This course focuses on how diverse communities around the world interact with their environment from an anthropological point of view. The course aims to understand human adaptation to environment and also discuss contemporary issues about environment, such as climate change, environmentalism, ecofeminism, political ecology.
Ecological anthropology studies the relations between human beings and their environments. In the first part of this course we will focus on diverse ways that people have adapted to their ecology and strategies they used for this adaptation. We will discuss traditional ecological knowledge and how different communities around the world may possess valuable knowledge about the Earth.
However, in the last hundred years, people have altered the global environment in ways that have no precedent in human history. With the contemporary environmental crisis as its backdrop, the second part of the course course will examine some classic and contemporary anthropological approaches to the environment and environmentalism. We will discuss issues like cultural ecology, political ecology, environmental history, ecofeminism, urban ecology and climate change.