Download or read book The Ecosystem Concept In Anthropology written by Emilio F Moran and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics of the ecosystem concept have noted the tendency of ecosystem-based studies to overemphasize energy flow, to rely on functionalist assumptions, to neglect historical and evolutionary factors, and to overlook the role of individuals as the locus of natural selection and decision making. In this volume, leading figures in the study of biological and human ecology evaluate these criticisms and propose ways to advance the state of knowledge in ecological research.
Download or read book The Ecosystem Approach in Anthropology written by Emilio F. Moran and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reassessment of the ecosystem concept for anthropology
Download or read book Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia written by Joshua Lockyer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In order to move global society towards a sustainable “ecotopia,” solutions must be engaged in specific places and communities, and the authors here argue for re-orienting environmental anthropology from a problem-oriented towards a solutions-focused endeavor. Using case studies from around the world, the contributors—scholar-activists and activist-practitioners— examine the interrelationships between three prominent environmental social movements: bioregionalism, a worldview and political ecology that grounds environmental action and experience; permaculture, a design science for putting the bioregional vision into action; and ecovillages, the ever-dynamic settings for creating sustainable local cultures.
Download or read book Environmentalism and Cultural Theory written by Kay Milton and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 1996 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Human Adaptability written by Emilio F. Moran and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed to help students understand the multiple levels at which human populations respond to their surroundings, this essential text offers the most complete discussion of environmental, physiological, behavioral, and cultural adaptive strategies available. Among the unique features that make Human Adaptability outstanding as both a textbook for students and a reference book for professionals are a complete discussion of the development of ecological anthropology and relevant research methods; the use of an ecosystem approach with emphasis on arctic, high altitude, arid land, grassland, tropical rain forest, and urban environments; an extensive and updated bibliography on ecological anthropology; and a comprehensive glossary of technical terms. Entirely new to the third edition are chapters on urban sustainability and methods of spatial analysis, with enhanced emphasis throughout on the role of gender in human-adaptability research and on global environmental change as it affects particular ecosystems. In addition, new sections in each chapter guide students to websites that provide access to relevant material, complement the text's coverage of biomes, and suggest ways to become active in environmental issues.
Download or read book Environmental Anthropology written by Patricia K. Townsend and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2008-06-25 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental anthropologists organize the realities of interdependent lands, plants, animals, and human beings; advocate for the neediest among them; and provide understandings that preserve what is needed for the survival of a diverse world. Can the things that anthropologists have learned in their studies of small-scale systems have any relevance for developing policies to address global problems? Townsend explores this dilemma in her captivating, concise exploration of environmental anthropology and its place among the disciplines subfields. Maintaining the structure and clarity of the previous edition, the second edition has been revised throughout to include new research, expanded discussions of climate change, and a chapter devoted to spiritual ecology. In the historical overview of the field, Townsend shows how ideas and approaches developed earlier are relevant to understanding how todays local populations adapt to their physical and biological environments. She next presents a closer look at global environmental issuesrapid expansion of the world economic system, disease and poverty, the loss of biodiversity and its implications for human healthto demonstrate the effects of interactions between local and global communities. As a capstone, she gives thoughtful consideration to how, as professionals and as individuals, we can move toward personal engagement with environmental problems.
Download or read book The Perception of the Environment written by Tim Ingold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understand the dynamics of development. And this in turn calls for an ecological approach that situates practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of their surroundings. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book is set to revolutionise the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings – at once organisms and persons – to inhabit an environment. The Perception of the Environment will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers. This edition includes a new Preface by the author.
Download or read book A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health written by Merrill Singer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-04-27 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the Anthropology of Environmental Health presents a collection of readings that utilize a medical anthropological approach to explore the interface of humans and the environment in the shaping of health and illness around the world. Features the latest ethnographic research from around the world related to the multiple impacts of the environment on health and of societies on their environments Includes contributions from international medical anthropologists, conservationists, environmental experts, public health professionals, health clinicians, and other social scientists Analyzes the conditions of cultural and social transformation that accompany environmental and ecological impacts in all areas of the world Offers critical perspectives on theoretical and methodological advancements in the anthropology of environmental health, along with future directions in the field
Download or read book The Ecological Transition written by John W. Bennett and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ecological Transition studies the relationships between humans and the physical environment. It also assesses some converging approaches in cultural anthropology, including cultural ecology, economic anthropology, social exchange, and behavioral adaptation. Comprised of ten chapters, this book focuses on ecological transition, which refers to the process by which humans incorporate nature into society. It discusses how to formulate a policy-oriented cultural ecology and looks at the ecological transition as material evolution and as a problem of equilibrium. The succeeding chapters review some of the contributions of cultural ecology, including its successes and failures. Finally, the book examines the concept of adaptive and maladaptive actions in human ecology. This book is useful for anthropologists who are interested in cultural-ecological research and its implications in public policy.
Download or read book Against the Grain written by Bradley B. Walters and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2008 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the Grain gathers scholars from across disciplines to explore the work of ecological anthropologist Andrew P. Vayda and the future of the study of human ecology.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Climate Change written by Hans Baer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In addressing the urgent questions raised by climate change, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the anthropology of climate change guided by a critical political ecological framework. It argues that anthropologists must significantly expand their focus on climate change and their contributions to responding to climate change as a grave risk to humanity. The book presents a human socioecological framework for conceptualizing climate change. It examines the emergence and slow maturation of the anthropology of climate change; reviews the historic foundations for this work in the archaeology of climate change; and presents three alternative contemporary theoretical perspectives in the anthropology of climate change. The book synthesizes anthropological work and perspectives on climate change in the form of case studies in various regions of the world revealing the nature of global climate change as constituting multiple and somewhat diverse changes in local settings. It explores the applied anthropology of climate change in terms of the ways anthropologists are contributing to climate policy, working with communities on climate change issues, as well as within the climate movement both internationally and nationally. Finally it provides an overview of what other the social sciences are saying about climate change and explores ways that the anthropology of climate change can interface with sociology, political science, and human geography in order to create an integrated social science of climate change. This book gives researchers and students in Environmental Anthropology, Climate Change, Human Geography, and Sociology, a novel framework for understanding climate change that emphasizes human socioecological interactions.
Download or read book Environmental Anthropology written by Helen Kopnina and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents new theoretical approaches, methodologies, subject pools, and topics in the field of environmental anthropology. Environmental anthropologists are increasingly focusing on self-reflection - not just on themselves and their impacts on environmental research, but also on the reflexive qualities of their subjects, and the extent to which these individuals are questioning their own environmental behavior. Here, contributors confront the very notion of "natural resources" in granting non-human species their subjectivity and arguing for deeper understanding of "nature," and "wilderness" beyond the label of "ecosystem services." By engaging in interdisciplinary efforts, these anthropologists present new ways for their colleagues, subjects, peers and communities to understand the causes of, and alternatives to environmental destruction. This book demonstrates that environmental anthropology has moved beyond the construction of rural, small group theory, entering into a mode of solution-based methodologies and interdisciplinary theories for understanding human-environmental interactions. It is focused on post-rural existence, health and environmental risk assessment, on the realm of alternative actions, and emphasizes the necessary steps towards preventing environmental crisis.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Sustainability written by Marc Brightman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-02 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book compiles research from leading experts in the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability, as well as local and global understandings of the concept, and on lived practices around the world. It contains studies focusing on ways of living, acting, and thinking which claim to favor the local and global ecological systems of which we are a part, and on which we depend for survival. The concept of sustainability as a product of concern about global environmental degradation, rising social inequalities, and dispossession is presented as a key concept. The contributors explore the opportunities to engage with questions of sustainability and to redefine the concept of sustainability in anthropological terms.
Download or read book A New Ecological Order written by Ştefan Dorondel and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century forged a new ecological order in North American and Western European states, radically transforming the environment through science and technology in the name of human progress. Far less known are the dramatic environmental changes experienced by Eastern Europe, in many ways a terra incognita for environmental historians and anthropologists. A New Ecological Order explores, from a historical and ethnographic perspective, the role of state planners, bureaucrats, and experts—engineers, agricultural engineers, geographers, biologists, foresters, and architects—as agents of change in the natural world of Eastern Europe from 1870 to the early twenty-first century. Contributors consider territories engulfed by empires, from the Habsburg to the Ottoman to tsarist Russia; territories belonging to disintegrating empires; and countries in the Balkan Peninsula, Central and Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Together, they follow a rhetoric of “correcting nature,” a desire to exploit the natural environment and put its resources to work for the sake of developing the economies and infrastructures of modern states. They reveal an eagerness among newly established nation-states, after centuries of imperial economic and political impositions, to import scientific knowledge and new technologies from Western Europe that would aid in their economic development, and how those imports and ideas about nature ultimately shaped local projects and policies.
Download or read book Science Society and the Environment written by Michael R. Dove and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era when pressing environmental problems make collaboration across the divide between sciences and arts and humanities essential, this book presents the results of a collaborative analysis by an anthropologist and a physicist of four key junctures between science, society, and environment. The first focuses on the systemic bias in science in favour of studying esoteric subjects as distinct from the mundane subjects of everyday life; the second is a study of the fire-climax grasslands of Southeast Asia, especially those dominated by Imperata cylindrica (sword grass); the third reworks the idea of ‘moral economy’, applying it to relations between environment and society; and the fourth focuses on the evolution of the global discourse of the culpability and responsibility of climate change. The volume concludes with the insights of an interdisciplinary perspective for the natural and social science of sustainability. It argues that failures of conservation and development must be viewed systemically, and that mundane topics are no less complex than the more esoteric subjects of science. The book addresses a current blind spot within the academic research community to focusing attention on the seemingly common and mundane beliefs and practices that ultimately play the central role in the human interaction with the environment. This book will benefit students and scholars from a number of different academic disciplines, including conservation and environment studies, development studies, studies of global environmental change, anthropology, geography, sociology, politics, and science and technology studies.
Download or read book Ecology and the Sacred written by Roy A. Rappaport and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A meaningful homage to an extraordinary anthropologist
Download or read book Methods of Desire written by Aurora Donzelli and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.
