Environmental Anthropology & the Anthropocene

The subfield studying how people know, use, damage, protect, and imagine their environments — the two-way relationship between societies and the non-human world.

The crude idea that climate dictates culture. Boas and others rejected it for its racist pedigree, arguing environment *limits* but does not *cause* cultural forms.

A 1950s middle path: the 'culture core' — technologies and labor arrangements tied directly to subsistence — adapts to environmental conditions, while other cultural features vary more freely.

That the Tsembaga Maring ritual pig-slaughter cycle worked like a thermostat, regulating pig populations, protein intake, and warfare — an example of ecological functionalism.

It made cultures look like tidy self-regulating machines and ignored history, internal conflict, and outside/global forces.

A 1980s approach insisting environmental problems are never purely local or natural; it links degradation to land tenure, debt, state policy, and global markets.

The cause was not 'ignorant peasants' but land tenure laws, debt, and colonial-era forest policy pushing cultivation onto steep marginal slopes.

Follow explanation upward — from the eroding field, to the household, to the state, to global commodity markets.

Cumulative, place-based environmental understanding transmitted across generations and embedded in practice, language, and cosmology.

(1) It is not a static museum piece — it changes, adopts new tools, and can be wrong; (2) states/NGOs often strip it from its social and spiritual context, reducing it to data points.