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5.0 out of 5 stars
Introduction to Environmental Anthropology, August 22, 2007
This review is from: Environmental Anthropology: From Pigs to Policies (Paperback)
This book is a short introduction to current topics in environmental anthropology, both at theoretical and practical levels. The author defines environmental anthropology as the use of anthropology's methods and theories that contribute to the understanding of local or global environmental problems. In a more general sense, the author refers to environmental anthropology as the involvement of anthropologists in environmental issues, with a variety of methods, theories, and specialized research interests. Under this umbrella are included the approaches known as ecological anthropology, evolutionary ecology, historical ecology, political ecology, ethnoecology, and others.
This book covers a wide variety of selected topics, including the relationship of the technology used in production to the environment in which it is used, the way how societies respond to changes in their environment and their culture core, the role of religious rituals in the regulation of the ecosystem pressures by local groups, the study of traditional ecological knowledge, the hunting practices of indigenous peoples in the rainforest, the agricultural pressures on the environment in complex societies, the effects of land and water pollution on local populations as a result of mining activities, the assessment of risks associated with natural disasters, the relationship between population growth and environmental degradation, the association between biodiversity, medicinal plants and human health, issues in common property regimes and the increase of forest fires, the analysis of carrying capacity and the growth of environmental movements, among many other topics.
The author also examines in a brief way the ideas of key authors who have made the most important contributions to environmental anthropology, including Fredrik Barth, Harold Conklin, Arturo Escobar, Clifford Geertz, Emilio Moran, Robert Netting, Darrell Posey, Roy Rappaport, Marshall Sahlins, Julian Steward, Eric Wolf, among many other representative authors. The book somehow follows a historical path, covering the period between 1940's until 2000. However, the author frequently includes references from earlier periods and is not limited by the constraints of the particular period at hand when trying to illustrate a topic.
From my perspective, the book is an especially important source of knowledge for students that are not familiar with the issues that are the subject of environmental anthropology, and also for students who have become acquainted with these issues in a fragmentary way. By providing a general overview of the different topics covered in this area of concentration, it opens up and stimulates the reader's desire for further exploration. It provides a general framework to understand the wide array of areas covered in environmental anthropology, ranging from the contributions of classical author's to contemporary global problems.
This book is also a very important source of knowledge for students from different disciplines who wish to understand current environmental problems from an anthropological perspective. An outstanding factor is that it is written in a simple language, without assuming that readers are already familiar with the concepts and ideas common in anthropology. It starts explaining what anthropology is and how it is organized, and where environmental anthropology is located in relation to the anthropological subdisciplines and related areas of concentration. From that point, it moves forward in a smooth way, without creating unnecessary complications for the readers, even when dealing with complex issues like the formula to understand the relationship between population growth and environmental impacts, or the comparison between the carrying capacity of lands under different systems of food production.
An important limiting factor identified in the book is that, considering the introductory nature of its contents, it does not provide adequate orientation for further exploration of the topics, except for the references section. A personal recommendation is that subsequent editions could include this sort of information, including calls to bibliographic sources that cover with more detail the specific topics considered, links to Websites where to obtain more detailed information, and brief descriptions of other introductory books to environmental anthropology, mentioning their general orientations and levels of detail provided.
At a personal level, this book provided me with very useful insights to understand environmental anthropology from a holistic perspective. Through the analysis of the different issues considered, I become familiar with the differences and similarities across topics, creating an enriched perspective on a wide range of environmental problems. Of particular interest for me were the sections related to the relationship between population and the environment, the social impacts of environmental pollution as a result of mining activities, the use of concepts drawn from disciplines like ecology, demography, and biology, integrated in the illustration of the topics considered, among other topics of interest.
The way the author presented the information was also a very important factor for me. The presentation of the topics based on the environmental topics provides not only clear information that facilitates the understanding of environmental problems, but also provides a context for a better understanding with the authors' ideas and methodological insights. This topic-centered approach resulted in a very illustrative way, which I found more useful than chronological versions of different authors, or the theoretical paradigms they are associated with, which are the main orientations in traditional introductory books in anthropology.
Among other limitations identified, one important issue is related to the section about threats to biodiversity. The book includes only half a page on this issue. Considering their relevance for the current practice of environmental anthropology in applied settings, it results clearly insufficient. A personal recommendation is to enlarge this section considerably. Another limitation identified is that some concepts mentioned in the book lack a proper explanation of their meaning, like in the case of cultural core, ecological footprint, recycling, or sustainability, which have different meanings according to the different contexts in which they are employed. The provision of a glossary as an appendix is not very useful if there are not references in the text that call for a review of their meaning at a different part of the book. A recommendation for improvement is to include the references for the definition of controversial terms embedded in the body of the text to facilitate their understanding.
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