Michael R. Dove

Jessica Barnes

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our times, yet global solutions have proved elusive. This book draws together cutting-edge anthropological research to uncover new ways of approaching the critical questions that surround climate change. Leading anthropologists engage in three major areas of inquiry: how climate change issues have been framed in previous times compared to present-day discourse, how knowledge about climate change and its impacts is produced and interpreted by different groups, and how imagination plays a role in shaping conceptions of climate change.

Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change

Climate Cultures

Percy E. Sajise

Amity A. Doolittle

Reflecting new thinking about conservation in Southeast Asia, Beyond the Sacred Forest is the product of a unique collaboration involving ethnographic research in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Scholars from those countries and the United States rethink the translation of environmental concepts between East and West, particularly ideas of nature and culture; what conservation might mean; and how conservation policy is applied and transformed in the everyday landscapes of Southeast Asia. As this collection of essays demonstrates, the researchers focus more on folk, community, and vernacular conservation discourses than on those of institutions and the state. Thick with ethnographic detail, their essays provide powerful examples of why social, political, historical, and economic factors are central to the success or failure of conservation initiatives. Natural resource managers and policy makers who accept and work with these factors are likely to enjoy greater and more enduring success than those who simply seek to remove the influence and impact of humans from the landscape. As many of the essays suggest, this requires the ability to manage contradictions, to relinquish orthodox ideas of what conservation looks like, and to practice continuously adaptive management techniques. It requires practitioners who are deeply reflexive and able to focus less on short-term goals and more on long-term engagement with the relationships between people and nature. Contributors: Upik Djalins ; Amity A. Doolittle ; Michael R. Dove; Levita Duhaylungsod; Emily E. Harwell; Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells; Lye Tuck-Po; Percy E. Sajise; Endah Sulistyawati; Yunita T. Winarto

Complicating Conservation in Southeast Asia

Beyond the Sacred Forest

A seminal anthropological work on the age-old question of the paradoxical relationship between human consciousness and the environment

The Ecological Challenge of Human Consciousness

Bitter Shade

Carol Carpenter

Environmental Anthropology: A Reader is a collection of historically significant readings, dating from early in the twentieth century up to the present, on the cross-cultural study of relations between people and their environment. Provides the historical perspective that is typically missing from recent work in environmental anthropology Includes an extensive intellectual history and commentary by the volume’s editors Offers a unique perspective on current interest in cross-cultural environmental relations Divided into five thematic sections: (1) the nature/culture divide; (2) relationship between environment and social organization; (3) methodological debates and innovations; (4) politics and practice; and (5) epistemological issues of environmental anthropology Organized into a series of paired papers, which ‘speak’ to each other, designed to encourage readers to make connections that they might not customarily make

A Historical Reader

Environmental Anthropology

Daniel M. Kammen

In an era when pressing environmental problems make collaboration across the divide between sciences and arts and humanities essential, this book presents the results of a collaborative analysis by an anthropologist and a physicist of four key junctures between science, society, and environment. The first focuses on the systemic bias in science in favour of studying esoteric subjects as distinct from the mundane subjects of everyday life; the second is a study of the fire-climax grasslands of Southeast Asia, especially those dominated by Imperata cylindrica (sword grass); the third reworks the idea of ‘moral economy’, applying it to relations between environment and society; and the fourth focuses on the evolution of the global discourse of the culpability and responsibility of climate change. The volume concludes with the insights of an interdisciplinary perspective for the natural and social science of sustainability. It argues that failures of conservation and development must be viewed systemically, and that mundane topics are no less complex than the more esoteric subjects of science. The book addresses a current blind spot within the academic research community to focusing attention on the seemingly common and mundane beliefs and practices that ultimately play the central role in the human interaction with the environment. This book will benefit students and scholars from a number of different academic disciplines, including conservation and environment studies, development studies, studies of global environmental change, anthropology, geography, sociology, politics, and science and technology studies.

Applying Anthropology and Physics to Sustainability

Science, Society and the Environment

This timely anthology brings together for the first time themost important ancient, medieval, Enlightenment, and modernscholarship for a complete anthropological evaluation of therelationship between culture and climate change. Brings together for the first time the most important classicalworks and contemporary scholarship for a complete historicalanthropological evaluation of the relationship between culture andclimate change Covers the historic and prehistoric records of human impactfrom and response to prior periods of climate change, including theimpact and response to climate change at the local level Discusses the impact on global debates about climate changefrom North-South post-colonial histories and the social dimensionsof the science of climate change. Includes coverage of topics such as environmental determinism,climatic events as social catalysts, climatic disasters andsocietal collapse, and ethno-meteorology An ideal text for courses in climate change, human/culturalecology, environmental anthropology and archaeology, disasterstudies, environmental sciences, science and technologystudies, history of science, and conservation and developmentstudies

Michael R. Dove

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