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-Strauss serves as a liaison officer for the British Expeditionary Forces stationed in northern France. With little to do in the ominous idyll of these first few months of war with Germany, Lévi-Strauss passes the time on long hikes through the countryside. On one such day, his attention drifts to a dandelion in a field of grass. “I was suddenly struck in the most vivid way,” he later recounts, “by the feeling that the wonderfully regular structure of this object was not and could not be the work of a succession of independent causes, but that some kind of organizing principle was necessary” (Akoun et al. 1972).

A chance encounter with a flower: such was the germ, it seems, of an intellectual movement that would galvanize the human sciences of the twentieth century, the method we came to know as structuralism.

The story, which Lévi-Strauss told on many occasions, stands out for many reasons. Take the minute scale of this event, against the epochal backdrop of the Second World War. Or the fact that it sketches a meeting between human and botanical actors, rather than an encounter among humans alone. Or the sense that a commonplace happening in the world could serve as the source of a profound idea.

Lévi-Strauss had just returned to Paris from Brazil the previous year, his baggage crammed with artifacts and stacks of photographs and fieldnotes. Now, these wartime environments into which he was suddenly plunged were akin to ethnological experience, he would later muse. Could this conversation with a dandelion be taken as a fieldwork experience? What could it tell us about how we learn, in anthropology, from the environments of our work?

“The notion of the environment often presumes a very specific understanding of the contexts we live in, what counts as the environment worth attending to and protecting in the first place, in contrast to the vast range of things that anthropology has considered as part of human lifeworlds,” anthropologist Shoko Yamada observes in an exchange she and I had a few years ago (Pandian and Yamada 2020). And indeed, what we practice in the name of anthropology is a peculiar kind of environmentalism, a radical empirical method that takes the circumstances of the world as the foundation of our knowledge.

Anthropology has never been interested in human beings in the abstract. On the contrary, our field has long insisted that there is no way to understand anything about people anywhere without paying close attention to their actual circumstances, their lifeworlds, and the richly detailed textures of those specific contexts. There is no way of producing an adequate understanding of what might happen in a particular human milieu without paying attention to an infinity of details about all the other human and nonhuman elements, living and non-living, that populate, animate, and motivate that lifeworld.

In A Possible Anthropology, I talk about this approach as a “method of experience,” a way of learning to heed what we do not expect to find (Pandian 2019). We pay close attention to unexpected happenings—their experiential and environmental textures—as the foundation of an unusual form of knowledge and ethics, a way of meeting the world with interest and responsiveness. I have seen this happen again and again through the pathways of my own work. Here is one example.

In the summer and fall of 2016, I began working on a new research project on the problem of plastic pollution. That August, I took a research trip to Hawaii, where I met with a number of activists, artists, and scientists working on the environmental and cultural challenges posed by pervasive plastic debris.

Countless fragments of plastic on the beaches and in the coastal waters were obstinate problems. But just as difficult were the cultural commitments that anchored the place of disposable plastic commodities in the everyday lives of consumers: the ideas of hygiene, convenience, cleanliness, and protection that all those bags, boxes, and containers were enveloped with. The pervasiveness of these ideas had so much to do with the pervasiveness of this material. And, as I eventually came to see, the challenges extended far beyond the sphere of plastic pollution.

In those very months, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was gaining momentum. Here too was a rhetoric that insisted on hygiene and containment, especially when it came to matters like immigration. On the last day of August 2016, Trump gave a pivotal speech in Arizona on the subject of immigration, in which he promised to begin building “an impenetrable physical wall on the southern border” on the very first day of his presidency, to contain the many dangers he falsely attributed to migrants.

I couldn’t help but think about the empty promises of cleanliness and convenience made by the plastic bags I often saw that week in Honolulu, like the crumpled Walmart bag printed with an idyllic island scene that I found gusting along a sidewalk. What Lévi-Strauss had seen in a dandelion, I saw in that plastic bag: the unexpected glimpse of a structural form.

Later that same day in Hawaii, I met with Joy Leilei Shih, an oceanographer and environmental activist. We talked about the plastic bags she had campaigned to ban, but also the barriers and boundaries that divide people from each other. I suggested that plastic containers made for little walls in comparison to the big wall that Trump was promising. She found the comparison subtle and elusive, and advised that I find the right way of explaining this idea.

At the time, I still thought I was writing a book about plastic, a book that remains unwritten. When Trump went on to win the presidency, I shifted the focus of my research and wound up writing another book instead, about the everyday walls of American life that can help to explain the appeal of ideas like the border wall (Pandian 2025). I could not have written this book without grasping the patterned nature of walls and divides of different kinds, at different scales. And it was the plastic debris of our time that first made this structure visible to me.

Border walls are failures of environmental imagination, founded on the impossible idea of a radical separation between life inside and life outside. I am grateful for the environmentalism of anthropology: its ability to face up to such challenges, and its commitment to thinking within and beyond the circumstances that confine our collective imaginations all too readily.