Chapter 5: Environmental Anthropology

Question 1

Environmental Anthropology

Answer 1

• foregrounds human-environment interactions of the past, present, and future

Question 2

Space and Place in EH

Answer 2

• approach, understand, and formulate solutions to socio-ecological issues
• shed light on human-environment relations beyond divisions between our social world and natural order
• space is more abstract than place
• place emerges as we get to know it better and endow it with value
• space becomes place becomes home

Question 3

Cultural Geography

Answer 3

• investigates human interactions between space and place to cast light on the ways we inhabit and affect the world as well as various meanings and values we ascribe to our experiences
• Grapples with themes of alienation, mobility, relations, transience, and transition
• Approaches politics broadly as power relations between humans, other humans, and more than humans

Question 4

Geohumanities

Answer 4

• interdisciplinary endeavor with space and place at its heart that links decades of critical thought following the spatial turn to new development in our digital capabilities
• spatial turn = emphasis on space in geographical theory and practice
• Reflects conceptual and technical developments that enable innovative approaches to data processing and underlie the production of new representations of space and place

Question 5

Phenomenological

Answer 5

engaging human sensory perception of the world’s complex phenomena

Question 6

Cultural ecology

Answer 6

• Julian Steward, 1930s
• long term human adaptations to environments
• the transformation of space to place depends on cultural beliefs, values, and practices

Question 7

Geological determinism

Answer 7

• the environment controls development patterns of groups, people, or society
• generalizes complex exchanges between culture and ecology over time, erasing the variation of different cultural groups within similar environments

Question 8

Environmental Possibilism

Answer 8

the level of inventive opportunism of living organisms in a place can expand or contract the set of possible social behaviors and structures

Question 9

Cultural Area/Ecoculture

Answer 9

• the entanglement of nature and culture in a specific place;
• terrain, climate, seasons, landforms, soils, plants, animals, and insects
• the design of human activities and community structures within the limits of bio regions
• Libertarian municipalism: decentralized semi-autonomous city-states integrated within commonly manged natural resource regions

Question 10

Ecocosmopolitanism

Answer 10

• Ursula Heise, 2008
• Emphasizes networks and exchanges
• An attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary “imagined communities” of both human and non human kind
• power of the human imagination to envision and empathize with creatures and communities in other parts of the world who are necessary co creators of global ecosystems
• think locally, act globally,

Question 11

What is the annual production of plastic waste?

Answer 11

• 300million tons
• 90% is non recyclable

Question 12

Engaged Anthropology

Answer 12

• Prioritizes advocacy, activism, collaboration, interaction with the public and long-term commitment to the subjects of research
• commitment to mobilizing anthropology for constructive interventions into politics

Question 13

Human-plant geography

Answer 13

Examines the relations between people and flora, including issues of ethics, dignity, and rights

Question 14

Geopoetics

Answer 14

creation of literary narratives of place informed by geographical thought