Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Anthropology, the Environment, and Environmental Crisis

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences

  • 209 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of anthropological research on the environment and socio-environmental and geosocial transformations which often are associated with crises and the Anthropocene. It presents ways anthropologists and researchers from related disciplines study and write about these transformations and considers their proposals to develop analytical tools, frameworks, and innovative methods that scrutinize and redefine the relations between humans and the environment. The chapter consists of five interlinked thematic discussions that span a long period in the study of human-environmental interrelations, from the early perspectives on cultural ecology to the most recent work on more-than-human relations. The thematic discussions consider human adaptation; the political ecology of natural resource extraction; research on toxicity; perspectives on temporalities and more-than-human agency; and finally, recent approaches to the study of life on a damaged planet.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Acosta A (2016) Las dependencias del extractivismo: aporte para un debate incompleto. Aktuel Marx 20:1–22

    Google Scholar 

  • Adams V, Van Hattum T, English D (2009) Chronic disaster syndrome: displacement, disaster capitalism, and the eviction of the poor from New Orleans. Am Ethnol 36(4):615–636

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Balée W (2006) The research program of historical ecology. Columbia University Press, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Barad K (2010) Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today 3(2):240–268

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bauer S (2018) Radiation science after the cold war: the politics of measurement, risk and compensation. In: Zvonareva O, Popna E, Horstman K (eds) Health, technologies and politics in post-soviet settings: navigating uncertainties. Palgrave Macmillan, p 225

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Behrends A, Reyna SP, Schlee G (2011) Crude domination: an anthropology of oil. Berghahn, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Blaser M (2013) Ontological politics and the people in spite of Europe: towards a conversation on political ontology. Curr Anthropol 54(5):547–568

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blaser M (2019) On the properly political (disposition for the) Anthropocene. Anthropol Theory 19(1):74–94

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bohme SR (2014) Toxic injustice: a transnational history of exposure and struggle. University of California Press, Berkeley

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bond D (2018) Environment: critical reflections on the concept, SSS occasional papers 64. Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown K (2013) Plutopia: nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great soviet and American plutonium disasters. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown K (2019) Learning to read the great Chernobyl acceleration: literacy in the more-than-human landscapes. Curr Anthropol 60(20):198–208

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brown K (2020) The pandemic is not a natural disaster: The coronavirus isn’t just a public health crisis. It’s an ecological one. The New Yorker: Annals of Inquiry, June 2021. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-pandemic-is-not-a-natural-disaster

  • Carson R (1962) Silent spring. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Castree N (2003) Commodifying what nature? Prog Hum Geogr 27(3):273–297

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chakrabarty D (2009) The climate of history: four theses. Crit Inq 32(2):197–222

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chen M (2012) Animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Clark N, Szerszynski B (2021) Planetary social thought: the Anthropocene challenge to the social sciences. Polity Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Cram S (2016) Living in dose: nuclear work and the politics of permissible exposure. Publ Cult 28(3):519–539

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crosby AW (1972) Colombian exchange: the biological and cultural consequences of 1492. Greenwood, Westport

    Google Scholar 

  • Crumley CJ (2017) Historical ecology and the study of landscape. Landsc Res 42(S1):565–573

    Google Scholar 

  • De la Cadena M (2015) Earth beings: ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • De la Cadena M, Blaser M (2018) Pluriverse: proposals for a world of many worlds. In: De la Cadena M, Blaser M (eds) A world of many worlds. Duke University Press, Durham, pp 1–22

    Google Scholar 

  • Descola P (2014) Modes of being and forms of predication. HAU J Ethnograp Theory 4(1):271–280

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ferguson J (1999) Expectations of modernity: myths and meaning of urban life on the Zambian copperbelt. University of California Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Ficek RE (2019) Cattle, capital, colonization: tracking creatures of the Anthropocene in and out of human projects. Curr Anthropol 60(20):S260–S271

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fiske SJ, Crate SA, Crumley CL, Galvin K, Lazrus H, Lucero L, Oliver-Smith AL, Orlove B, Strauss S, Wilk R (eds) (2014) Changing the atmosphere: Anthropology and climate change. Final report of the AAA Global Climate Change Task Force. AAA, Arlington

    Google Scholar 

  • Fortun K (2009) Advocacy after Bhopal: environmentalism, disaster, new global orders. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault M (1980) Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972–77. Vintage

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault M (2003) Society must be defended: lectures at the college de France 1975–76. Picador, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Fraser N (2000) Rethinking recognition. New Left Review 7:107–120

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilberthorpe E, Rajak D (2017) The anthropology of extraction: critical perspectives on the resource curse. J Dev Stud 53(2):186–204

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Golub A (2014) Leviathans at the gold mine: creating indigenous and corporate actors in Papua New Guinea. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Gudynas E (2015) Extractivismos. Ecología, economía y política de un modo de entender el desarrollo y la naturaleza. CEDIB, Cochabamba

    Google Scholar 

  • Guzmán-Gallegos M (2019a) Controlling abandoned oil installations: ruination and ownership in northern Peruvian Amazonia. In: Ødegaard CV, Andia JJR (eds) Indigenous life projects and Extractivism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp 53–75

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Guzmán-Gallegos M (2019b) Philippe Descola: Thinking with the Achuar and the Runa in Amazonia, in special issue of Ethnos., Guest editors: Lien M. & Pálsson G., Ethnography Beyond the Human: The ‘Other-than Human in Ethnographic Work, special issue of Ethnos, https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1580759

  • Guzmán-Gallegos M (2021) Modes of knowing: perceptibility of toxicity and living in the Ecuadorian Amazonia. Anthropol Today 37(4):23–26

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway DJ (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hébert K (2016) Chronicle of a disaster foretold: scientific risk assessment, public participation and the politics of imperilment in Bristol Bay. J R Anthropol Inst 22(S1):108–126

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hecht G (2018) Interscalar vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On waste, temporality and violence. Cult Anthropol 33(1):109–141

    Google Scholar 

  • High MM (2012) The cultural logics of illegality: living outside the law in the Mongolian gold mines. In: Change in democratic Mongolia. Brill, pp 249–270

    Google Scholar 

  • Hilson G, Hilson A, Maconachie R, McQuilken J, Goumandakoye H (2017) Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in sub-Saharan Africa: re-conceptualizing formalization and ‘illegal’ activity. Geoforum 83:80–90

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jacka JK (2015) Alchemy in the rainforest: politics, ecology, and resilience in a New Guinea mining area. Duke University Press, Durham

    Google Scholar 

  • Jacka JK (2018) The anthropology of mining: the social and environmental impacts of resource extraction in the mineral age. Annu Rev Anthropol 47:61–77

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kirsch S (2014) Mining capitalism: the relationship between corporations and their critics. University of California Press, Oakland

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Knowles SG (2018) Deferred maintenance: slow disaster and American infrastructures. In: Davis Center seminar (Lecture). Princeton University, Princeton, 23 February

    Google Scholar 

  • Kohn E (2013) How forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. University of California Press, California

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kolen J, de Smet E, de Theije M (2018) “We are all Garimpeiros:” settlement and movement in communities of the Tapajós small-scale gold mining reserve. J Latin Am Caribbean Anthropol 23(1):169–188

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kuletz V (1998) The tainted desert: environmental and social ruin in the American West. Routledge, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Leifsen E (2017) Wasteland by design: dispossession by contamination and the struggle for water justice in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Extracting Ind Soc 4:344–335

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leifsen (2020) The socionature that neo-extractivism can see: practicing redistribution and compensation around large-scale mining in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Polit Geogr 82:1–11

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lerner S (2010) Sacrifice zones: the front lines of toxic chemical exposure in the United States. MIT Press, Massachusetts

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Li F (2009) Documenting accountability: environmental impact assessment in a Peruvian mining project. PoLAR 32(2):218–236

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li F (2015) Unearthing conflict: corporate mining, activism, and expertise in Peru. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Liboiron M (2016) Redefining pollution and action: the matter of plastics. J Mater Cult 21(1):87–110

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liboiron M, Tironi M, Calvillo N (2018) Toxic politics: acting in a permanently polluted world. Soc Stud Sci 48(3):331–349

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Little PE (1999) Environment and environmentalisms in anthropological research: facing a new millennium. Annu Rev Anthropol 28:253–284

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lyons KM (2018) Chemical warfare in Colombia, evidentiary ecologies and senti-actuando practices of justice. Soc Stud Sci 48(3):414–437

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Martinez-Alier J (2003) The environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and valuation. Edward Elgar Publications

    Google Scholar 

  • Mathews AS (2018) Landscapes and throughscapes in Italian forest worlds: thinking dramatically about the Anthropocene. Cult Anthropol 33(3):386–414

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mathews AS, Barnes J (2016) Prognosis: vision of environmental futures. J R Anthropol Inst 22(S1):9–26

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McNeill J R (2010) The state of the field of environmental history. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 35:345–374

    Google Scholar 

  • Michaels D (2008) Doubt is their product. How industry’s assault on science threatens your health. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Murphy M (2006) Environmental politics, technoscience, and women workers. Duke University Press, Durham

    Google Scholar 

  • Murphy M (2008) Chemical regimes of living. Environ Hist 13(4):695–703

    Google Scholar 

  • Murphy M (2013) Distributed reproduction, chemical violence, and latency. Scholar Fem Online 11(3). Retrieved from: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/life-un-ltd-feminism-bioscience-race/distributed-reproduction-chemical-violence-and-latency/

  • Murphy M (2017) Alterlife and decolonial chemical relations. Cult Anthropol 32(4):494–503

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nading A (2020) Living in a toxic world. Annu Rev Anthropol 49:209–224

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nixon R (2011) Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Orlove BS (1980) Ecological anthropology. Annu Rev Anthropol 9:235–273

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Orr Y, Lansing JS, Dove MR (2015) Environmental anthropology: systemic perspectives. Annu Rev Anthropol 44:153–168

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peluso N (2018) Entangled territories in small-scale gold mining frontiers: labor practices, property, and secrets in Indonesian gold country. World Dev 101:400–416

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peluso NL, Watts M (eds) (2001) Violent environments. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

    Google Scholar 

  • Perrault T (2013) Dispossession by accumulation? Mining, water and the nature of enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano. Antipode 45(5):1050–1069

    Google Scholar 

  • Petryna A (2002) Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Povinelli EA (2016) Gentologies: A requiem to late liberalism. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rogers D (2014) Oil and anthropology. Annu Rev Anthropol 44:365–380

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sawyer S (2004) Crude chronicles: indigenous politics, multinational oil and neoliberalism in Ecuador. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Sawyer S (2015) Crude contamination: law, science and indeterminacy in Ecuador and beyond. In: Appel H, Mason A, Watts M (eds) Subterranean estates: life worlds of oil and gas. Cornell University Press, pp 126–146

    Google Scholar 

  • Schlosberg D (2013) Theorizing environmental justice. Theories, movements, and nature. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Scoones I (1999) New ecology and the social sciences: what prospects for a fruitful engagement. Annu Rev Anthropol 28:479–507

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shapiro N, Kirksey E (2017) Chemo-ethnography: an introduction. Cult Anthropol 32(4):481–493

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sullivan S (2013) After the green rush? Biodiversity offsets, uranium power and the ‘calculus of causalities’ in greening growth. Hum Geogr 6(1):80–101

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Svampa M (2016) Debates Latinoamericanos: indianismo, desarrollo, dependencia, populismo. Edhasa, Buenos Aires

    Google Scholar 

  • The Guardian (2021) Australian government must protect young people from climate crisis harm, court declares. The Guardian, 8th July: Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/08/australian-government-must-protect-young-people-from-climate-crisis-harm-court-declares

  • Tironi M (2018) Intimate activism: hypo-interventions and the politics of potentiality in toxic environments. Soc Stud Sci 48(3):438–455

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tschirhart C, Handschumacher P, Laffly D, Bénéfice E (2012) Resource management, networks and spatial contrasts in human mercury contamination along the Rio Beni (Bolivian Amazon). Hum Ecol 42:511–523

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tsing AL (2013) More-than-human sociality: a call for critical description. In: Hastrup K (ed) Anthropology and nature. Routledge, New York, pp 27–42

    Google Scholar 

  • Tsing AL (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Tsing AL, Swanson HA, Gan E, Bubandt N (eds) (2017) Arts of living on a damaged planet. Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

    Google Scholar 

  • Tsing AL, Mathews AS, Bubandt N (2019) Patchy Anthropocene: landscape structure, multispecies history and the retooling of anthropology. Curr Anthropol 60(20):S186–S196

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tuck E (2009) Suspending damage: a letter to communities. Harv Educ Rev 79(3):409–428

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Verbrugge B (2015) The economic logic of persistent informality: artisanal and small-scale mining in the southern Philippines. Dev Chang 46(5):1023–1046

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Viveiros de Castro E (2004) Exchanging perspectives: the transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies. Common Knowl 10(3):463–484

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Voyles TB (2015) Wastelanding: legacies of uranium mining in Navajo country. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Walker JS (2011) Toxic archipelago: a history of industrial disease in Japan. University of Washington Press, Seattle

    Google Scholar 

  • Watts M (2013) Blood oil: the anatomy of petro-insurgency in the Niger delta, Nigeria. In: Behrends A, Reyna SP, Schlee G (eds) Crude domination: an anthropology of oil. Berghahn, New York, pp 49–80

    Google Scholar 

  • Weizman E (2017) Forensic architecture: violence at the threshold of detectability. Zone Books, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. VID Specialized University, Oslo, Norway

    María A. Guzmán-Gallegos

  2. Department of International Environment and Development Studies, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Aas, Norway

    Esben Leifsen

Authors
  1. María A. Guzmán-Gallegos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Esben Leifsen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to María A. Guzmán-Gallegos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    David McCallum

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Guzmán-Gallegos, M.A., Leifsen, E. (2022). Anthropology, the Environment, and Environmental Crisis. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_18-1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_18-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-4106-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-4106-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation