Overview

How can cultural forms motivate people to care about their environment? While important scientific data about ecosystems is mushrooming, E. N. Anderson argues in this powerful new book that putting effective conservation into practice depends primarily on social solidarity and emotional factors. Marshaling decades of research on cultures across several continents, he shows how societies have been more or less successful in sustainably managing their environments based on collective engagements such as religion, art, song, myth, and story. This provocative and deeply felt book by a leading writer and scholar in human ecology and anthropology will be read and debated widely for years to come.

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9781611329605

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Gene Anderson has been one of the best and most consistent observers of the relationships between human societies and local ecologies for the better part of the past six decades. In Caring for Place, Anderson once again provides us with a kaleidoscope look at how cultures around the world are interrelated with their environments. The amount of ethnographic and historical material provided is impressive, with particular attention paid to the cultures of China, the Yucatec Maya, and Medieval Ireland. The truism that ideology and emotion are central to any human-in-environment interaction is one that is too often overlooked by environmental researchers. This book shows us definitively that if we are going to transition to sustainable societies, which we must, caring for our place is how to start. --James R. Veteto, University of North Texas

Author Information

E. N. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at the University of California, Riverside. He has done research on ethnobiology, cultural ecology, political ecology, and medical anthropology in several areas, especially Hong Kong, British Columbia, California, and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. His books include The Food of China (Yale University Press, 1988), Ecologies of the Heart (Oxford University Press, 1996), Political Ecology of a Yucatec Maya Community (University Press of Arizona Press, 2005) and The Pursuit of Ecotopia (Praeger, 2010). In 2013 he received the Distinguished Ethnobiology Award from the Society for Ethnobiology.

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