User:Carter4444/Environmental anthropology

Environmental anthropology is a sub-discipline of anthropology that examines the complex relationships between humans and the environments which they inhabit. This takes many shapes and forms, whether it be examining the hunting/gathering patterns of humans tens of thousands of years ago, or how modern human societies are adapting to climate change and other anthropogenically-driven environmental issues. This sect of anthropology is considered to be emerging, as is an academic desire to better understand the culture-environment relation on a sociological level.

This sub-discipline is ever-changing because it must evolve to satiate the needs and appropriately address issues from the state and region level all the way down to complex communities, hence must uses a multitude of different approaches when considering a problem. According to the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA),

"'Environmental anthropology is particularly effective in relating to and gaining understanding of cultural diversity in community settings, and intercultural/intersect oral conflict, thus lending itself to applied endeavors that involve collaboration among diverse interest groups for the common good.'"

Environmental anthropologists aim to utilize their understanding of the culture at hand in order to gain as emic (an insider's understanding of the culture in question) a perspective as possible when dealing with these situations. These type of situations are ideal within the field and sheds positive light on a field that is criticized for refusing to accept this perspective.

Early Days of Research
The establishment of this particular sub-discipline of anthropology can be credited to Julian Steward, a cultural ecologist who studied cultural change. Stewart's work revolved heavily around system theories in the sixties, a method which acknowledged recurrence in a cultural setting. His efforts to define culture were based upon topography, climate, and resources and their accessibility. This characterization has since been widely criticized for narrowly assuming the state of societies as static.

Though Stewart is credited, Marcel Mauss's work establishing systems theories created the framework for environmental anthropology to subsist. Mauss, an anthropologist himself, released Seasonal Variation of Eskimo, was one of the first examples of a concerted effort to adopt a sociological approach to the analysis of a singular society.

Climate Change
There has been a renewed interest in recent years to reexamine cultural-environmental relationships across the globe due to the looming threats of land development, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity, all of which are, in large part, due to climate change.

While sociological research on climate change is emerging and ongoing, there is a global push to recognize global communities in the context of their ecologies, as well as their places in history. After all, throughout history, the natural climate of specific areas have allowed for certain nations to flourish, whether it be in the Fertile Crescent or in the Indus River Valley thousands of years ago.

Cultural Diversity
There is a renewed focus of environmental anthropology on cultural variation and diversity. Such factors like environmental disasters (floods, earthquakes, frost), migrations, cost & benefit ratio, contact/ associations, external ideas (trade/ latent capitalism boom), along with internal, independent logic and inter-connectivity's impact now were observed. Roy A. Rappaport and Hawkes, Hill, and O'Connell's use of Pyke's optimal foraging theory for the latter's work are some examples of this new focus.

This perspective was based on general equilibriums and criticized for not addressing the variety of responses an organisms can have, such as "loyalty, solidarity, friendliness, and sanctity" and possible "incentives or inhibitors" in relations to behavior. Rappaport, often referred to as a reductionist in his cultural studies methods, acknowledges, "The social unit is not always well defined " exhibiting another flaw in this perspective, obfuscation of aspects of analyze and designated terms.