皇家华人

Module Content

This postgraduate option module provides a thorough grounding in current themes and debates in more-than-human anthropology and the posthumanities. The module introduces students to a range of ideas and approaches, both historical and contemporary, in the anthropological study and theorisation of human-environmental relationships in the current period of accelerated environmental change termed the Anthropocene. The course explores recent attempts to incorporate nonhuman agents (animals, plants, fungi, microbes etc.) into anthropological analysis in meaningful and experimental ways. Methodological and theoretical approaches to 鈥渁n anthropology beyond the human鈥� will be critically evaluated, including multispecies ethnography, more-than-human anthropology, political ecology, posthumanist theory, and eco-feminist critique (and including prominent scholars such as Tsing, Haraway, Latour, Ingold, Kirksey, and Kohn). The module will be convened and taught by Dr Lewis Daly but, depending on year, may also include guest sessions from lecturers across the department working on human-environmental interactions in various ethnographic contexts and from a variety of anthropological perspectives.

Indicative topics include:

• Nature, Culture, Environment
• Anthropology Beyond the Human
• Anthropology in the Anthropocene
• Sustainability and Environmental Justice
• Energy and Climate Change
• The Blue Economy
• Embodying the Environment
• Political Ecology of Conservation
• Ethnobotany and Human-Plant Relations
• Ethnozoology and Human-Animal Relations

Learning Outcomes

• Students will gain an understanding of a range of relevant approaches including more-than-human anthropology, including multispecies ethnography, political ecology, ethnoecology, posthumanist theory, and Anthropocene anthropology;
• Students will attain an understanding of established and emerging theories for exploring human-environment relationships, as well as for conducting ethnographic research across species boundaries and with nonhuman subjects (animals, plants, fungi, microbes etc.);
• Students will receive a thorough empirical grounding in relevant ethnographic case studies from a broad range of contexts globally, including rural and urban contexts across the Global North and South;
• Students will learn how to apply these critical academic theories and approaches to real-world situations involving climate change and the environmental crisis;
• Students will develop skills in library-based research and anthropological writing, including building an argument based on a synthesis of theoretical and ethnographic materials.

Indicative Teaching Delivery听

Teaching for this module consists of one two-hour seminar per week. Seminars consist of a lecture followed by a group discussion based on set literature.

Additional Information

Assessment for the module is across two summative essay-based assignments (one worth 25%, the other 75%). There are no formative assignments.

Representative readings include:

• Hastrup, Kirsten (ed.) (2014) Anthropology and Nature. Routledge.
• Tsing, Anna et al. (eds.) (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press.
• Brightman, Marc and Jerome Lewis (eds.) (2017) The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Kirksey, Eben and Stefan Helmreich (2013) The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545鈥�76.
• Ingold, Tim (2013) Anthropology Beyond Humanity. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 38(3): 5鈥�23.
• Kohn, Eduardo (2013) How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press.
• Tsing, Anna (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
• Govindrajan, Radhika (2018) Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India鈥檚 Central Himalayas. University of Chicago Press.
• Mathur, Nayanika (2021) Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene. University of Chicago Press.