Environmental Anthropology

Environmental anthropology considers human-environment interactions across the full range of sociocultural variation and from the earliest human societies to the contemporary global system. It endeavors to understand environmental problems and knowledge not only from a Western scientific standpoint, but also from the multiple and often conflicting perspectives of members of various nonwestern societies and their national, regional, local, or indigenous cultural systems. These goals require familiarity with concepts and methods in various social, biological, and physical sciences, as well as relevant humanities.

While environmental problems are widely recognized as matters of great public and scholarly concern, far more attention has been focused on physical and biological dimensions of these problems than on social, cultural, and historical dimensions. A primary aim of environmental anthropology is to redress this imbalance.  Since sociocultural and environmental phenomena shape each other through processes of mutual influence, environmental anthropology fosters an integrated analysis of their interaction. Our program provides coursework in the following areas:

• ethnoecology, ethnobiology, and traditional environmental knowledge
• history of human interactions with environmental contexts
• political ecology, sustainable development, and environmental justice
• critical environmental studies

The University of Washington has long been a premier center of environmental studies and offers a particularly rich array of environmentally-oriented faculty and courses in such disciplines as biology, medicine, public health, forest resources, ocean and fisheries sciences, earth and space sciences, atmospheric sciences, geography, international political economy, and literature. An integral part of every student’s educational pursuits consists of work that cross-fertilizes with some of these many disciplines.

The Environmental Anthropology specialization has been re-confirgured  to begin in the 2008-2009 academic year. Students interested in this specialization should apply for one of the department's three PhD track programs (Archaeology, Biocultural Anthropology, or Sociocultural Anthropology) and check the box that indicates that the applicant also wishes to be considered for the Environmental Anthropology specialization. Applicants will then be evaluated by faculty affiliated with the Environmental Anthropology specialization as well as the subfield to which to the applicant has applied.  As under the previous configuration, we anticipate admitting 2-3 students per year into the environmental specialization.

Those graduate students admitted to any program who have opted for the Environmental Anthropology specialization will take a series of core courses in environmental anthropology as well as the core courses in their subdisciplinary program.  Combined with other courses inside and outside the department, this constitutes an intensive and rigorous curriculum in environmental anthropology.