GOLDSMITHS, University of London

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

AN53021A ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT (0.5 cu) Spring Term

READING LIST 2008-2009

COURSE LECTURER: Dr Eliza Darling

Course requirements.

Attendance requirements: the College Regulations state that Students shall attend on all days
prescribed for their programme unless the College is officially closed. If you are unable to attend due
to illness you must inform the Department Office on the day of the class.

Coursework requirements: one course essay, though two essay are recommended.

Students who fail to meet the attendance and coursework requirements risk being put on probation.
Please see the Student Handbook for further information.

Course essays are due in as follows in the Autumn Term: essay one (required) at seminars in week
seven, essay two (optional) by the end of term.

Mode of assessment: two-question take-home paper (no more than 1,500 words each). Take-
home papers will be given out from 9am on Thursday 7 May 2009. Take-home papers are due in
by 4pm on Thursday 21 May 2008.

Towards the end of the reading list you will find a guide to writing and presenting course essays and
examined reports. Please study these carefully before you plan and write your coursework essays
and/or any examined reports.

Course Objectives

This course provides a critical introduction to environmental anthropology, beginning with a brief
exploration of its historical roots and examining its subsequent iterations, but concentrating especially
upon anthropologys contributions to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, with a particular
emphasis upon issues of environmental justice in terms of race, gender, class and nation.

Course Content

In the past thirty years, disciplines across the social sciences and humanities from philosophy to
history to sociology to political science to geography to cultural studies have undergone a greening
as the social aspects of nature have come to be seen as a legitimate, even sexy subject of scholarly
investigation. For anthropology, this has constituted more a revival than an invention, for anthropology
was environmental long before there was an identifiable environmental anthropology of which to
speak. Yet Carole Crumley notes that the discipline is marked by a distinct contradiction, emphasizing
the immense capacity of environment to shape human existence through the pressures of natural
selection, yet progressively according it a smaller and smaller role as culture ascends and nature
declines in explanations of the human condition until it comes full circle in the recognition of
contemporary environmental crisis, whereupon the environment, marginalized in the latter portions of
the story of human evolution, becomes again the central problem for the species (1994:2-3). We will
bear this central contradiction in mind as we examine the human place in what we colloquially call
nature, attempting to deconstruct the complex and antithetical meanings embedded in the term
while avoiding the reduction of nature to a mere social construct. Accordingly, this course investigates
the way we produce nature and the way nature produces us, taking a dialectical approach to the
anthropology of environment.

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Course Structure

We will meet weekly for an hour-long lecture followed by a seminar, during which students will take it
in turns to make short presentations based upon their own interests in environmental anthropology.
Well use the seminar during the first week to organise panels of 2-3 presentations which fit, to the
greatest extent possible, with the topic of each weeks lecture and readings. Depending on the
number of students in each seminar, each student will be required to give at least two presentations.
While we will not meet during Reading Week (Week 6), an optional module on environment and
development will be available on the VLE for students to explore on their own during the break if they
so choose.

Course Topics

Week 1 Introduction: Anthropology and the Denaturalisation of Nature

Week 2 The Politics of Nature: Perspectives on Green Political Theory
Week 3 Limits to Growth: Crisis, Scarcity, and Apocalyptic Environmentalism
Week 4 State Agendas, Local Resistance: Capital, Regulation and Resource Control
Week 5 Space and Place: Landscape, Alienation, Consumption
Week 6 Optional Module: Environment and Development
Week 7 Environmental Justice: Race, Waste and Indigeneity
Week 8 Human Nature? The Construction of Gender and the Regulation of Reproduction
Week 9 Epistemologies of Nature: Sacred and Secular
Week 10 Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?" Nature and Class
Week 11 Imperial Nature: Ecology, War and the Colonial Encounter

Course Readings

Due to the explosion of green literature in the social sciences (including anthropology) over the past
few decades, one course cannot hope to cover the entire canon, and many of the texts listed in this
syllabus are full-length books. However, students should not despair at the length of the reading list. I
have placed three article/chapter-length texts from each section in a reader pack (available for
purchase from the Anthropology office) and three more from each section on the VLE. These
readings comprise articles and chapters which are (a) foundational to the weekly topic and (b)
unavailable to Goldsmiths students electronically, in the DSLC or on the Goldsmiths Library shelves.
Some readings which are readily available to students are also foundational to the weekly topics, and
I will point these out specifically during the lecture; please obtain these texts on your own. Students
are encouraged to explore the remaining texts according to their individual intellectual interests (for
example, if you find an excerpt from a particular book interesting, follow up by tracking down and
reading the rest of it, or mining its bibliography for associated references). Texts which are not
physically available on campus in books or journals have been ordered and will be made available as
soon as possible; however, in the interim students should be prepared to access readings through
interlibrary loan, AnthroSource, Senate House, the British Library, and other resources available to
University of London students.

Useful Journals

Antipode Harbinger
Capitalism Nature Socialism Human Ecology
City and Society Journal of Ecology
Cultural Geographies Journal of Political Ecology
Environment and History Journal of Rural Development
Environment and Planning Organization & Environment
Environmental Ethics Rural History
Environmental History Science and Society
Environmental Politics The Journal of Rural Studies
Ethics, Place & Environment The Trumpeter
Global Environmental Change Urban Anthropology

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Week 1
Introduction: Anthropology and the Denaturalisation of Nature

The introductory lecture provides a broad historical view on the concept of environment in
anthropology, from the earliest inception of the discipline to the present day. We critically examine
shifting anthropological perspectives on human-environmental relations through the development of
the schools of cultural evolution, cultural materialism, human ecology, cultural ecology, historical
ecology, and political ecology. We also consider the intersection of sociocultural anthropology with
biological and linguistic anthropology and archaeology through the window of environment, as well as
examining the role of environment in such topical subfields as cognitive anthropology. Although this
section is intended to provide a very general overview, students are encouraged to pursue particular
topics of interest through close reading of original texts on their own. The texts in this section are
primarily historical, biographical and theoretical rather than ethnographic; however many of their
themes are developed and contested through empirical research in the sections to follow.

Argyrou, Vassos
2005 The Logic of Environmentalism: Anthropology, Ecology and Postcoloniality. New
York: Berghahn Books.
Bale, William
2006 The Research Program of Historical Ecology. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:75-
98.
Biersack, Aletta
1999 From the New Ecology to the New Ecologies. American Anthropologist 101(1):5-18.
Childe, V. Gordon
2003 Man Makes Himself. New ed. Nottingham: Spokesman Books.
Crumley, Carole L., ed.
2001 New Directions in Anthropology and Environment: Intersections. Walnut Creek and
Oxford: AltaMira Press.
1994 Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. Santa Fe: School
of American Research Press.
Descola, Philippe and Gsl Plsson, eds.
1996 Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge.
Dove, Michael R. and Carol Carpenter, eds.
2008 Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader. Malden: Blackwell.
Escobar, Arturo
1996 Constructing Nature: Elements for a Poststructural Political Ecology. In Richard Peet
and Michael Watts, eds. Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social
Movements. London and New York: Routledge.
Haenn, Nora and Richard R. Wilk, eds.
2006 The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable
Living. New York: New York University Press.
Harris, David, ed.
1994 The Archeology of V. Gordon Childe: Contemporary Perspectives. London: University
College London.
Harris, Marvin
1979 Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Random
House.
Heider, Karl G.
1972 Environment, Subsistence, and Society. Annual Review of Anthropology 1:207-226.
Ingold, Tim
2000 The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
London and New York: Routledge.
1986 The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kottak, Conrad P.
1999 The New Ecological Anthropology. American Anthropologist 101(1):23-35.
Little, Paul E.
1999 Environments and Environmentalisms in Anthropological Research: Facing a New
Millennium. Annual Review of Anthropology 28:253-284.
Milton, Kay

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 1996 Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology in
Environmental Discourse. London and New York: Routledge.
1993 Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge.
Morgan, Lewis Henry
1963 Ancient Society; or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress From Savagery
Through Barbarism to Civilization. Eleanor Burke Leacock, ed. New York: Meridian
Books.
Orlove, Benjamin S.
1980 Ecological Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 9:235-273.
Orlove, Benjamin S. and Stephen B. Brush
1996 Anthropology and the Conservation of Biodiversity. Annual Review of Anthropology
25:329-352.
Peace, William J.
2004 Leslie A. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Rappaport, Roy A.
1984 Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Scoones, I.
1999 New Ecology and the Social Sciences: What Prospects for a Fruitful Engagement?
Annual Review of Anthropology 28:479-507.
Steward, Julian
1977 Evolution and Ecology: Essays on Social Transformation. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
1972 Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Sutton, Mark Q. and E.N. Anderson
2004 Introduction to Cultural Ecology. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Townsend, Patricia K.
2000 Environmental Anthropology: From Pigs to Policies. Prospect Heights: Waveland
Press.
Vayda, Andrew P. and Bonnie J. McCay
1975 New Directions in Ecology and Ecological Anthropology. Annual Review of
Anthropology 4:293-306.
White, Leslie
nd
1969 The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization. 2 ed. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
1959 The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
Zubrow, Ezra B.W.
1972 Environment, Subsistence, and Society: The Changing Archaeological Perspective.
Annual Review of Anthropology 1:179-206.

Week 2
The Politics of Nature: Perspectives on Green Political Theory

As the social sciences have undergone a greening with the rise of the mass environmental
movement, so too has political theory. In this section, we move beyond the disciplinary boundaries of
anthropology to examine the intersection of ecology with socialism, feminism, anarchism, and critical
race theory, drawing on inter- and cross-disciplinary approaches to green political theory. We
examine the social ecology approach of Murray Bookchin, the green feminist socialism of Mary
Mellor, the eco-anarchism of Brian Morris, James OConnors second contradiction of capitalism, Neil
Smiths uneven development, Arne Nsss deep ecology, and Donna Harraways cyborg feminism,
among others. The texts in this section tend heavily toward theory rather than ethnographic example;
however, as with week one, many of their themes are investigated empirically in ensuring sections.
And again, students are encouraged to pursue personal topics of interest through close reading of
original texts in order to augment the general overview provided by the lecture.

Benton, Ted, ed.

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 1996 The Greening of Marxism. New York: Guilford Press.
1993 Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice. London and New York:
Verso.
Bookchin, Murray
1992 Deep Ecology and Anarchism: A Polemic. London: Freedom Press.
1990 The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Montral and
New York: Black Rose Books.
Castree, Noel and Bruce Braun
1998 The Construction of Nature and the Nature of Construction: Analytical and Political
Tools for Survivable Futures. In Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking
Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London and New York: Routledge.
Dobson, Andrew
rd
2000 Green Political Thought. 3 ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Dobson, Andrew and Robyn Eckersley, eds.
2006 Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Engels, Friedrich
1972 The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State; in Light of the Researches
of Lewis Henry Morgan. Eleanor Burke Leacock, ed. New York: International
Publishers.
1940 Dialectics of Nature. Clemens Dutt, trans and ed. New York: International Publishers.
Foster, John Bellamy
2002 Ecology Against Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
2000 Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Haraway, Donna
2004 The Haraway Reader. New York and London: Routledge.
1997 Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse: Feminism and
Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
1991 Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free
Association.
Harvey, David
1996 Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.
Hornborg, Alf and Carole L. Crumley, eds.
2006 The World System and the Earth System: Global Socio-environmental Change and
Sustainability Since the Neolithic. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Katz, Eric, Andrew Light and David Rothenberg
2000 Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno
2004 Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Catherine Porter,
trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Leff, Enrique
1998 Murray Bookchin and the End of Dialectical Naturalism. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism
9(4):67-93.
Light, Andrew, ed.
1998 Social Ecology after Bookchin. New York: Guilford Press.
Light, Andrew and Avner de-Shalit, eds.
2003 Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Light, Andrew and Eric Katz, eds.
1996 Environmental Pragmatism. London and New York: Routledge.
Luke, Timothy W.
1999 Capitalism, Democracy and Ecology: Departing from Marx. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Macauley, David, ed.
1996 Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology. New York: Guilford Press.
Mellor, Mary
1997 Feminism & Ecology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
1992 Breaking the Boundaries: Towards a Feminist, Green Socialism. London: Virago.
Merchant, Carolyn
1992 Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. New York: Routledge.

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Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva.
1993 Ecofeminism. Halifax: Fernwood.
Moog, Sandra and Rob Stone, eds.
2008 Nature, Social Relations and Human Needs: Essays in Honour of Ted Benton. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Morris, Brian
1996 Ecology & Anarchism: Essays and Reviews on Contemporary Thought. Victoria:
Images Publishing.
OConnor, James
1998 Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford Press.
Salleh, Ariel
1997 Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern. London and New York:
Zed Books.
Schmidt, Alfred
1971 The Concept of Nature in Marx. Ben Fowkes, trans. London: NLB.
Smith, Neil
rd
2008 Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. 3 ed. New
York: Blackwell.
Soper, Kate
1995 What is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell.

Warren, Karen J.
2000 Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters.
Lanham and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Williams, Raymond
1976 Nature. In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Zimmerman, Michael E.
1994 Contesting Earths Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity. Berkeley: University
of California Press.

Week 3
Limits to Growth: Crisis, Scarcity, and Apocalyptic Environmentalism

Contemporary environmental discourses are frequently organised around the allegory of crisis:
economic, ecological, political. The tropes which frame modern discussions of global warming,
demographic explosion (or collapse) and eco-capitalistic contradiction, however, share certain themes
in common with older, politically problematic theories of catastrophic ecology, including Malthusianism
and the tragedy of the commons. In this section, we examine what geographer Cindi Katz terms
apocalyptic environmentalism, critically analysing the political agendas implicit in various types of
catastrophic ecological discourse and their outcomes in practice, including policy. To what extent are
ecocidal narratives linked to the control of women? In what ways do overpopulation arguments
legitimise racism, including anti-immigration sentiments? Does the framing of environmentalism in
terms of apocalypse-versus-salvation actually, as Katz argues, obscure the source of environmental
problems? What are the alternatives?

Boucher, Douglas H.
1996 Not with a Bang but a Whimper. Science and Society 60(3):279-289. Special Issue
on Marxism and Ecology.
Carson, Rachel
2002 Silent Spring. 40th anniversary ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Clark, Brett, John Bellamy Foster and Richard York
2008 Ecology: Moment of Truth. Special Issue. Monthly Review 60(3).
Davis, Mike
1999 A Worlds End: Drought, Famine and Imperialism (1896-1902). Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism 10(2):3-46.
1998 Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York:
Metropolitan Books.
1990 City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles. London and New York: Verso.

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Ellis, Jeffrey C.
1996 On the Search for Root Cause: Essentialist Tendencies in Environmental Discourse.
In William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature.
New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Ehrlich, Paul R.
1971 The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books.
Ehrlich, Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich
1996 Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our
Future. Washington: Island Press.
Goldsmith, Edward
1972 A Blueprint for Survival. New York: Penguin Books.
Hardin, Garrett
1995 The Immigration Dilemma: Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons. Washington: The
Federation for American Immigration Reform.
1977 Managing the Commons. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Katz, Cindi
1995 Under the Falling Sky: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and the Production of Nature.
In Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order. Antonio Callari
et.al., eds. New York and London: Guilford.
Keil, Roger et.al.
1999 Symposium: Mike Davis Ecology of Fear. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 19(3):71.
Kovel, Joel
2007 The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? 2nd ed.
London and New York: Zed Books.
Marco, Gino J., Robert M. Hollingworth and William Durham, eds.
1987 Silent Spring Revisited. Washington: American Chemical Society.
McCay, Bonnie J. and James M. Acheson, eds.
1987 The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Oliver-Smith, Anthony
1996 Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters. Annual Review of Anthropology
25:303-328.
Ross, Andrew
1994 The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Natures Debt to Society. London and New
York: Verso.
Shantz, Jeffrey
2003 Scarcity and the Emergence of Fundamentalist Ecology. Critique of Anthropology 23:
144 - 154.
Mhlhusler, Peter and Adrian Peace
2006 Environmental Discourses. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:457-479.
Seccombe, Wally
1991 Marxism and Demography. New Left Review 137:22-47.
Vanderheiden, Steve and John Barry
2008 Political Theory and Global Climate Change. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Vandermeer, John
1996 Tragedy of the Commons: The Meaning of the Metaphor. Science and Society
60(3):290-306.
Williams, Gavin
1995 Modernizing Malthus: The World Bank, Population Control and the African
Environment. In Jonathan Crush, ed. Power of Development. London and New York:
Routledge.

Week 4
State Agendas, Local Resistance: Capital, Regulation and Resource Control

States play crucial roles in the regulation of environment, from pollution legislation to resource
exploitation to the enforcement of private property. In this section, we draw on the work of the French
regulation theorists to frame our discussion of state environmental management, with a particular eye
on the role of the state in negotiating capitalistic relationships with nature within and between nation

7
states in the context of globalisation and neoliberalism. We pay special attention to the state
regulation of common property resources, including parks, through preservation, conservation, and
restoration. To what extent are such strategies reflective (or generative) of social inequality? In what
ways to they subvert (or sustain) the process of capital accumulation? Has the power of the state to
manage nature been eroded through the process of globalisation? To what extent are states effective
units of environmental management in the context of global ecological crisis? How has environment
been implicated in the discourse of rights, civil and human?

Acheson, James M.
2006 Institutional Failure in Resource Management. Annual Review of Anthropology
35:117-134.
Agrawal, Arun
1999 State Formation in Community Spaces: Control over Forests in the Kumaon
Himalaya, India. Paper presented to the Workshop on Environmental Politics, 30
April.
2003 Sustainable Governance of Common-Pool Resources: Context, Methods, and
Politics. Annual Review of Anthropology 32:243-262.
Agrawal, Arun and Clark C. Gibson, eds.
2001 Communities and the Environment: Ethnicity, Gender and the State in Community-
Based Conservation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Brosius, Peter J., ed.
2005 Communities and Conservation: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural
Resource Management. Walnut Creek: AltaMira.
Blaikie, Piers, Harold Brookfield and Narpat Jodha
1987 The Degradation of Common Property Resources. In Piers Blaikie and Harold
Brookfield. Land Degradation and Society. London and New York: Methuen.
Cederlf, Gunnel and K. Sivaramakrishnan, eds.
2006 Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods and Identities in South Asia. Seattle:
University of Washington Press.
Charnley, Susan and Melissa R. Poe
2007 Community Forestry in Theory and Practice: Where Are We Now? Annual Review of
Anthropology 36:30136.
Doolittle, Amity Appell
2005 Property & Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights. Seattle:
University of Washington Press.
Dreiling, Michael
1998 Remapping North American Environmentalism: Contending Visions and Divergent
Practices in the Fight over NAFTA. In The Struggle for Ecological Democracy:
Environmental Justice Movements in the United States. Daniel Faber, ed. New York:
Guilford Press.
Howarth, William
1998 Property Rights, Regulation and Environmental Protection: Some Anglo-Romanian
Contrasts. In Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition. C.M. Hann,
ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Katz, Cindi
1998 Whose Nature, Whose Culture? Private Productions of Space and the Preservation
of Nature. In Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking Reality: Nature at the
Millennium. London and New York: Routledge.
Lipschutz, Ronnie D. and Ken Conca, eds.
1993 The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Luke, Timothy W.
1997 Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Martinez-Alier, Juan
1996 The Merchandising of Biodiversity. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7:37-54.
Rocheleau, Dianne and Laurie Ross
1995 Trees as Tools, Trees as Text: Struggles over Resources in Zambrana-Chacuey,
Dominican Republic. Antipode 27(4):407-428.
Monbiot, George

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 1995 Brazil: Land Ownership and the Flight to Amazonia. In Marcus Colchester and Larry
Lohman, eds. The Struggle for Land and the Fate of the Forest. London: Zed Books.
Neumann, Roderick P.
1995 Local Challenges to Global Agendas: Conservation, Economic Liberalization and The
Pastoralists Rights Movement in Tanzania. Antipode 27(4):363-382.
Neumann, Roderick P.
1996 Nature-State-Territory: Toward a Critical Theorization of Conservation Enclosures. In
nd
Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements. 2 ed. Richard
Peet and Michael Watts, eds. London and New York: Routledge.
Peluso, Nancy Lee
1993 Coercing Conservation? The Politics of State Resource Control. Global
Environmental Change 3(2):199-217.
1992 Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Peluso, Nancy Lee and Michael Watts, eds.
2001 Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Robbins, Paul
2000 The Practical Politics of Knowing: State Environmental Knowledge and Local Political
Economy. Economic Geography 76:126-144.
Scott, James C.
1998 State Projects of Legibility and Simplification: Nature and Space. In James C. Scott.
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Smith, Eric Alden
1998 Nature as Artifice and Artifact. In Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking
Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London and New York: Routledge.
Smith, Eric Alden and Joan McCarter, eds.
1997 Contested Arctic: Indigenous Peoples, Industrial States, and the Circumpolar
Environment. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Snajdr, Edward
2008 Nature Protests: The End of Ecology in Slovakia. Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Thompson, E. P.
1975 Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane.
Tokar, Brian
1997 Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash. Boston:
South End Press.
West, Paige, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington
2006 Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas. Annual Review of
Anthropology 35:251-277.
Zerner, C., ed.
2000 People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Week 5
Space and Place: Landscape, Alienation, Consumption

Week five provides a brief introduction to the burgeoning literature on space and place, which
considers the ways in which people form cultural and psychological attachments to general spaces
and particular places through concepts such as freedom and security, risk and comfort, independence
and collectivity. We begin with an analysis of the historical development of the western concept of
landscape before moving on to consider the politics of the built environment. Cross-cutting many of
the themes addressed in other sections, we relate space and place to gender, race, class and nation,
looking especially at gendered metaphors of nature as they relate to tropes of nationalism and
manifest destiny, as well as the relationship between race, landscape and eugenics. We also attempt
to deconstruct the well-worn shibboleths which divide urban and rural into discreet spheres,
examining the mutually-reinforcing historical, material and ideological relationships between them,
and evaluating the commonalities between the political ecology of the city and that of the countryside.

9
Bender, Barbara, ed.
1993 Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence: Berg.
Cronon, William
1991 Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company.
Darby, Wendy Joy
2000 Landscape and Identity: Geographies of Nation and Class in England. Oxford: Berg.
Darling, Eliza
2006 Natures Carnival: The Ecology of Pleasure at Coney Island. In In the Nature of
Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Nik Heynen,
Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw, eds. New York and London: Routledge.
2005 The City in the Country: Wilderness Gentrification and the Rent Gap. Environment
and Planning A 37:1015-1032.
Desai, Madhavi, ed.
2004 Gender and the Built Environment in India. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Dickens, Peter
1996 Reconstructing Nature: Alienation, Emancipation and the Division of Labour. London
and New York: Routledge.
Eiesland, Nancy L.
2000 A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Green, Nicholas
1990 The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth Century
France. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Hirsch, Eric and Michael OHanlon, eds.
1995 The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Space and Place. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Keith, Michael and Steve Pile, eds.
1993 Place and the Politics of Identity. London and New York: Routledge.
Kolodny, Annette
1975 The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and
Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Lawrence, Denise L. and Setha M. Low
1990 The Built Environment and Spatial Form. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 453-
505.
Levinson, Stephen C.
1998 Studying Spatial Conceptualization across Cultures: Anthropology and Cognitive
Science. Ethos 26(1): Pages 7 24.
Light, Andrew and Jonathan M. Smith, eds.
1997 Space, Place and Environmental Ethics. Lanham: Roman & Littlefield Publishers.
Low, Setha M.
2007 Urban Fear: Building the Fortress City. City & Society 9(1):53-71.
2006 The Erosion of Public Space and the Public Realm: Paranoia, Surveillance and
Privatization in New York City. City & Society (18)1:43-49.
2001 The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear.
American Anthropologist 103(1):45-58.
1996 Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space
in Costa Rica. American Ethnologist 23(4): 861-879.
Low, Setha and Neil Smith, eds.
2006 The Politics of Public Space. New York: Routledge.
Nash, Roderick
1983 Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Massey, Doreen
2005 For Space. London: SAGE.
1994 Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity.
Marx, Leo
1964 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London,
Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, TWJ., ed.
nd
2002 Landscape and Power. 2 ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

10
Pred, Allen
1998 The Nature of Denaturalized Consumption and Everyday Life. In Bruce Braun and
Noel Castree, eds. Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London and New
York: Routledge.
Price, Jennifer
1999 Fight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America. New York: Basic Books.
Rothenberg, David, ed.
1995 Wild Ideas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sheridan, Thomas E.
2007 Embattled Ranchers, Endangered Species, and Urban Sprawl: The Political Ecology
of the New American West. Annual Review of Anthropology 36:121-138.
Schrepfer, Susan R.
2005 Natures Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas.
Spirn, AW
2000 The Language of Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stewart, Pamela and Andrew Strathern, eds.
2003 Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives. London and Sterling:
Pluto.
Tuan, Yi-Fu
2001 Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Urry, John
1995 Consuming Places. London and New York: Routledge.
Williams, Raymond
1973 The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zukin, Sharon
1991 Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of
California Press.

Week 6
Optional Module: Environment and International Development

International development refers to the global debt industry which arose with American empire in the
wake of WWII, defining relationships between rich and poor nations and constituting a proxy
battleground for the Cold War. Because development has been driven by modernisation, it has
entailed an often brutal reworking of nature at the scale of landscape. This course contains no formal
section on development, as many students will already have taken Anthropology of Development:
Critical Voices, which includes a section on environment and development. This section offers an
optional reading list for students who have not taken this course, or students who wish to explore the
intersection of environment and development in further depth. Because the materials for this week are
optional, they will not be formally examined; however, because development cross-cuts so many
general themes in anthropology, students may find the readings listed in this section relevant for other
sections of the course, including the weeks on gender, race, imperialism, and regulation.

Adams, W.M.
1995 Green Development Theory? Environmentalism and Sustainable Development. In
Jonathan Crush, ed. Power of Development. London and New York: Routledge.
Braidotti, Rosi et.al.
1994 Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Emergence of the Theme
and Different Views. In Rosi Braidotti et.al. Women, the Environment, and
Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis. London: ZED Books.
Carruyo, Light
2008 Producing Knowledge, Protecting Forests: Rural Encounters with Gender,
Ecotourism, and International Aid in the Dominican Republic. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Chatterjee, Pratap and Matthias Finger
1994 The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics and World Development. London and New York:
Routledge.

11
Croll, Elisabeth and David Parkin
1992 Bush Base, Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development. London and New
York: Routledge.
Dove, Michael R.
1996 So Far from Power, So Near to the Forest: A Structural Analysis of Gain and Blame
in Tropical Forest Development. In Christine Padoch and Nancy Lee Peluso, eds.
Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation, and Development. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
FitzSimmons, Margaret and David Goodman
1998 Incorporating Nature: Environmental Narratives and the Reproduction of Food. In
Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium.
London and New York: Routledge.
Goodman, David and Michael Redclift
1991 The Food System and the Environment. In Refashioning Nature: Food, Ecology and
Culture. David Goodman and Michael Redclift, eds. London and New York:
Routledge.
Greenberg, James B.
1997 A Political Ecology of Structural-Adjustment Policies: The Case of the Dominican
Republic. Culture & Agriculture 19(3):85-93.
Helmreich , Stefan
1999 Digitizing 'Development': Balinese Water Temples, Complexity and the Politics of
Simulation. Critique of Anthropology 19: 249 - 265.
Johnston, Barbara Rose, ed.
1997 Life and Death Matters: Human Rights and the Environment at the End of the
Millennium. Walnut Creek: AltaMira.
Kurian, Priya A.
2000 Engendering the Environment? Gender in the World Banks Environmental Policies.
Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate.
Leff, Enrique
1995 Green Production: Toward an Environmental Rationality. Margaret Villanueva, trans.
New York: Guilford Press.
McAfee, Kathleen
1999 Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and the Rise of Green Developmentalism.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17(2):133 -154.
Nygren, Anja
1999 Local Knowledge in the Environment-Development Discourse: From Dichotomies to
Situated Knowledges. Critique of Anthropology 19: 267 - 288.
Peet, Richard and Michael Watts
1996 Liberation Ecology: Development, Sustainability, and Environment in an Age of
Market Triumphalism. In Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds. Liberation Ecologies:
Environment, Development, Social Movements. London and New York: Routledge.
Thomas-Slayter, Barbara P. and Dianne Rocheleau
1995 Gender, Environment and Development in Kenya: A Grassroots Perspective.
Boulder: L. Rienner.
Shiva, Vandana
1991 The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics.
London: Zed Books.
Shiva, Vandana, ed.
1994 Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide.
Philadelphia: New Society Publishers.
West, Paige
2006 Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New
Guinea. Duke University Press.

Week 7
Environmental Justice: Race, Waste, and Indigeneity

In this section, we examine the relationship between environment and race, focusing on two central
problematics. First, we consider the literature inspired by the landmark findings of the United Church

12
of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, which in 1987 established a strong correlation between race
and the placement of hazardous waste in the United States, spawning a generation of research into
environmental racism on a global scale and a subsequent political struggle for environmental justice.
Second, we consider the debates around the concept of the ecologically noble savage, in which
indigenous peoples are posited (and often posit themselves) as natural conservationists by dint of
historical, spiritual, or biological ties to particular landscapes and concomitant modes of sustainable
living. In both cases, we critically analyse the centrality of nature to the construction of race and
racism, questioning the extent to which struggles for racial justice can be effectively linked to
environmentalism without reinforcing the very ideologies underpinning racism itself.

Bicker, Alan, Roy Ellen and Peter Parkes, eds.

2000 Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and Its Transformations. London and New
York: Routledge.
Brechin, Gray
1996 Conserving the Race: Natural Aristocracies, Eugenics, and the US Conservation
Movement. Antipode 28(3):229-245.
Brosius, J. Peter
1997 Endangered Forest, Endangered People: Environmentalist Representations of
Indigenous Knowledge. Human Ecology 25(1):47-69.
Bullard, Robert D.
1990 Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder: Westview Press.
Bullard, Robert D., ed.
1993 Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston: South End
Press.
Camancho, David E., ed.
1998 Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles: Race, Class, and the Environment.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Cole, Luke W. and Sheila R Foster
2001 From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental
Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press.
Conklin, Beth and Laura Graham
1996 The Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-Politics. American
Anthropologist 97(4):695-710.
Crawford, Colin
1996 Uproar at Dancing Rabbit Creek: Battling over Race, Class, and the Environment.
Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Doane, Molly
2007 The Political Economy of the Ecological Native. American Anthropologist 109(3):452-
462.
Dore, Elizabeth
1996 Capitalism and the Ecological Crisis: Legacy of the 1980s. In Helen Collinson, ed.
Green Guerrillas: Environmental Conflict and Initiatives in Latin America and the
Caribbean. London: Latin America Bureau.
Dove, Michael R.
2006 Indigenous People and Environmental Politics. Annual Review of Anthropology
35:191-208.
Foster, John Bellamy
1993 Let Them Eat Pollution: Capitalism and the World Environment. Monthly Review
44(8):10-20.
Geddicks, Al
1998 Racism and Resource Colonization. In The Struggle for Ecological Democracy:
Environmental Justice Movements in the United States. Daniel Faber, ed. New York:
Guilford Press.
Hames, Raymond
2007 The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate. Annual Review of Anthropology 36:177-190.
Jacobs, Jane
1994 Earth Honoring: Western Desires and Indigenous Knowledge. In Alison Blunt and
Gillian Rose, eds. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial
Geographies. New York: Guilford.
Johnston, Barbara Rose, ed.

13
 1994 Who Pays the Price? The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis. Washington:
Island Press.
Kuper, Adam
2003 The Return of the Native. Current Anthropology 44(3):389-402.
Luhrmann, Tanya M.
1993 The Resurgence of Romanticism: Contemporary Neopaganism, Feminist Spirituality
and the Divinity of Nature. In Kay Milton, ed. Environmentalism: The View from
Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge.
Martinez-Alier, Juan
1997 Environmental Justice (Local and Global). Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8(1):91-107.
Morello-Frosch Rachel A.
2002 Discrimination and the Political Economy of Environmental Inequality. Environment
and Planning C: Government and Policy 20(4):477-496.
Pulido Laura
1996a Ecological Legitimacy and Cultural Essentialism: Hispano Grazing in the Southwest.
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7(4):37-58.
1996b A Critical Review of the Methodology of Environmental Racism Research. Antipode
28(2):142-159.
Ramos, Alcida Rita
1991 A Hall of Mirrors: The Rhetoric of Indigenism in Brazil. Critique of Anthropology
11:155-169.
Smith, Eric Alden and Mark Wishnie
2000 Conservation and Subsistence in Small-Scale Societies. Annual Review of
Anthropology 29:493-524.
Smith, William D.
2004 The Topology of Autonomy: Markets, States, Soil and Self-determination in
Totonacapan. Critique of Anthropology 24:403 - 429.
Surralles, Alexandre and Pedro Garcia Hierro, eds.
2005 The Land within: Indigenous Territory and the Perception of Environment.
Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo
1996 Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnology. Annual Review of
Anthropology 25:179-200.
Westra, Laura and Peter S. Wenz, eds.
1995 Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Week 8
Human Nature? The Construction of Gender and the Regulation of Reproduction

Following on the themes raised in weeks three, five and seven, in this section we consider the
relationship between environment and gender, taking as a central problematic the shopworn maxim
that women are to nature as men are to culture, which has been effectively exploited in the control,
oppression and dehumanisation of women as well a counter-deployed in struggles for womens
liberation. Expanding on some of the readings from week two, we take a closer look at feminist
approaches to environmentalism, exploring their internal controversies and contradictions (e.g.,
mysticism versus materialism) as well as exploring their relationship to environmental justice struggles
based on race, class and nation. Finally, we pay particular attention to the relationship between
gender, reproduction, technology and demography, considering the relationship between scales of
gender oppression, from the body to the household to the nation to the region, and their political
parallels with similar scales of struggle in environmentalism.

Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella

2007 Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mpuche.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Biehl, Janet
1991 Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. Boston: South End Press.
Blum, Elizabeth D.

14
 2008 Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Buckingham, Susan
2000 Gender and Environment. London and New York: Routledge.
dEaubonne, Franoise
1999 What Could an Ecofeminist Society Be? Ethics and the Environment 4(2):179-185.
Di Chiro, Giovanna
1998 Environmental Justice from the Grassroots: Reflections on History, Gender, and
Expertise. In The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice
Movements in the United States. Daniel Faber, ed. New York: Guilford Press.
Engelhardt, Elizabeth Sanders Delwiche
2003 The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
Gaard, Greta, ed.
1993 Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hessing, Melody, Rebecca Ragion and Catriona Sandilands, eds.
2005 This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Jackson, Cecile
1995 Radical Environmental Myths: A Gender Perspective. New Left Review 210:124-140.
Janes, Craig R.
2004 Free Markets and Dead Mothers: The Social Ecology of Maternal Mortality in Post-
Socialist Mongolia. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 18(2):230-257.
Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann
2002 Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel. Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press.
Lorentzen, Lois Ann
1995 Reminiscing about a Sleepy Lake: Borderland Views of Women, Place, and the Wild.
In Wild Ideas. David Rothenberg, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Low, Alaine and Soraya Tremayne, eds.
2001 Sacred Custodians of the Earth? Women, Spirituality and the Environment. New
York: Berghahn Books.
Lowe, Marian and Ruth Hubbard, eds.
1983 Woman's Nature: Rationalizations of Inequality. New York: Pergamon Press
Martin, Emily
1998 Fluid Bodies, Managed Nature. In Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking
Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London and New York: Routledge.
Merchant, Carolyn.
1996 Earthcare: Women and the Environment. New York: Routledge.
Pea, Devon Gerardo.
1997 The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender and Ecology on the US-
Mexican Border. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Plumwood, Val
1993 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge.
Riley, Glenda
1999 Women and Nature: Saving the Wild West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Silliman, Jael and Ynestra King
1999 Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and
Development. Cambridge: South End Press.
Shiva, Vandana
1988 Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Smedley, Audrey
2004 Women Creating Patrilyny: Gender and Environment in West Africa. Walnut Creek:
AltaMira Press.
Sperling, Susan
1991 Baboons with Briefcases vs. Langurs in Lipstick: Feminism and Functionalism in
Primate Studies. In Micaela di Leonardo, ed. Gender at the Crossroads of
Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Stephens, Sharon

15
 1995 Physical and Cultural Reproduction in a Post-Chernobyl Norwegian Sami
Community. In Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds. Conceiving the New World
Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sturgeon, Nol
1997 Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Political Action. New York:
Routledge.
Warren, Karen J.
2000 Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters.
Lanham and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
Warren, Karen J., ed. with Barbara Wells-Howe
1994 Ecological Feminism. London and New York : Routledge.
Warren, Karen J., ed. with Nisvan Erkal
1997 Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Week 9
Epistemologies of Nature: Sacred and Secular

In week nine, we examine the ways in which human-environmental relationships material and
discursive are mitigated through the seemingly disparate epistemological categories of science,
religion and spirituality. Building on the themes introduced in week eight, we begin with the scientific
revolution of the seventeenth century, examining the decline of classical understandings of the natural
world with the rise to dominance of mechanistic views which would come to embody the principles of
rationalisation, modernisation, progress, and creative destruction. We then contextualise this
relationship by comparing and contrasting it with sacred, spiritual or faith-based epistemologies of
nature, including global monotheistic religions as well as the vast variety of indigenous belief systems
documented by anthropologists. Importantly, we avoid positing the secular and the sacred as
oppositional categories (as well as reifying these systems geographically as a contrast between the
west and the rest) instead critically scrutinizing their contradictions, commonalities, and overlaps.

Arnold, David
2006 The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856.
Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Arnold, Philip P. and Ann Grodzins Gold, eds.
2001 Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Politics. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate.
Barnhill, David Landis and Roger S. Gottlieb
2001 Deep Ecology and World Religions: New Essays on Sacred Grounds. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Berglund, Eva
1997 Knowing Nature, Knowing Science: Ethnology of Local Environmental Activism.
Cambridge: White Horse Press.
2001 Self-defeating Environmentalism? Models and Questions from an Ethnography of
Toxic Waste Protest. Critique of Anthropology 21: 317-336.
Berkes, Fikret
1999 Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management.
London: Taylor and Frances.
Bird-David, Nurit
1990 The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-
Hunter. Current Anthropology 31(2):189-196.
Cooper, David E. and Joy A. Palmer, eds.
1998 Spirit of the Environment: Religion, Value, and Environmental Concern. London and
New York: Routledge.
Cunningham, Hilary
1998 Colonial Encounters in Postcolonial Contexts: Patenting Indigenous DNA and the
Human Genome Diversity Project. Critique of Anthropology 18: 205 - 233.
Descola, Philippe
1994 In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Nora Scott, trans. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Devall, Bill and George Sessions
1985 Deep Ecology. Salt Lake City: G.M. Smith.

16
Drengson, Alan and Yuichi Inoue, eds.
1995 The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology. Berkeley: North Atlantic
Books.
Eden, Sally, Andrew Donaldson and Gordon Walker
2006 Green Groups and Grey Areas: Scientific Boundary-Work, Nongovernmental
Organisations, and Environmental Knowledge. Environment and Planning A
38(6):1061-1076.
Ellen R.F
1986 What Black Elk Left Unsaid: On the Illusory Images of Green Primitivism.
Anthropology Today 2(6):8-12.
Enfield, Georgina H. and David J. Nash
2002 Missionaries and Morals: Climatic Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Central Southern
Africa. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92(4):727-742. Fairhead,
Fairhead, James and Melissa Leach
1995 Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savannah
Mosaic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Glacken, Clarence J.
1967 Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient
Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gottlieb, Roger S., ed.
1996 This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna
1989 Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New
York: Routledge.
Hughes, J. Donald
nd
1996 North American Indian Ecology. 2 ed. El Paso: Texas Western Press.
Latour, Bruno
1999 Pandoras Hope: An Essay on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Kellert, Stephen R. and Edward O. Wilson, eds.
1995 The Biophelia Hypothesis. Washington: Island Press.
Krech, Shepard
1999 The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
McLaughlin, Andrew
1993 Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Menzies, Charles R., ed.
2006 Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural Resource Management. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Merchant, Carolyn
1990 The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco:
Harper & Row.
1989 Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Messer, Ellen and Michael Lambek, eds.
2001 Ecology and the Sacred: Engaging the Anthropology of Roy A. Rappaport. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Rappaport, Roy A.
1979 Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Robertson, George et.al., eds.
1996 FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Sessions, George, ed.
1995 Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Shambhala.
Sheridan, Michael J and Celia Nyamweru, eds.
2008 African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change. Athens: Ohio
University Press.
Sillitoe, Paul
2002 Contested Knowledge, Contingent Classification: Animals in the Highlands of Papua
New Guinea. American Anthropologist 104(4):1162-1171.
Stoll, Mark

17
 2007 Religion Irradiates the Wilderness. In American Wilderness: A New History. Michael
Lewis, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strum, Shirley C. and Linda M. Fedigan, eds.
2002 Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Toumey, Christopher P.
2006 Gods Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.

Week 10
Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?" Nature and Class

While struggles for environmental justice are frequently linked to the liberatory politics of feminism,
anti-racism and anti-colonialism, the significance of class in the production of exploitative human-
nature relationships is increasingly on the scholarly and political agenda. This week, we consider the
problem of class in environmental justice, drawing on much of the literature introduced in week two
(especially that on social ecology, uneven development and the ecological contradictions of
capitalism), paying particular attention to the most visible struggle for working class environmental
justice through the occupational health and safety movement, but considering broader alliances
(potential and realised) between workers and environmentalists as well. We also apply a critical class
analysis to environmental movements, considering the historical antagonism between labour and
environmental activists. Finally, we consider how the struggle for working class environmental justice
relates to environmental movements based on race, gender and nation.

Darling, Eliza
2001 The Lorax Redux: Profit Biggering and Some Selective Silences in American
Environmentalism. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 12(4):51-66.
Dewey, Scott
1998 Working for the Environment: Organized Labor and the Origins of Environmentalism
in the United States, 1948-1970. Environmental History 3(1):45-63.
Estabrook, Thomas
2005 Labor-Environmental Coalitions: Lessons from a Louisiana Petrochemical Region.
Amityville: Baywood Publications.
Field, Rodger C.
1998 Risk and Justice: Capitalist Production and the Environment. In The Struggle for
Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States.
Daniel Faber, ed. New York: Guilford Press.
Foster, John Bellamy
1998 The Limits of Environmentalism without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest
Struggle in the New West. In The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental
Justice Movements in the United States. Daniel Faber, ed. New York: Guilford Press.
Germic, Stephen A.
2001 American Green: Class, Crisis, and the Deployment of Nature in Central Park,
Yosemite, and Yellowstone. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Hansen, Edward C.
1995 The Great Bambi War: Tocquevillians versus Keynesians in an Upstate New
York County. In Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric
R. Wolf. Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, eds. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Heiman, Michael K.
2006 Race, Waste, and Class: New Perspectives on Environmental Justice. Antipode
28(2):111-121.
1989 Production Confronts Consumption: Landscape Perception and Social Conflict in the
Hudson Valley. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 7(2):165-178.
Jerrett M., J. Eyles, D. Cole and S. Reader
1997 Environmental Equity in Canada: An Empirical Investigation into the Income
Distribution of Pollution in Ontario. Environment and Planning A 29(10):1777-1800.
Kazis, Richard and Richard L. Grossman

18
 1991 Fear at Work: Job Blackmail, Labor and the Environment. Philadelphia: New Society
Publishers.
Levenstein, Charles and John Wooding
1998 Dying for a Living: Workers, Production, and the Environment. In The Struggle for
Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States.
Daniel Faber, ed. New York: Guilford Press.
Levenstein, Charels and John Wooding, eds.
1997 Work, Health and Environment: Old Problems, New Solutions. New York: Guilford
Press.
Martnez Alier, Juan
2002 The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation.
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
McCarthy, James
2002 First World Political Ecology: Lessons from the Wise Use Movement. Environment
and Planning A 34:1281-1302.
Meier V.
1999 Cut-Flower Production in Colombia A Major Development Success Story for
Women? Environment and Planning A 31(2):273-289.
Montrie, Chad
2000 Expedient Environmentalism: Opposition to Coal Surface Mining in Appalachia and
the United Mine Workers of America, 1945-1977. Environmental History 5(1):75-98.
Obach, Brian K.
2004 Labor and the Environmental Movement: The Quest for Common Ground.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Prudham Scott
2007 Sustaining Sustained Yield: Class, Politics, and Post-War Forest Regulation in British
Columbia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25(2):258-283.
2005 Knock on Wood: Nature as Commodity in Douglas Fir Country. London and
New York: Routledge.
2002 Downsizing Nature: Managing Risk and Knowledge Economies through Production
Subcontracting in the Oregon Logging Sector. Environment and Planning A
34(1):145-166.
Slatin, Craig
2009 Environmental Unions: Labor and the Superfund. Amityville: Baywood Publishing
Company.
Smith Neil
2000 What Happened To Class?" Environment and Planning A 32(6):1011-1032.
Stewart, Sarah
1996 The Price of a Perfect Flower: Environmental Destruction and Health Hazards in the
Colombian Flower Industry. In Helen Collinson, ed. Green Guerrillas: Environmental
Conflict and Initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean. London: Latin America
Bureau.
Walker, Peter and Louise Fortmann
2003 Whose Landscape? A Political Ecology of the Exurban Sierra. Cultural Geographies
10:469-491.
White, Richard
1996 Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living? Work and Nature. In
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. William Cronon, ed. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Week 11
Imperial Nature: Ecology, War and the Colonial Encounter

In the final week of the course, we analyse environment as an instrument of empire, wielded by
powerful states in the process of colonialism, neocolonialism and expansionist wars. We examine
nature as both object of conquest and strategic instrument in the form of space, territory, and
resources, beginning with a general overview of the role of ecology (intended and inadvertent) in
European colonialism and subsequent postcolonial struggle, before turning to the neocolonial aspects
of contemporary environmental movements, including those driven by conservation, preservation, and

19
sustainable development agendas. We also look at the use of nature as a tool of war, from the
production and deployment of biological weapons to the calculated destruction of ecological
resources, drawing on the themes of mechanistic science and creative destruction introduced in week
nine and examining the consequences for civilian populations. We conclude the course by
considering the intersection of ecological and anti-imperialist resistance in the quest for a global
environmental justice.

Birch, Thomas H.
1998 The Incarceration of Wilderness: Wilderness Areas as Prisons. In In The Great New
Wilderness Debate. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson, eds. Athens and
London: The University of Georgia Press.
Blaikie, Piers and Harold Brookfield
1987 Colonialism, Development, and Degradation. In Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield.
Land Degradation and Society. London and New York: Methuen.
Castro, Alfonso Peter
1989 Southern Mount Kenya and Colonial Forest Conflicts. In John F. Richards and
Richard P. Tucker, eds. World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Cosgrove, Dennis
1995 Habitable Earth: Wilderness, Empire, and Race in America. In Wild Ideas. David
Rothenberg, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Luke, Timothy
1997 The World Wildlife Fund: Ecocolonialism as Funding the Worldwide Wise Use of
Nature. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8(2):31-61.
Mackenzie, Fiona
1995 Selective Silence: A Feminist Encounter with Environmental Discourse in Colonial
Africa. In Jonathan Crush, ed. Power of Development. London and New York:
Routledge.
Merchant, Carolyn
1996 Reinventing Eden: Western Culture as Recovery Narrative. In William Cronon, ed.
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York and London:
W.W. Norton & Company.
Crosby, Alfred W.
1994 Germs, Seeds and Animals: Studies in Ecological History. London: M.E. Sharpe.
1986 Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Davis, Mike
1999 A Worlds End: Drought, Famine and Imperialism (1896-1902). Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism 10(2): 3-46.
Griffiths Tom and Libby Robin
1997 Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies. University of Seattle:
Washington Press.
Grove, Richard H.
1995 Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Forest Edens, and the Origins of
Environmentalism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harper, Krista
2005 "Wild Capitalism" and "Ecocolonialism": A Tale of Two Rivers. American
Anthropologist 107(2):221-233.
Hughes, David McDermott.
2006 From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a South African Frontier. Seattle:
University of Washington Press.
Leaning, Jennifer
1993 War and the Environment: Human Health Consequences of the Environmental
Damage of War. In Eric Chivian et.al., eds. Critical Condition: Human Health and the
Environment. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.
MacKenzie, John, ed.
1990 Imperialism and the Natural World. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Merchant, Carolyn.
2003 Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge.
Mills, Sara

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 1994 Knowledge, Gender, and Empire. In Allison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds. Writing
Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York and London:
The Guilford Press.
Neumann Roderick P.
1998 Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schroeder, Richard A. and Roderick P. Neumann
1995 Manifest Ecological Destinies: Local Rights and Global Environmental Agendas.
Antipode 28:321-324.

Course Essays

1. To what extent have shifts in the concept of environment in anthropology constituted a process
denaturalisation?

2. Critically discuss Bruno Latours contention that political ecology has nothing to do with nature.

3. Critically discuss the political implications of apocalyptic environmentalism for gender OR race.

4. In what way can preservation be described as a new accumulation strategy for capital?

5. In what sense is wilderness not wild?

6. Critically discuss the social implications of the green revolution.

7. Must the marriage of indigenous rights movements and environmentalism necessarily entail an
evocation of the ecologically noble savage?

8. Discuss the contradiction of mysticism versus materialism in ecofeminist politics.

9. Critique the notion that workers are a threat to the environment.

10. Is environmental conservation a form of neocolonialism?

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 A guide for writing and presenting course essays and examined reports

These guidelines have been designed to ensure that you are aware of the basic expectations of
written coursework and examined reports. In addition to general comments concerning essay
structure, they include details about how to reference work and issues regarding plagiarism and
overlap. Please note that in the marking of work, both of these issues will be taken into account.

1. General essay guidance

An essay should present a well-organized argument that responds to a set question. It should
include a review and discussion of relevant literature, and should also present an argument
for your own perspective. Aim to convince the reader that your angle on the topic is valid, but
make sure you demonstrate knowledge of other possible approaches.

a. The Introduction
You should begin with an introduction setting out the issue to be discussed, and tell
the reader how you will approach it. Avoid wasting space on definitions unless a
particular question requires them. Make a clear argument and proceed from one point
to the next so that the narrative builds on what went before.

b. The main body of the essay

Tell the reader where a line of reasoning you refer to is helpful or flawed and, using
your own judgment and the work of previous commentators, explain why. Keep the
essay focussed on the argument and avoid meandering. Critique is appropriate in an
essay but unsubstantiated, moralistic and generalized polemic is not.
You can use subheadings to provide structure to the essay and guidance for the
reader. Make the sections build on each other. In general, arguments should not be
purely abstract or theoretical, but should use examples (from ethnography, history,
the media and popular culture, and your own experience, where appropriate). Make
sure that the relevance of your examples is clearly stated. Your essay should have a
clear and succinct conclusion.

c. Footnotes and Endnotes

Footnotes may be used for points of amplification, but are not generally necessary.
Endnotes are discouraged.

2. References
Sources listed in the reading guide will provide good starting points, but you may introduce
other material. You may locate further references through bibliographies in articles and books
that you already have, through browsing relevant journals, through library catalogues, or
through searching the web. Bear in mind that material on the web, especially, is very uneven
in quality: you need to make judgements as to whether data are likely to be accurate, and
whether interpretations are justifiable or opinionated.

In order to be clear and professional, you should cite and list your sources in a standardized
way. In anthropology, the most common system uses author-date citations within the text
rather than footnotes or endnotes.

General reference to writer/text within a sentence: for example,

as Leach (1972) influentially argued
as critics of Said have noted (e.g. Clifford 1988)

Reference to a specific passage/quotation: all direct quotations must be accompanied by

specific page references, for example,
Fry and Willis are suspicious of the emphasis they see on traditional Aboriginal
artists (1989: 160-62)
Myers has suggested that the appeal of the acrylics is the sense of their
rootedness in the world (1995: 84).
Any quotation longer than three lines should appear as a separate, indented paragraph, without

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 quotation marks.
The Bibliography
Full references should be consolidated in a bibliography at the end of your essay, not in the
form of endnotes. It should be in alphabetical order by author and should include all and only
those works cited. It is important that you include all the information for a reference, and not
only date, author and title. Although there are a number of set bibliographic styles, we
strongly recommend that you use the following form:

Book:
Taussig, Michael (1987) Shamanism, colonialism and the wild man: a study in terror and
healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Edited book:
Karp, Ivan and Stephen Lavine (eds) (1991) Exhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics of
museum display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Article in journal:
Appadurai, Arjun (1990) Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Public
Culture 2 (2): 1-24.

Chapter in book:
Beckett, Jeremy (1998) Haddon attends a funeral: fieldwork in Torres Strait, in Cambridge
and the Torres Strait, Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, (eds) pp. 23-49. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Film/Video:
Harlan County, USA. (1976) Barbara Kopple. Cabin Creek Films, USA. 103 minutes. [name
after date is that of director].

Web pages:
Where appropriate, refer to the specific page, rather than the site in general, and include
details of the title and author of specific material, for example:
Luttwak, Edward (1990) Capitalism without capital, www.lbr.org.uk/articles/luttwak.html

3. The issues of plagiarism and overlap

In addition to the general rules of plagiarism, as stated in the Student Handbook, you must
ensure that the same work is not submitted for more than one examination, and that it does
not overlap with other formally assessed work. Please note the Colleges chief concern is that
you do not use material in examinations as a means of deception. These guidelines do not
therefore stipulate against you making links between courses, or establishing the cross-over
of material, or against the answering of an examination question that may partially relate to a
coursework essay.

Plagiarism is the use of someone elses work - either direct quotation or minor rephrasing -
that is not cited, and is passed off as your own work. The form of the original source is
irrelevant - for example, it can be from a book, the Internet, or another students essay. Work
where the author is unknown should be listed as anonymous.

Self-plagiarism is the use of your own work - either direct quotation or minor rephrasing - that
has already been submitted to a Department, either in the form of a coursework essay or
examination. Self-plagiarism is a particular issue where an essay, or section of an essay, is
reproduced completely unchanged through cut and paste facilities.

Overlap is the use of the same material in more than one examination, either within this
Department or another. In addition to self-plagiarism, overlap can include the use of virtually
the same general argument or virtually the same sources of reference material.

Note that the College is very strict on these matters, and if found guilty students are likely to
be severely penalised. If you have any queries regarding these issues you must contact the
Anthropology Examinations Officer.

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