SOSANT4505 – Environmental Anthropology, Honours
Course description
Course content
What characterizes peoples’ relationship to the environment and the living world? How do different people think and act in response to changes in their environmental surroundings? How are extractive practices justified, and what forms of resistance exist? How are plants, animals, birds and fish known, and what sorts of relations beyond the human make local surroundings meaningful?
This course is an introduction to some of the central themes in environmental anthropology as well as an exploration of some recent anthropological analyses of environmental change. Drawing on a range of ethnographic studies the course provides perspectives on topics such as:
- How peoples’ understanding of the environment can be related to their sense of self, identity, and moral obligation
- How nature—animals, plants and landscapes—can become sites of contestation and conflict
- How environments can elicit different forms of knowledge
- How global inequality and colonial dispossession are connected to climate change and biodiversity loss
- How both slow and sudden environmental crises affect how we think about the future and what it means to be human
Learning outcome
Knowledge
- Knowledge of environmental issues and anthro