Books
portant role to play in generating more environmentally
Anthropology and Environmental
Engagement
kay milton
School of Anthropological Studies, Queen’s University
Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, U.K.
(k.milton@qub.ac.uk). 29 viii 01
New Directions in Anthropology and Environment:
Intersections. Edited by Carole L. Crumley with A.
Elizabeth van Deventer and Joseph J. Fletcher.
Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2001. 308 pp.
Teachers of courses on anthropology and environment
have long been in need of a comprehensive text through
which to introduce this field to students, so it was with
some anticipation that I approached Crumley and col-
leagues’ collections. The book is divided into three sec-
tions, each containing four or five essays. The first sec-
tion, through contributions by Tsing, Maffi, Kempton,
Hardesty and Fowler, and Dove, addresses cultural un-
derstandings of nature and environment. These chapters
consider how various analytical approaches, used in dif-
ferent fields (environmental history, political ecology,
cognitive anthropology, archaeology of landscape, and so
on), can throw light on human understandings of envi-
ronment. The second section, which contains essays by
Leatherman and Thomas, Johnston, Brosius, and Spon-
sel, considers how social and cultural factors, including
political actions, globalization, and religion, shape hu-
man—environment relations and, all too often, create
and foster injustice. These essays all advocate greater
attention to culture in the search for understanding of
and solutions to so-called environmental problems. The
final section, with essays by Winthrop, Ingerson, McCay,
and Poncelet, looks more closely at case studies and eth-
nographies and their lessons for the application of an-
thropological perspectives.
All the essays are, to varying degrees, review articles,
summarizing research in a particular subfield of envi-
ronmental anthropology in recent years and in some
cases over a much longer period. Most of them also sug-
gest future directions for research or for applications of
research or draw attention to particularly interesting or
useful developments. Each essay thus combines sub-
stantive knowledge of a body of work with a commit-
ment to particular lines of inquiry or to causes such as
environmental equality and justice. The authors are
united in their conviction that anthropology has an im-
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from their authors.
520
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benign ways of living which might secure a better future
for humankind and the rest of the natural world.
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 in-
terdisciplinary scholarship is insightful, especially when
paired with Dove’s demonstration of and reflections on
interdisciplinary borrowing in ecological anthropology.
Several essays, especially when taken together (for in-
stance, those by Tsing, Leatherman and Thomas, Bro-
sius, and Ingerson), stimulate reflection on the relation-
ship between political ecology and political economy.
Others (for instance, those by Winthrop, Dove, and Har-
desty and Fowler) emphasize the temporal perspective,
asking how knowledge of the past makes sense of the
present and vice versa. Against this general endorsement,
however, I find myself asking three questions.
First, and most important given the book’s explicit
purpose, can this collection of essays capture the imag-
ination of students and turn them on to environmental
anthropology? I have no doubt that it will inform and
stimulate some of those whose inclinations already lie
in this direction, but I wonder whether it can do more
than encourage those already converted. The only con-
tribution that seems to have been written with this pur-
pose in mind is Sponsel’s on the rewards of studying and,
perhaps, personally engaging with spiritual ecology.
From the opening words—“Read this chapter at your
own risk: you might get hooked on religion!”—this essay
entices and challenges more openly than the others do.
It could be argued that the subject matter of environ-
mental anthropology is enticing enough in itself, but in
a world of countless competing interests we have to
strive to attract people to what matters to us. Most of
these essays seem to me to rely too heavily on the subject
matter to speak for itself. The reviews and suggestions
they contain could have been written for an academic
journal or for a conference of already knowledgeable
scholars. Minds new to the field, as students’ minds gen-
erally are, would benefit from more infectious
enthusiasm.
Second, is there anything genuinely new about the
lines of research these essays suggest? The word “new”
in a book title is always a hostage to fortune, challenging
reviewers to list all the research that already does what-
ever is being advocated. As I read, in Kempton’s essay,
of the need to understand indigenous wisdom and prac-
tice, I thought of Paul Richards’s work on Mende agri-

culture, Vandana Shiva’s on indigenous forestry in India,
and Darrell Posey’s on Kayapo ecology, among others.
As I read Brosius’s critique of anthropology’s traditional
concern with the local—“To assume that the topology
of simple locality has salience any longer is not merely
naive, but irresponsible”—I struggled to think of any an-
thropologist colleagues who still made this assumption.
Indeed, it has been more or less obsolete since the early
1990s, when Appadurai and Hannerz, among others,
were emphasizing what many of us had already
grasped—that cultures never have been discrete units.
Making exaggerated claims to “newness” is not a crime,
and, given that such claims can always be argued for as
well as against, it might not even be an error of judge-
ment. But it raises false hopes, attracts criticism, and is
easily avoided. This volume demonstrates that environ-
mental anthropology has become such a huge field of
inquiry that no one scholar or group of scholars can be
expected to know it all and, therefore, to know when
something is genuinely new.
Finally, how did this volume come into being? On this,
the introduction is annoyingly oblique. We are told that
it is a product of the Anthropology and Environment
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Volume 43, Number 3, June 2002 F 521
Section of the American Anthropological Association
and that most of the contributors participated in that
Section’s inaugural session in 1996. It is also clear that
some of the chapters have been developed from original
presentations to that session. But what was the vision
that drove the volume, and how was it planned? Are we
to assume that it was five years in being developed from
original papers (in which case, the claim to be presenting
“New Directions in Anthropology and Environment” be-
comes even less credible)?
This is not quite the book that teachers of courses on
anthropology and environment have been waiting for,
but it goes some way towards filling that niche. It high-
lights some important developments in the field, and it
forcefully advocates anthropology’s engagement in en-
vironmental discourse. Some chapters, those of Sponsel,
Dove, and Ingerson, in particular, will become central to
my course reading lists, while some others might be rec-
ommended as useful illustrations. As a whole, the col-
lection satisfies in some important ways but disappoints
in relatively minor ones, which is, after all, as much as
most academic writers can hope to achieve.