Anth 152 Midterm #1

What is environmental anthropology?

Environmental anthropology is the study of how humans and the environment affect each other. It examines how culture, power, technology, political economies, and resource use shape the environment, and how environmental conditions influence human culture and social organization.

What is an example of environmental anthropology involving deforestation?

Deforestation in the Amazon occurs when people clear forests for agriculture or cattle ranching. This destroys animal habitats and can affect Indigenous communities that depend on forests for food, medicine, shelter, and cultural traditions.

How does Amazon deforestation demonstrate human-environment interactions?

Humans change the forest through clearing and ranching, while those changes affect ecosystems and the people who depend on them. The example shows that environmental change also has cultural, economic, and social consequences.

What is another example of environmental anthropology involving urban development?

Building roads, houses, or campuses changes land and habitats. The environment can also shape development because wetlands, coastlines, and other local conditions affect how people use the land.

How does environmental anthropology connect culture and nature?

It examines how cultural beliefs and practices influence the environment and how environmental conditions influence people's behavior, knowledge, and social organization.

How does environmental anthropology examine power?

It asks who controls land and resources, who benefits from environmental changes, who experiences the harm, and how political and economic systems shape environmental decisions.

What is environmental determinism?

Environmental determinism is the theory that the physical environment determines or strongly limits human societies and their outcomes.

What is an example of environmental determinism?

Claiming that people in a particular climate must develop one specific type of society because of the climate would be an example of environmental determinism.

What is possibilism?

Possibilism argues that the environment creates opportunities and limits, but people make choices and use culture and technology to shape different outcomes.

What is an example of possibilism?

People living in a dry environment may develop different farming methods or water-management systems. The environment creates challenges, but human choices influence how people respond.

What is human agency?

Human agency is people's ability to make choices, take action, and influence their social or physical environments.

What is an example of human agency in environmental anthropology?

Residents may decide to restore a wetland, change farming practices, or protect a local ecosystem instead of continuing an existing pattern of land use.

What is a dialectical relationship between humans and the environment?

It is a two-way relationship in which humans change the environment and environmental conditions also influence human behavior, culture, and social organization.

How does the dialectical relationship differ from environmental determinism?

Environmental determinism emphasizes the environment's influence on humans, while a dialectical approach examines how humans and environments influence each other.

What is the nature-culture divide?

The nature-culture divide is the idea that nature and human culture are separate categories, with humans often viewed as distinct from or superior to the natural world.

What is an example of the nature-culture divide?

A fenced-off nature reserve that is treated as the place where nature exists separately from human society can reflect the idea that humans and nature should be kept apart.

How can the nature-culture divide influence environmental management?

It can encourage people to view nature as something external that must be controlled, protected from humans, or separated from everyday social life.

How can environmental anthropology challenge the nature-culture divide?

It shows that humans are part of environmental relationships and that activities such as farming, building, restoring, and managing land continuously connect culture and nature.

What is perception?

Perception is how people interpret and make sense of information received through their senses. It is influenced by culture, language, experience, and expectations.

What is classification of the environment?

It is the process of organizing environmental features into categories, such as useful plants and weeds, pets and wild animals, or clean and dirty spaces.

How can culture influence environmental classification?

Cultural knowledge and expectations can affect whether a plant is seen as useful or unwanted, whether an animal is treated as a pet, and whether a space is considered clean.

What is space?

Space is a general physical area or location that does not necessarily have a particular personal or cultural meaning.

What is place?

Place is a space that has acquired personal, cultural, emotional, historical, or social meaning through people's experiences and relationships.

What is the difference between space and place?

Space refers to a physical area, while place refers to that area as people understand, experience, and give meaning to it.

What is environment?

Environment refers to the surroundings and conditions in which organisms live or operate.

What is landscape?

Landscape refers to the visible features and landmarks of an area at a human scale.

What is a cultural landscape?

A cultural landscape is a landscape shaped or changed by human activity and human-environment interactions over time.

What does anthropogenic mean?

Anthropogenic means caused or created by human activity.

What is an example of an anthropogenic landscape?

A campus with roads, buildings, paths, and former military infrastructure is anthropogenic because people have constructed and changed its physical layout.

What is a trace in landscape analysis?

A trace is a physical mark, remnant, or feature left by earlier human activity.

What is a landscape palimpsest?

A landscape palimpsest is a landscape that contains layers of traces from different groups, activities, and historical periods.

What is an example of a landscape palimpsest at UCSB?

The campus and surrounding area reflect Chumash history, agriculture, military development, university expansion, and environmental restoration.

What is place-making?

Place-making is the process of making a location meaningful through events, stories, relationships, shared experiences, and cultural practices.

How can a landmark contribute to place-making?

A recognizable landmark can become connected to shared memories, campus identity, and people's experiences of a location.

What does it mean to read a landscape?

It means interpreting visible features as evidence of human activity, environmental change, cultural values, and history.

How can a landscape appear natural while still being a cultural landscape?

It may have been shaped by earlier cultivation, extraction, construction, settlement, or restoration even if those activities are no longer obvious.

What is a patch in landscape analysis?

A patch is a similar-looking component or area within a larger, varied landscape.

How can place names preserve cultural history?

Place names can preserve memories, historical events, cultural meanings, and relationships between communities and locations.

How are cultural geography and environmental anthropology connected?

Both examine how people interact with environments and how culture, history, meaning, and power shape the use and interpretation of land.

What is structuralism?

Structuralism, associated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, examines the underlying patterns and categories through which people organize and understand the world.

What is a binary opposition?

A binary opposition is a pair of contrasting categories used to organize or understand the world.

What are examples of binary oppositions?

Nature/culture, raw/cooked, clean/dirty, and cultivated/wild.

What is the nature-culture binary opposition?

It is a conceptual contrast that places nature and human culture into separate categories.

What is the raw-to-cooked transformation?

In structuralist thought, the transformation from raw to cooked can symbolize the passage from nature to culture through human activity.

How can binary oppositions influence people's understanding of the environment?

They can encourage people to sort things into contrasting categories, such as desirable plants versus weeds or pets versus wild animals.

Who is Mary Douglas in relation to the concept of matter out of place?

Mary Douglas was an anthropologist whose work in Purity and Danger examined how ideas about dirt, purity, and danger are shaped by cultural classifications and boundaries.

What does Mary Douglas mean by "matter out of place"?

Something is considered dirty or out of order when it appears in a place where it is culturally understood not to belong.

What does purity mean in Mary Douglas's framework?

Purity refers to what a culture considers clean, proper, or correctly arranged.

What does danger mean in Mary Douglas's framework?

Danger can arise when something challenges cultural categories, boundaries, or expectations about what belongs where.

What is an example of matter out of place inside a home?

Muddy boots may be acceptable outside but considered dirty inside because they cross a boundary between outdoor and indoor spaces.

How does sweeping a dirt yard illustrate matter out of place?

Residents remove litter and misplaced objects rather than removing the soil itself. The yard is considered clean when it is properly organized.

How can natural oil on a beach illustrate matter out of place?

Naturally occurring oil may be treated as dirt because it violates people's expectations that a recreational beach should be clean.

How do Mary Douglas's ideas connect to Hoelle's Chapter 3?

Both show that cleanliness depends on cultural rules about the organization of spaces and what belongs in each location, rather than simply on the physical presence of dirt.

How do classification and power connect?

Categories influence what people value, protect, remove, control, or consider appropriate within an environment.

What is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis?

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis proposes that language influences or shapes how people think, perceive, categorize, and understand the world.

How can language influence environmental perception?

Words and grammatical structures can shape which distinctions people notice and how they categorize plants, animals, places, and other parts of the environment.

What is an example of language shaping environmental classification?

Calling a plant a "weed" can encourage someone to remove it, while calling the same plant useful vegetation may encourage them to protect it.

Who is Robin Wall Kimmerer?

Robin Wall Kimmerer is the author associated with Braiding Sweetgrass and the discussion of the Grammar of Animacy in the study materials.

What is the Grammar of Animacy?

The Grammar of Animacy describes language that recognizes nonhuman life as animate, active, or worthy of relationships rather than treating it only as an object.

How does Kimmerer contrast English with Potawatomi?

English often uses "it" for nonhuman entities, while Potawatomi can use grammatical forms that recognize nonhuman life as animate.

How can calling a living being "it" influence perception?

It can make a living being seem like an object or resource instead of an active presence with which humans have relationships.

How can the Grammar of Animacy change human relationships with nature?

It encourages people to recognize plants, animals, and other nonhuman beings as living participants in the world rather than merely resources.

What does describing a bay as "being a bay" illustrate?

It illustrates how language can represent a nonhuman entity as active and living rather than as an inert object.

How does the Grammar of Animacy challenge the nature-culture divide?

It encourages people to understand humans and nonhuman beings through relationships instead of treating nature as separate from human life.

How do the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and Grammar of Animacy connect?

Both show that language matters to how people perceive the world. Kimmerer's example demonstrates how grammatical patterns can encourage different relationships with nonhuman life.

How does the Grammar of Animacy connect to environmental anthropology?

It shows how cultural and linguistic systems influence how people understand, value, and relate to their environments.

Who is the author discussed in Cultivated?

Jeffrey Hoelle.

What is the main focus of Hoelle's research in Cultivated?

Hoelle examines how people understand, classify, cultivate, and manage plants and organize their environments according to cultural expectations.

What is the main argument of Cultivated Chapters 1–3?

People actively organize plants, animals, land, and household spaces according to cultural ideas about care, order, cleanliness, and control. These practices show that human-environment relationships are cultural as well as practical.

What is ethnography?

Ethnography is an in-depth, fieldwork-based study of people's everyday lives, practices, relationships, and ways of understanding the world.

What is participant observation?

Participant observation is a research method in which a researcher observes people while participating in or spending time around their everyday activities.

How does Hoelle's research illustrate ethnography?

He examines everyday practices involving plants, land, animals, cleanliness, and the organization of rural spaces to understand the cultural meanings behind them.

Why is Hoelle's research an example of environmental anthropology?

It explores how people shape their environments and how environmental conditions and cultural expectations influence everyday behavior.

How did observing everyday practices help Hoelle develop his argument?

Observations of how residents manage vegetation, organize spaces, and define cleanliness revealed recurring cultural expectations about order, care, and control.

Why is Cultivated about more than agriculture?

It examines the cultural meanings of cultivation, including how people classify plants, judge landscapes, demonstrate care, and organize relationships between humans and nonhuman life.

What are the four principles of cultivation in Hoelle's notes?

Type, Origin, Position, and Form.

What is Type in the principles of cultivation?

Type means deciding which plants belong in a space and which plants are desired or unwanted.

What is an example of Type?

Choosing flowers to plant and removing vegetation classified as weeds.

What is Origin in the principles of cultivation?

Origin means deciding where plants come from or what source they should have.

What is an example of Origin?

Choosing plants from a nursery rather than allowing all vegetation to grow without selection.

What is Position in the principles of cultivation?

Position means deciding where plants should be placed within a space.

What is an example of Position?

Planting flowers in rows or placing them symmetrically around an entrance.

What is Form in the principles of cultivation?

Form means controlling how plants look through shaping, trimming, grooming, or other management practices.

What is an example of Form?

Trimming bushes into shapes or cutting grass to a uniform height.

How do Type, Origin, Position, and Form work together?

People choose which plants belong, decide where the plants come from, determine where they are placed, and control how they look.

How do the four principles reveal cultural expectations?

They show that people have ideas about which vegetation is desirable, where it belongs, and how a well-managed environment should appear.

What is planta in Hoelle's notes?

Planta refers to desirable or intentionally cultivated vegetation.

What is mato in Hoelle's notes?

Mato refers to vegetation categorized as unwanted, wild, or weed-like growth.

Are planta and mato fixed botanical categories?

No. These categories depend on context, human knowledge, intended use, placement, and cultural expectations.

Why might one person classify a plant as mato while another considers it useful?

They may have different knowledge of the plant, different intended uses, or different expectations about what belongs in that space.

What does the idea that "everything that is not planted is mato" reveal?

It reveals a local classification system that distinguishes intentionally planted vegetation from uncultivated growth.

How can knowledge change the classification of a plant?

A person who recognizes a plant's uses may value it, while someone unfamiliar with those uses may classify it as unwanted vegetation.

What is the aesthetic of control?

The aesthetic of control is a preference for visibly orderly, groomed, and intentionally managed environments that demonstrate human labor, care, and control.

How do people create an aesthetic of control?

They select desired plants, arrange them, trim them, remove unwanted vegetation, and maintain spaces to make them appear orderly.

What is an everyday example of the aesthetic of control?

A neatly maintained lawn with trimmed grass, shaped hedges, and organized flower beds.

What does a well-maintained field communicate in Hoelle's analysis?

It can communicate that people are working, caring for the land, maintaining order, and exercising control over the environment.

What is a biospatial configuration?

A biospatial configuration is the arrangement of humans, animals, plants, and other elements into spaces with different uses and expectations.

What is an example of biospatial configuration on a farm?

The house, yard, garden, livestock area, pasture, and forest occupy different zones with different purposes and rules.

What does cultivation reveal about the relationship between humans and nature?

Humans actively shape vegetation and land, while environmental conditions influence how they cultivate and organize spaces.

How can a maintained yard influence social judgments?

People may interpret a well-kept yard as evidence that someone is responsible, hardworking, or wealthy.