ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1 MOD. 1

The course is primarily addressed to students of the Master Degree in Environmental Humanities. The participation of students of other programmes can be authorised upon agreement with the instructors.
The course is taught in English.

The course aims at providing the students with the necessary skills to look at the relationship between human beings, society, and the environment through the perspective of social and cultural anthropology. Moreover, they will acquire the basic tools and concepts in order to plan an ethnographic research on related issues. Finally, through group and individual presentations they will enhance their ability for critical and independent thinking.

This is a required/elective course offered to students enrolled in the Master Degree in the Environmental Humanities. No prior background is required. The first module grants the access to the second module of the course.

The relevance of human action in determining the environmental transformations of the last centuries has been highlighted through various attempts to define our era according to a predominant social or political agent: terms like “anthropocene”, “plantatiocene” or “capitalocene” have thus been proposed. Other authors have emphasized the relationship between different species, and between them and humans, and how the deterioration of this relationship has led to the dramatic environmental changes underway, coining expressions such as “chthulucene”, “tangles” or “geontologies”. Another line of studies has investigated the way in which scientific research and technological innovation have changed these relationships in irreversible ways, generating new challenges, including the survival of mankind and life on earth. One of the specific tasks of anthropology is to move across contexts and scales, exploring the singularity of local relationships between human beings and the environment, taking into account the mutual influence of commercial, financial and ideological processes.
Through the study of ethnographic cases from different geographical areas, the course aims to analyse the interaction of environmental, social, cultural and political factors in determining the current relationships between human beings and the environment, the ecosystemic transformations induced by contemporary processes and the possibilities to respond to the challenges of the future.

FIRST MODULE
After a brief introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, the first module of the course will introduce students to the main perspectives framing globalization and its dynamics in an anthropological perspective. In particular, the processes of time-space compression, growth escalation, and human pressure over nature will be addressed. Particular attention will be devoted to notions like ‘modernity’, ‘development’, ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘degrowth’ and to the phenomenon of global mobility of goods, capitals and people. The second half of the module will propose the study of ethnographic cases of human intervention over the environment, focusing in particular the African continent, with the aim of identifying both situations of risk and attempts to envisage alternative possibilities.

First module:
Ingold T. 'Anthropology. Why it matters'. Polity, 2018.
Eriksen, T.H. Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. Pluto Press, 2016.

Attendance is not mandatory, but attending students are required to follow and participate in classes, intervening and animating the debate on the topics under consideration. Starting from the second part of the course, attending students are required to introduce the topic of the day by presenting, in small groups, a review of one article/chapter suggested by the instructor, encouraging questions and generating a discussion among colleagues. The class will then proceed by exploring the questions raised in the presentation and debate, moving progressively toward theoretical analysis.
The final exam is constituted by an oral examination, based, for attending students, on the two books cited above. Non attending students will add to the programme all the articles presented during classes (available in moodle).

The course is taught through lectures, audio-visual materials, class discussion and group presentations of selected articles.

English

The instructors of the two modules receive students in their office, upon appointment previously arranged by email.

written and oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Climate change and energy" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development