Intersectional Ecologies: Reimagining Anthropology and Environment

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Black feminist scholars, this review suggests “intersectional ecologies” as a method for critically engaging anthropology's relationship with the environment across subfields, intellectual traditions, and authorial politics. Intersectional ecologies helps us trace how a broad coalition of scholars represents and accounts for the environment within shifting planetary arrangements of bodies, sites, practices, and technologies. Our basic argument in this article is that because the environment is a malleable and contingent social fact, it matters who is analyzing its formation and how they are analyzing it. To this end, the scholarship we review comes from a diverse array of authors. The three themes we have identified—materiality, knowledge, and subjectivity—are central to bringing this diverse scholarship into dialogue while putting into focus anthropology's uneven commitments to the environment as a concept. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Carrier bag storytelling with coastal Kenyan families: sharing food, illustrations, and knowledge for tangible environmental justice impacts

“…As has been shown in many fields, access to the means of production is a precondition of power in scientific research (Traweek, 1988). In Kenya, access to environmental data and the naturecultures of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) peoples are preconditions of power in conservative sustainability science (Subramaniam, 2014;Vaughn et al, 2021)-and international geopolitics. Though the academic field changes, the balance of power that underpins it remains the same.…”

“…The roots of this movement in research can be traced back to the reflexive questions of Science and Technology Studies (Latour, 1987), but have been occurring more covertly (i.e., in the humanities, arts, and other more liberal disciplines) for longer (Freire, 1968;la paperson, 2017). As these critical thinkers have studied, we cannot disentangle our physical, social, and political ecologies, and so a just response requires that we subvert power structures by freeing the bounds of knowledge and pursuing justice through any means necessary for the benefit of the diversity of life on earth (Subramaniam, 2014;Haraway, 2016;Vaughn et al, 2021). Proponents of interdisciplinary thought and speculative futures have highlighted this danger by commenting on how "ghostly" the connections between natural phenomenon and human social worlds can be (Subramaniam, 2014).…”

Drought Terroirs: Debating anthropological territorialities in the study of climate change and environmental disasters

“…Tsing et al (2019) recognise these anthropological studies of globalisation as a source of inspiration for more recent reflections on the Anthropocene. In that line, cursorily recalling these debates, particularly in their methodological unfolding, paves the way to arguing how the notion of 'drought terroirs' is useful for an 'anthropological awareness of the Anthropocene' (Moore 2016: 28), one in which we acknowledge multiple, more than human agencies -from the farmers' tractor capabilities to the salinity of the soil, the taste of the capim (grass), the size and status of the Ngombe or Barotse ox, or the inclination of the Oncocua mountain -across different forms of hierarchy and intersection (Vaughn et al 2021).…”

Beyond the Limits: Medicine, Healing, and Medical Anthropology

“…As critical recent interventions by groups like #CiteBlackWomen (Cite Black Women Collective 2022) and The Ancestors Project (Pouchet 2020) have demonstrated, these citational practices have a politics; one that frequently excludes and marginalizes (Smith and Garrett‐Scott 2021; Vaughn et al. 2021). Changing our citational practices is one way to disrupt conventional scholarly practices within our discipline, dismantling the norms that reproduce patriarchy and white supremacy (Mariner 2022; Ogden 2021: 130–32; Yates‐Doerr 2020).…”