Humanistic Environmental Studies and Global Indigeneities

Abstract

The Environmental Humanities constitute an emerging transdisciplinary enterprise that is becoming a key part of the liberal arts and an indispensable component of the twenty-first-century university. Bringing together scholars from a number of environmentally related fields in the humanities and allied social sciences-including Ecocriticism (Literature and Environment studies), Environmental History, Environmental Philosophy, Environmental Anthropology, and Human Geography-the Environmental Humanities has, in the past decade, become a substantial collaborative scholarly endeavor. Journals including Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (est. 2014) and Environmental Humanities (est. 2012), as well as book series such as Routledge Environmental Humanities, are providing an increasing number of venues for scholars in the humanities and related social sciences to introduce new approaches for grappling with the world's environmental challenges. For their part, initiatives such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities for the Environment (http://hfe-observatories.org), which includes the African Observatory,

Shaping Landscapes: Thinking On the Interactions between People and Nature in Inter- and Postdisciplinary Narratives

“…In turn the emergence of the environmental humanities, which connect different fields of human and social sciences in order to address environmental issues and paradigms, is part of the growing willingness to engage with the environment from a new perspective. It represents an effort to enrich environmental research with a broader conceptual vocabulary and to rethink the exceptionalism of the human being (e.g., Rose et al 2012;Iovino et al 2018;Thornber 2016;Little 2017;Holm and Brennan 2018;Roque et al 2020). The environmental humanities, joined with a new landscape approach, will make it possible to go beyond regional and national portraits and consider new transcontinental and global scenarios far beyond westernized categories, at the same time revaluing traditional and indigenous worldviews (Sepie 2017;Emmanouilidou and Toska 2020).…”

“…Additionally, humanistic environmental studies focus largely on different cultural products ranging from architecture, literature, poetry and nonfiction writing, drama, music, visual arts, films, and other media, to eco-criticism, politics, history, religion, philosophy, medicine, social and natural sciences (Thornber 2016;Roque et al 2020). These studies stem from the work of scholars with different backgrounds and stimulate cultural responses to answer today's challenges.…”

“…These studies stem from the work of scholars with different backgrounds and stimulate cultural responses to answer today's challenges. Therefore, bringing together scholars and methodologies from different scientific areas makes us aware of the diverse perspectives on human/non-human relationships (Thornber 2016) and of how these interactions have shaped and changed landscapes according to different perceptions and realities (Pasca et al 2019).…”

The Geopolitics of Protected Areas

“…Protected areas have played a critical role in the geopolitical redefinition of the "self" and the "other" (Ramutsindela, 2004) for various indigenous groups, while being instrumental for transnational actors such as conservationists, forest companies, and successive neoliberal and indigenist governments of Bolivia. The Bolivian geopolitics of protected areas demonstrates the versatility of essentialized notions of indigeneity as an economic and political instrument against those in power (Thornber 2016).…”

Creative and Sustainable Tourism: The Case of Ainu in Japan

“…In this scenario, it should be stressed that endemic race discrimination and territorial political issues represent challenges which are shaping the abovementioned situation. For instance, in 2004 Japan applied for Shiretoko, a traditional Ainu town in Hokkaido, to be designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (Thornber, 2016), once again excluding any Ainu representation from the research and application process, which is revealing of a complete separation between the aims of the Japanese and those of the Ainu; the Japanese see Ainu tourism as a potential economic asset, which excludes the Ainu from any control over their own culture and social values.…”