New Directions in Anthropology and Environment

Carole L. Crumley is professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a member of the Executive Board of the Carolina Environmental Program. She is secretary of the American Anthropological Association, and past president and founding member of the AAA Anthropology and Environment Section.

• IntroductionPart One: Defining Environment and Interpreting NatureChapter 1: Nature in the MakingChapter 2: Linking Language and the Environment: A Coevolutionary PerspectiveChapter 3: Cognitive Anthropology and the EnvironmentChapter 4: Archaeology and Environmental ChangeChapter 5: Interdisciplinary Borrowing in Environmental Anthropology, and the Critique of Modern SciencePart Two: Beliefs, Values and Environmental JusticeChapter 6: Political Ecology and Constructions of Environment in Biological AnthropologyChapter 7: Anthropology and Environmental Justice: Analysts, Activists, Mediators, and Trouble MakersChapter 8: The Politics of Ethnographic Presence: Sites and Topologies in the Study of Transnational MovementsChapter 9: Do Anthropologists Need Religion and Vice Versa: Adventures and Dangers in Spiritual EcologyPart Three: Application and EngagementChapter 10: Historical Ecology: Landscapes of Change in the Pacific NorthwestChapter 11: Getting the Dirt Out: An Anthropological Approach to the Culture and Political Economy of Urban Land in the United StatesChapter 12: Environmental Anthropology at SeaChapter 13: The Discourse of Environmental Partnerships

As review articles, all the essays are informative and potentially useful, pointing the way towards work that could be followed up in more detail. In this sense, they serve their purpose as introductions to environmental anthropology and its various subfields. In particular, Tsing's analysis of the relations among environmental history, science studies, political ecology, and cultural anthropology in the creation of particular strands of interdisciplinary scholarship is insightful, especially when paired with Dove's demonstration of and reflections on interdisciplinary borrowing in ecological anthropology.... [This book] highlights some important developments in the field, and it forcefully advocates anthropology's engagement in environmental discourse. Some chapters, those of Sponsel, Dove, and Ingerson, in particular, will become central to my course reading lists, while some others might be recommended as useful illustrations.