Approximately ten years ago, when I was in the US Navy, I visited Greece and Italy. The port visits there were short and sweet, and did not provide nearly enough time to see all of the archaeological sites. However, in Naples, I decided to go on the group tour visit to Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius: this was a life-changing experience for me. I did not know that I had an interest in anthropology then. I did not even know that anthropology was connected with archaeology, which had been passion for me ever since it had been glorified
Although conflict between groups – over land and resources, animals, habitats and important cultural sites – is a common theme in environmental anthropology, I don’t wish to give the impression that this subdisciplinary area is all about conflict. There are many strands of research that are simply concerned to gain a deeper understanding about how human beings interact with their environments. For example, analyses by Barbara Bender (1993), Chris Tilley (1994), Jeff Malpas (1999) and Rodney Giblett (1996) illuminate the processes through which people make cultural landscapes and locate meaning in them.9 Kay Milton’s research with
environmental groups led her to consider closely how humans develop emotional attachments to places, or to ‘nature’ (2002, and Milton and Svašek 2005). This has fostered a lot of work in this area, such as that by Tracey Heatherington, whose research on communal territory in Sardinia showed how ‘. . . attachment to the land is perceived as inherent to cultural identity, economic futures and the persistence of community . . . belonging to the town commons is felt in the body and in the family. It is an object of ongoing ‘love’, nostalgia, passion, worry, grief and jealousy’ (Heatherington 2005: 152–3).
in movies like Indiana Jones. I had no idea what course of study I was going to pursue at college when I got out of the navy. At that point in my life, I didn’t realize that I was different from the other crew members on the ship, because they tended to go to bars and drink heavily when they were at a port visit, and I tended to go to museums and experience the local culture.
I began to read more and more about archaeology, and I also became very interested in the culture on the ship. I liked learning about different people and about the psychological aspects of how we all did or did not get along in such a cramped environment. Over 6,000 people were living and working together creating a socially cohesive unit functioning as one complete whole, and this fascinated me, sparking a life-long interest in human behaviour.
My visit to Pompeii made me realize that archaeology was not just something in the movies, but was an actual discipline that could be studied in college. I signed up to study anthropology at a community college near my home town north of Detroit, Michigan, and quickly realized that archaeology was a sub-discipline of anthropology. After that, I knew that I was going to become an archaeologist: I went on to do a Master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and to work on a large stone tool collection from southwestern France, at the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Anthropology to me is the study of people, at all times and all places, and if you can think of anything else about human behaviour in between, you are probably right. It is a discipline that prepares students to understand human beings of all ethnicities, all cultures, and all time periods, ultimately refining our perspectives and objective worldviews while simultaneously respecting others. In what may seem to be a time of disorder in our world today, an understanding of anthropology provides hope and optimism: it enables us to open up dialogue with other cultural groups while respecting their particular worldviews.
and the ‘anthropology of the senses’ has proved to be a rich area of investigation, in which researchers such as David Howes (2005), Stephen Feld and Keith Basso (Feld and Basso 1996) have shown how even sensory experience is heavily mediated by culture. There are close intellectual ties between this kind of work and the anthropology of art (see Chapter 8), which considers how aesthetic experiences, like the senses, are culturally formulated to create and appreciate particular forms of artistic expression (Coote and Shelton 1992, Morphy and Perkins 2006).
The way that people interact with the material world, cognitively and physically, is an intriguing area of research. Alfred Gell (1998) wrote about how artefacts and tools become ‘prosthetic extensions’ of the self and Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh- Jones (1995) have examined the way that houses create extensions of individual and family identities. I became interested in this theme in my own work on water and cultural landscapes, looking at how people express creative agency and identity through domestic homes and gardens (Strang 2004) and through wider productive endeavours such as agriculture and manufacturing (Strang 2009).
This kind of research also connects with areas such as architecture and urban planning, in which it is vital to have an understanding of how people relate to their surroundings, both in creating successful urban spaces, and in helping to move towards more sustainable ways of living. For example, David Casagrande and his fellow environmental anthropologists are involved in an interdisciplinary project in Arizona, working with biologists and ecologists to bring urban landscaping, human behaviour and water conservation together in experimental research aimed at contributing to water management policy (Casagrande et al. 2007).
Environmental and architectural themes also come together in Marcel Villenga’s work, which considers vernacular (local) traditions in architecture, and considers what can be learned from these. He notes
. . . the strength of the need, desire and capacity of human beings all around the world to be in control of their own built environment, to create buildings that
are intimately related to their own sense of identity . . . Buildings can be culturally responsive and environmentally sustainable, if creative use is made of resources and vernacular methods are used in combination with modern and sometimes innovative technologies . . . anthropology has the potential to contribute much to these attempts. (Villenga 2005: 7)
Communities need to be socially as well as ecologically sustainable. Gretchen Herrmann’s research is concerned with the community-building potential of neighbourhood garage sales in suburban developments and cities.
Under the auspices of attracting more shoppers and making some extra money by cleaning out unneeded goods, neighborhood sales get residents out of their dwellings and mingling among themselves, sometimes for the first time. Some neighborhood sales have been organized expressly for the purpose of getting the neighbors to know one another in areas undergoing transition. They provide a positive means to combat a perceived ‘decline of community’ in the United States today . . . Neighborhood sales also define the neighborhood to the larger community, as well as promote internal solidarity. (Herrmann 2006: 181)
Environmental anthropology therefore examines many different aspects of human-environmental relationships, bringing the social and cultural aspects of these to the surface, and providing insights into the diverse ways that cultural and sub- cultural groups engage with the equally varied social and material environments in which we live.