Development and Environment: Anthropological Perspectives

Social inequality and environmental degradation are fundamentally intertwined. This course will interrogate key concepts, ideas, and practices that enable the patterns of stark inequality and environmental destruction that we live with in the modern world. Through ethnographies of development practice, we will trace ideological and conceptual underpinnings of contemporary efforts to alleviate poverty and environmental degradation. We will consider how the concept of development is enmeshed in ideologies that imagine natural and social worlds as governable objects and productive resources. Lastly, we will explore intellectual, political, and activist movements – such as ‘South-South cooperation,’ ‘pluriverse politics,’ and ‘degrowth’ – that seek not only to undo development’s conceptual underpinning but also to imagine alternative responses to global inequality, marginalization, and the climate crisis.