• Course Overview
  • Week 1: Course overview and approaches
  • Week 2: Anthropocene
  • Week 3: Forests and statecraft
  • Week 4: Climate change
  • Week 5: Media and environment
  • Week 6: Globalization
  • Week 7: Capitalism and plantations
  • Week 8: Conservation
  • Week 9: Dispossession and protected areas
  • Week 10: More-than-human entanglements
  • Week 11: Space and place
  • Week 12: Waste
  • Week 13: Toxicity
  • Week 14: Presentations

ANTH481: Environmental Ethnographies: Asia

Week 1: Course overview and approaches

Reading and media

  • Yeh, Emily T. “Forest Claims, Conflicts and Commodification: The Political Ecology of Tibetan Mushroom-Harvesting Villages in Yunnan Province, China.” The China Quarterly 161 (2000): 264–78.
  • Zee, Jerry C. 2017. “Holding Patterns: Sand and Political Time at China’s Desert Shores.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (2): 215–241. doi:10.14506/ca32.2.06
  • Media: Short film – Adaptation: Floating Gardens of Bangladesh
  • Media: Podcast - Qasa’s Farm - Building Resilience in Bangladesh: Costing the Earth

Tuesday agenda

  • Syllabus and course overview

Thursday agenda

  • Approaches to reading and media
  • Example media discussion

Assignments due

Recommended

  • Recommended: Mueggler, Erik. 1998. “The Poetics of Grief and the Price of Hemp in Southwest China.” The Journal of Asian Studies 57 (4): 979–1008.
  • Recommended: West, Paige. 2005. “Translation, Value, and Space: Theorizing an Ethnographic and Engaged Environmental Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 107 (4): 632–642.