240521 SE Anthropology and the Environment: Thinking about and thinking through the environment (P4) (2015W)

'The environment' has become a dominant figure in our daily lives, the media and academic pursuits alike. What can anthropology teach us about contemporary human-environmental relations and environmental problems and their solutions? In this seminar we will examine contemporary anthropological modes of approaching the environment: the modes of thinking about and thinking through the environment. Through the first mode we will ask: How is the environment defined, experienced and understood differently and similarly around the world? How do humans conceive of nature and engage with it in order to make their environment and lives meaningful? Which ideas about 'the environment' are globally circulating and what are the consequences in various localities? What role do race, class, and gender play in our engagement with the environment? What role does religion/spirituality take on?

Questions like these lead also to a critical examination of the origins and persistence of the very category of the environment or nature. They touch essential issues such as what people around the world are conceiving as human and non-human and how they imagine and value the relationship between humans and non-humans (like plants, animals). Moreover, the anthropological exploration of the environment involves a critical reflection on the nature/culture divide predominating Western thought and also representing a fundamental theme of anthropology as a discipline.

In fact, putting the current deep environmental changes on center stage requires us to rethink many of the concepts and ideals that have been central to Western modernity and values. This current unsettling of ideas about the environment and of the dominant place and position of humans in it has heralded another mode called 'thinking through the environment'. Accompanied by a number of 'turns' (like the ontological turn, the 'species turn') which has been proclaimed this mode has led to searching for new theoretical and methodological approaches and new genres of writing in anthropology and other social and cultural sciences. Different attempts aiming to 'decentering' the dominant place attributed to humans vis-à-vis the environment or other species will be as critically examined as different approaches related more to the mode of 'thinking about the environment'.