Nature/Culture/Power
Graduate Seminar Last Taught: Spring 2025
To say that “nature” is a pivotal category of the contemporary moment is to profoundly understate the case. Ecology, environmental degradation, and climate change have become the watchwords of contemporary politics. The always tenuous and constructed boundaries between “nature” and “culture” now appear profoundly eroded. How do, and how have, thinkers in the environmental social sciences engaged with these issues? And what do ethnographies at the intersections of nature, culture, and power contribute to our understandings of both epochal and everyday environmental change? This graduate seminar explores these questions and the rich theoretical and methodological debates opened in environmental anthropology and related fields. It traces debates over nature, culture, and power back through cultural ecology, political ecology, agrarian studies, and science and technology studies. It traces them forwards through ethnographies of the socio-natures of sustainability, water, race and ethnicity, resistance, material politics, and human/animal/plant relations.
To say that “nature” is a pivotal category of the contemporary moment is to profoundly understate the case. Ecology, environmental degradation, and climate change have become the watchwords of contemporary politics. The always tenuous and constructed boundaries between “nature” and “culture” now appear profoundly eroded. How do, and how have, thinkers in the environmental social sciences engaged with these issues? And what do ethnographies at the intersections of nature, culture, and power contribute to our understandings of both epochal and everyday environmental change? This graduate seminar explores these questions and the rich theoretical and methodological debates opened in environmental anthropology and related fields. It traces debates over nature, culture, and power back through cultural ecology, political ecology, agrarian studies, and science and technology studies. It traces them forwards through ethnographies of the socio-natures of sustainability, water, race and ethnicity, resistance, material politics, and human/animal/plant relations.
