Anthropology has a long and rich history of efforts to make sense of human societies in relation to their natural environments, and this edited collection, by Michael Dove and Carol Carpenter of Yale University, is an important contribution to that history.
The editors organize their selections according to what they call ‘a sort of archaeology of key, persisting themes in the field’ (p. xv). Each of the themes is imaginatively represented by subsets of two reprinted essays each. The essays were selected not only for their thematic focus, but also because they are based on original ethnographic case studies and are written and argued in ways that make them memorable. Indeed, many of the essays in this book are ones that I remember well when exploring issues in environmental anthropology.
The first theme, and likely of particular interest to readers of Environmental Conservation, is the nature-culture dichotomy which lies behind the powerful assumption or discourse that people degrade nature, and therefore that nature must be saved from people and their culture. Two of the selections, by Posey and by Fairhead and Leach, claim to show how what might appear as truly ‘natural’ is instead the outcome of human agency, with the implication that indigenous and poor people might be exemplars of conservation. Like many others in this collection, these essays also figure large in the politics of knowledge, conservation and development. The second theme concerns ecology and social organization, bringing together classics by M. Mauss, J. Steward, F. Barth and C. Geertz, together with two significant pieces on responses to disasters (R. Firth and geographer E. Waddell). The focus on disasters reflects the book's strong emphasis on scholarship that is relevant to social and environmental policy. A third section serves as an umbrella for methodological challenges and debates, on slash-and-burn agriculture (sustainable or destructive farming?, classics by H. Conklin and R. Carneiro); the application of natural science models (cybernetics, R. Rappaport; optimal foraging theory, Kristen Hawkes et al.); and issues of historical depth and spatial scale in anthropological studies of community (J. Solway and R. Lee; R. Netting).
The fourth general theme concerns the politics of natural resources and the environment as expressed in issues of indigeneity (R. Ellen and T.M. Li) and environmental campaigns and projects (J.P. Brosius and A.L. Tsing). Indigeneity, the notion that local peoples have special claims to, knowledge of, and practices in relation to natural systems, is a distinctive contribution of anthropology but has also been criticized by anthropologists among others, as shown in these selections. The chapter by Ellen also addresses the question of what causes the development of environmental consciousness. Li's chapter would be helpful to conservationists, building as it does on theory about articulation of local landscapes and stories with global ‘slots’ of attention and interest. These authors, along with Brosius and Tsing, are widely esteemed for their contributions to anthropological theory and conservation and development practice. Brosius is among those who emphasize the power of discourses that privilege some interests and groups over others and obscure the essentially political dimension of environmental problems. Tsing's work shows how the relatively powerless groups may enact dominant discourses of development and conservation while also playing upon outsiders' fantasies about tribalists and wild nature, creating possibilities for otherwise unlikely collaborations between international environmental non-governmental organizations and tribal peoples.
The fifth and last set of essays is organized around the theme of ‘knowing the environment’. M. Bloch and C. Frake explore cultural dimensions of creating a sense of place or identity from a landscape, the former in eastern Madagascar, the latter in East Anglia, England. In both cases, cultural identity is created in part by transformation of nature, through farming and distinctive views of the past (in England) and the future (in Madagascar). G. Bateson and T. Ingold's essays, which close the book, both concern human experiential relationships with the environment.
I strongly recommend the book to environmental scientists and conservation practitioners as a source of ideas about the ‘human dimension’ of the things they care about. The editors do not pretend to survey the entire field of environmental anthropology, and indeed leave out important scholarship by people such as Emilio Moran, Andrew P. Vayda and Eugene Anderson, as well as many younger scholars. Nonetheless, the selections by and large are truly memorable and likely to engage graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well. Most of all, the themes are discussed fully and intelligently in the editors' introduction, which gives a very large ‘added value’ to the collection, making connections and theoretical thrusts that are often surprising or non-intuitive and always thought-provoking.
