SS-213P Environmental Anthropology

3 Credits

• SS-213P-01

This course explores the interactions between humans and the environment, which vary cross-culturally, over time, in different sociopolitical contexts, and different ecosystems, and seeks explanations for this diversity. With an interdisciplinary approach and the use of anthropological methods and perspectives, the course provides students with theories and methodological tools for investigating culture as both something that manages and responds to the environment and is in turn shaped by it. With the current environmental crises, as well as cultural changes across the world, such investigation takes on added urgency and importance.By focusing on environmental issues through case studies from contemporary times and the past, and from small endangered societies to large-scale industrial ones, this course will look at ideas of nature in different parts of the world; different environmental regulations, knowledge, and conflicts; the issue of sustainability; impacts of colonization, globalization, and consumerism on environments; climate change; history of social declines due to environmental shifts; political ecology; environmental justice, and beyond.