The HAR editorial team is pleased to announce the program for HAR‘s first conference, “Environmental Anthropologies: Pasts, Presents, Futures,” which will take place at Yale University from March 31 to April 1, 2025. This event is co-organized by History of Anthropology Review and Yale’s History of Science and Medicine Program. This event is free and open to all who are interested in attending.
This workshop revisits the past 150+ years of anthropological and ethnographic research on relationships among human lifeways, cultures, and environments. How can the errors and insights of earlier paradigms help us grapple with shifting, unpredictable ecologies today? Experts from Anthropology, History, Science Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Environmental Science will reflect on earlier encounters, and on ways for these fields to talk, think, and work together now.
Monday, March 31
9:20 am: Opening remarks from John Tresch (Warburg Institute) and Joanna Radin (Yale University)
9:30-11:00 am:
· Sophie Chao (University of Sydney): “Plantation Anthropologies: Three Turning Points”
· Josh Sterlin (McGill University): “Cultural Rewilding: How Previous Eras of Conservation and Anthropology Inform an Ethnographic Present“
· Eduardo Brondizio (Indiana University): “An Intertwined Journey: Longitudinal, Interdisciplinary, and Transdisciplinary Environmental Anthropology”
11:30-1:00 pm:
· Alyssa Paredes (University of Michigan): “Trouillot and Appadurai: Trajectories in the Anthropology of Commodities from 1985 Onwards”
· Megnaa Mehtta (University College London): “Erosion by Infrastructure: Mapping Regional Causations for a Global Environmental Crisis”
· Michael Degani (University of Cambridge): “Seasonal Variations: Modes, Possible Worlds, and Environmental Anthropology”
1:00-2:00 pm: Lunch
2:00-3:30 pm:
· Eli Nelson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): “Trapping the Ecological Indian: Ethnology and Native Science in the history of Turtle Island Subsistence Hunting and Fur Trade”
· Elaine Ayers (Yale University): “Amazonian Ethnobotany and the Legacies of Colonialism: Plants, People, and Collecting in the 19th and 20th Centuries”
· Deborah Coen (Yale University): “Analysts of Atmospheric Influence: History at the Nexus of Climate and Life.”
Tuesday, April 1
9:30-11:00 am:
· Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University): “Anthropology as Environmental Science”
· Federico Ferretti (University of Bologna): “Learning Mutual Aid: The Environmental Anthropologies of Early Anarchist Geographers”.
· Mayanthi Fernando (University of California, Santa Cruz): “More-than-Human, More-than-Natural, More-than-Secular”
11:15-12:00 pm: Closing thoughts and discussion
Schedule is subject to change.
For more information on how to attend and to register interest, please email enviro.anthro.hist.yale.2025@gmail.com.
The organizing committee for “Environmental Anthropologies: Pasts, Presents, Futures” is Michael Edwards (University of Sydney), Adrianna Link (American Philosophical Society), Ramah McKay (University of Pennsylvania), Sarah Pickman (Independent scholar), Joanna Radin (Yale University) and John Tresch (Warburg Institute).
This event is made possible by the support of the NOMIS Foundation. Further generous support is provided by Yale University’s Program in Agrarian Studies, Environmental Humanities Program, Department of Anthropology, and Kathleen Keenan in History of Science and Medicine; the University of Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science; the Warburg Institute; and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.
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