As review articles, all the essays are informative and potentially useful, pointing the way towards work that could be followed up in more detail. In this sense, they serve their purpose as introductions to environmental anthropology and its various subfields. In particular, Tsing's analysis of the relations among environmental history, science studies, political ecology, and cultural anthropology in the creation of particular strands of interdisciplinary scholarship is insightful, especially when paired with Dove's demonstration of and reflections on interdisciplinary borrowing in ecological anthropology.... [This book] highlights some important developments in the field, and it forcefully advocates anthropology's engagement in environmental discourse. Some chapters, those of Sponsel, Dove, and Ingerson, in particular, will become central to my course reading lists, while some others might be recommended as useful illustrations.
- Kay Milton, (Queen's University, Belfast), Current Anthropology
The papers in this volume offer a rich and varied menu sure to delight young scholars seeking to engage environmental issues through an anthropological prism. From approaches to the construction of nature to the emergence of a spiritual ecology, engagement with environmentalism, historical ecology, and political ecology readers will find much food for thought in these pages.
- Emilio Moran, (Director, Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change, Indiana University),
Introduction
Part One: Defining Environment and Interpreting Nature
Chapter 1: Nature in the Making
Chapter 2: Linking Language and the Environment: A Coevolutionary Perspective
Chapter 3: Cognitive Anthropology and the Environment
Chapter 4: Archaeology and Environmental Change
Chapter 5: Interdisciplinary Borrowing in Environmental Anthropology, and the Critique of Modern Science
Part Two: Beliefs, Values and Environmental Justice
Chapter 6: Political Ecology and Constructions of Environment in Biological Anthropology
Chapter 7: Anthropology and Environmental Justice: Analysts, Activists, Mediators, and Trouble Makers
Chapter 8: The Politics of Ethnographic Presence: Sites and Topologies in the Study of Transnational Movements
Chapter 9: Do Anthropologists Need Religion and Vice Versa: Adventures and Dangers in Spiritual Ecology
Part Three: Application and Engagement
Chapter 10: Historical Ecology: Landscapes of Change in the Pacific Northwest
Chapter 11: Getting the Dirt Out: An Anthropological Approach to the Culture and Political Economy of Urban Land in the United States
Chapter 12: Environmental Anthropology at Sea
Chapter 13: The Discourse of Environmental Partnerships