These essays confront the climate crisis, and the conceptions of humanity it evokes, through the histories of environmental anthropology itself. Over time, concepts have shifted; notions such as diffusion, adaptation, and cultural ecology give way to climate migration, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and multispecies ethnography. Yet since its inception, anthropology has studied human-environment relations, and has long been deeply entangled with earth sciences and natural history as well as imperial formations. In this dossier, anthropologists join historians of science to ask how past paradigms of environmental anthropology—under that name or others—condition present states of the discipline, and may shed new light on emerging techno-socio-economic-bio-geological conjunctures.
Posts in This Series
Editors’ Introduction: Dissonant Ecotones, Fractured Strata
The essays in this Fieldsights dossier approach the contemporary climate crisis and the conceptions of humanity it evokes through focused histories of environme... More
The Peculiar Environmentalism of Anthropology
This piece is dedicated to my teacher Donald Moore, who brought me into anthropology and gave me a sense of its environment. The year is 1940. Claude Lévi-Stra... More
Plantation Anthropologies: Three Turning Points
This essay traces the evolution of anthropological thinking around plantations through the lens of three conceptual turning points: political economy, more-than... More
An Unfinished Synthesis: Environmental Anthropology and the Challenge of Interdisciplinary Relevance
In “History and Scope of Environmental Anthropology,” published in the Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology (2016), we provided a historical chronol... More
The Legacies of Spruce, Schultes, and Colonialism in Amazonian Ethnobotany
Hoping to rescue him from obscurity, in 1976 Harvard professor Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001) described Victorian botanist Richard Spruce (1817–1893) as “am... More
The Legal Life of Sediments? Reparations and “Geosocial” Justice
We had been sitting facing the river as the rain slapped its surface. In the course of just half an hour, we counted five barges that passed us. Tarun da, a fis... More
Seasons as World-Shifters
Beginning with Mauss, anthropological engagements with seasons have emphasized their modal quality. As the Earth rotates, societies adopt different subsistence ... More
Experimental Anthropology
I have been in relationship with the community surrounding the Wilderness Awareness School (WAS) for over a decade, first as a student and assistant instructor,... More
Atmospheric Influence: History at the Nexus of Climate and Life
Historians looking for precedents for the study of the human impacts of climate change have focused on theories of “climate determinism,” an ancient assumption ... More
Learning Mutual Aid: The Environmental Anthropologies of Early Anarchist Geographers
Challenging widespread racism and determinism in the European “science” of their day, early anarchist geographers Elisée (1830–1905) and Elie Reclus (1827–1904)... More
More-than-Natural, More-than-Human, More-than-Secular
The Anthropocene, many would argue, is a consequence of what Bruno Latour (1993) calls the modern constitution—that is, the divide between the natural world and... More