Assessing Foucault's Legacy in Environmental Anthropology

This chapter examines the importance of integrating archaeological perspectives within contemporary environmental anthropology. It does this through exposing key questions raised by environmental anthropologists concerning West African relations with soil and forests that can only be addressed through collaboration with archaeological investigation (see also Balée, Chapter 3 this volume). Environmental anthropological research has been particularly important in revealing the ecological knowledge and environmental practices of land users and how these practices interplay with ecological and economic processes in the shaping of landscapes. This research has systematically undermined a paradigm of environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’, ‘equilibrial’, or ‘pristine’ environments (whether of soils, forests, or faunal assemblages). Whilst equilibrial ecology is apparently no longer upheld in ecological sciences either, in its shift to non-equilibrium ecology and recognition of path dependency, and whilst nature is no longer so easily configured simply as the absence of people, assumptions rooted in such simplistic ideas of nature still strongly inform and mislead the way West African environments are understood and problematized. Anthropologically derived critiques of the way landscapes are understood have been associated with a rereading of the history of those landscapes. Yet given how oral historical and anthropologically derived historical evidence can so easily be delegitimized and dismissed by apparently ‘harder’ sciences, environmental archaeology becomes a crucial player in these debates. In this brief chapter I shall focus on two key debates which can only be resolved (or reconceptualized) through environmental archaeology. The first of these concerns the degradation (or otherwise) of soils and vegetation linked to farming in West Africa’s Guinea savannah and forest-savannah transition zones. The second concerns the legacy of past land use on current ‘old growth’ forest in the Central and West African humid forest zones. These are not only interesting debates, but are at the heart of sustainable development policy deliberation in West Africa. The continued power of the paradigm in environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’ or ‘pristine’ environments is visible in the way that landscape features are often interpreted uncritically as ‘relicts’ of that nature.

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Ethnobiology and the new environmental anthropology

Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology ◽

10.4324/9781315768946-3 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 31-43

Author(s):

E. N. Anderson

Keyword(s):

Environmental Anthropology

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History and scope of environmental anthropology

Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology ◽

10.4324/9781315768946-2 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 10-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Eduardo Brondízio ◽

Ryan T. Adams ◽

Stefano Fiorini

Keyword(s):

Environmental Anthropology

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A Critical Review of Environmental Conservation in Zimbabwe

Africa Spectrum ◽

10.1177/000203971304800205 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 48 (2) ◽

pp. 85-97 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Munyaradzi Mawere

Keyword(s):

Environmental Conservation ◽

Scientific Models ◽

Environmental Anthropology ◽

Stink Bugs ◽

Indigenous Epistemologies ◽

Considerable Success ◽

Indigenous Conservation ◽

Communal Area ◽

Border Thinking

The discourse on “environmental conservation” is highly dynamic and has generated controversies of epic proportions in conservation sciences and environmental anthropology. Given the nebulous nature of conservation, coupled with the varying interpretations evoked by the deployment of the concept across different disciplines, a more robust understanding of the notion calls into question its practical manifestations and application in particular situated contexts – particularly within the conservation sciences and environmental anthropology. In Zimbabwe, conservation by the state has tended to favour and privilege Western scientific models at the expense of the “indigenous” conservation practices of local people, as informed by their indigenous epistemologies. This paper thus represents an attempt to rethink conservation in Zimbabwe, adopting the Norumedzo communal area in south-eastern Zimbabwe as its case study. The choice of Norumedzo is based on the fact that this is one area where the highly esteemed and delicious harurwa (edible stink bugs, Encosternum delegorguei) are found. As a result of these insects being valued as “actors” and the appreciation shown to both Western and indigenous epistemologies, conservation in the area has enjoyed considerable success. To this end, this paper lends support to the arguments of Walter Mignolo and Ramon Grosfoguel in their advocacy for critical border thinking in issues of knowledge regarding environmental conservation.

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Interspecies Relations and Agrarian Worlds

Annual Review of Anthropology ◽

10.1146/annurev-anthro-102317-050232 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 47 (1) ◽

pp. 233-249 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Shaila Seshia Galvin

Keyword(s):

Recent Work ◽

Environmental Anthropology ◽

Multispecies Ethnography ◽

Recent Scholarship ◽

Interspecies Relations

Recent years have witnessed burgeoning interest in interspecies relations and multispecies ethnography. This review explores what such perspectives bring to long-standing anthropological attention to agrarian worlds. Considering why so much recent scholarship only minimally engages with longer disciplinary traditions found within ecological and environmental anthropology and ethnobotany, the review examines continuities and discontinuities across these different modes of attending to interspecies relationships. From here, it explores how contemporary scholarship renews anthropological attention to questions of domestication, relatedness, agency, and personhood and how it charts new ground by engaging theories of biopolitics, biocapital, biosemiotics, and plant ontologies. While noting that recent work has distinctive theoretical preoccupations, the review concludes by suggesting that fruitful possibilities lie in working with, and across, established and emergent anthropologies of the agrarian.

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