and the natural environment. For most of human history, the relationship between humans and the environments in which they have lived was largely one of resource extraction with relatively low levels of impact. The relationship to environment changed quite dramatically after the advent of food domestication, as well as after the Industrial Revolution, and has kept apace ever since with new technological innovations and increased global political-economic relations between human populations that have affected the natural world at large.
This course will examine both the historical bases for human-nature interactions (as a way of recognizing significant factors to consider in a comprehensive analysis of human-nature relationship), as well as important developments in the contemporary world. Topics we will cover include traditional foraging, domestication of plants and animals, issues of sustainability, resilience, resource management, intellectual property rights, Indigenous resource rights, climate change, and biosemiotics. We will examine key theoretical orientations in environmental anthropology, including cultural ecology, ethnobiology/ethnoecology, and political ecology. We will explore important connections between subsistence strategies, knowledge systems, national and ethnic identities, and politics as we aim to understand the reverberations of human actions upon and understanding of the natural world and the linkages between humans and environment. By examining cross-cultural perspectives, including our own, we use both macro- and micro-lens approaches.
Assignments
Online quizzes (4)
Exams (2)
Short writing assignments (5)
Final project
Learning Outcomes
- Identify an anthropological approach to studying human and environment relationships
- Identify key moments in history where human—non-human relations were altered
- Learn about cultural ecology, adaptive strategies, and ethnobiology
- Explain the value of traditional and Indigenous environmental knowledge
- Understand various empirical approaches to the natural world
- Understand story telling about human—non-human relations
- Explain Indigenous resource rights and their socio-political significance
- Explore current research on human—non-human communication