The theme of the seminar is the interconnectedness of people and environment, one of the grand questions in geography. The theme is also known as: human ecology, behavioral geography, cultural ecology, and in an earlier time, "man-environment relations." Other topics are related to it: behavioral environment, perception of environment, ethnogeography, energetic and natural hazards research.
We will read and discuss some of the literature on these themes, including works that are constantly cited in methodological articles. We will consider efforts to connect the theme to other kinds of geography, including physical geography, study of spatial organization, geopolitical economy, feminist geography and environmental ethics.
Each week we will have a set of readings in common, usually three to four articles. Students should be prepared to comment on them in seminar. Substitutions of readings are possible with common consent. In preparation for the seminar, each student will write a 2-3 page (double spaced), summarizing/ evaluating/ challenging the major arguments, viewpoints or findings of the author(s). The instructors will read the reaction papers and return them at the beginning of the following seminar session, unless collectively we decide to make them due the day before the seminar. (By reading the reaction papers in advance, tne intructors have a better opportunity to sharpen and improve discussion). Both instructors should receive a copy of each reaction paper. We will develop a roster assigning special responsibility for leading discussion for each meeting of the seminar.
Students will write one longer review and critique (on the order of 10-15 pages) of a book or monograph-length work, either chosen from the list to be provided, or, if different, with the consent of the instructors. The list contains case studies and methodological studies.
Butzer, Karl. 1989. Cultural ecology. In Gary L. Gaile and Cort J. Willmott, eds., Geography in America. Columbus, OH: Merrill Publishing Company, pp. 192-208.
Hardesty, Donald. l986. Rethinking cultural adaptation. Professional Geographer 38:11-18.
Turner II, B. L. 1989. The specialist-synthesis approach to the revival of geography: The case of cultural ecology. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79:88-100.
Zimmerer, Karl. 1994. Human geography and the 'new ecology': the prospect and promise of integration. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84:108-125.
Bassett, Thomas. 1986. Fulani herd movements. Geographical Review 76:233-248.
Bassett, Thomas J. 1988. The political ecology of peasant-herder conflicts in the northern Ivory Coast. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78:453-472.
Blaut, James. 1979. A radical critique of cultural geography. Antipode 11:25-29.
Brookfield, Harold. 1964. Questions on the human frontiers of geography. Economic Geography 40:283-303.
FitzSimmons, Margaret. 1989. The matter of nature. Antipode 21:106-120.
Grossman, Lawrence. 1981. The cultural ecology of economic development. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 71:220-236.
Grossman, Lawrence. 1983. Cattle, rural economic differentiation, and articulation in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. American Ethnologist 10:59-78.
Grossman, Lawrence. 1993. The political ecology of banana exports and local food production in St. Vincent, eastern Caribbean. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83:2:347-367.
Harvey, David. 1984. On the history and present condition of geography: An historical materialist manifesto. Professional Geographer.
Meillassoux, Claude. 1972. From reproduction to production - A Marxist approach to economic anthropology. Economy and Society 1:93-105.
Orlove, Benjamin. 1980. Ecological anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 9:235-273.
Peet, Richard. 1977. The development of radical geography in the United States. In Richard Peet, ed., Radical Geography: Alternative Viewpoints on Contemporary Social Issues, Chicago: Maaroufa Press, pp. 6-30.
Porter, Philip W. 1987. Wholes and fragments: Reflections on the economy of affection, capitalism, and the human cost of developments. Geografiska Annaler 69B:1:1-14.
Porter, Philip W. 1990. Searches for social theory in geography and geography in social theory. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Toronto, 21 April 1990.
Terray, Emmanuel. 1972. Marxism and Primitive Societies. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Wisner, Ben. 1978. Does radical geography lack an approach to environmental relations? Antipode 10:1:84-95.
Barrows, Harlan, H. 1923. Geography as human ecology. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 13:1-14.
Buttimer, Anne. 1968. Social geography. International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences 134145.
Chorley, Richard J. 1973. Geography as human ecology. In R. Chorley, ed., Directions in Geography, London: Methuen, pp. 155-169.
Denevan, William M. 1983. Adaptation, variation, and cultural geography. Professional Geographer 35:399-407.
Grossman, Larry. 1977. Man-environment relationships in anthropology and geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67:126-144.
Hawley, Amos H. 1968. Human ecology. International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 328337.
Kates, Robert W. 1983. Part and apart: Issues in humankind's relationship to the natural world. In F. Kenneth Hare, ed., The Experiment of Life, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 151-180.
Mikesell, Marvin W. 1970. Cultural ecology. In Phillip Bacon, ed., Key Concepts and Teaching Strategies, 40th Yearbook of the National Council for the Social Studies, pp. 39-61.
Mikesell, Marvin W. 1974. Geography as the study of environment: An assessment of some new and old commitments. In R. Manners and M. W. Mikesell, eds., Perspectives on Environment, Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, Publication No. 13, pp. 1-23.
Morgan, W. B., and R. P. Moss. 1965. Geography and ecology: The concept of community and its relationship to environment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 55:339350.
Odum, Eugene P. 1977. The emergence of ecology as a new integrative discipline. Science 195:1289-1293.
Porter, Philip W. 1978. Geography as human ecology. American Behavioral Scientist 22:15-39.
Price, Edward T. 1968. Cultural geography. International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 129134.
Steward, Julian H. 1968. Cultural ecology. International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 337344.
Stoddart, D. R. 1965. Geography and the ecological approach: The ecosystem as a geographical principle and method. Geography, 50:242-251.
Brookfield, Harold. 1975. On the environment as perceived. Progress in Geography 1:51-80.
Kirk, William. 1951. Historical geography and the concept of behavioural environment. Silver Jubilee Souvenir and N. C. Subrahmanyam Memorial Volume, Indian Geographical Society, 25:152-160.
Kirk, William. 1963. Problems of geography. Geography 48:357-371.
Lowenthal, David. 1961. Geography, experience, and imagination: Towards a geographic epistemology. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 51:241 -260.
Saarinen, Thomas F. and James L. Sell. 1980. Environmental perception. Progress in Human Geography 4:525-548.
Wright, John K. 1947. Terrae Incognitae: The place of the imagination in geography. Annals of the Associatism of American Geographers 37:1-15.
Attfield, Robin. 1992. Development and environmentalism. In Robin Attfield and Barry Wilkins, International Justice and the Third World, London: Routledge, pp. 151-168.
Christopherson, Susan. 1989. On being outside the 'The Project'. Antipode 21 (3):83-89.
Booth, Douglas. 1993. Valuing Nature. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 1-24.
Esteva, Gustavo. 1994. Re-embedding food in agriculture. Culture and Agriculture 48:2-13.
Naess, Arne. 1990. Sustainable development and deep ecology. In J. R. Engel and J G. Engel, eds., Ethics of Environment and Development: Global Challenge, International Response, Tucson: AZ: University of Arizona Press, pp. 87-96.
Seager, Joni. 1993. Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis. London: Routledge, pp. 1-13.
Warren, Karen J. 1987. Feminism and ecology: Making connections. Environmental Ethics 9:320.
Warren, Karen J., and Jim Cheney. 1991. Ecological feminism and ecosystem ecology. Hypatica 6(1):179-197.
Barth, Fredrik. 1956. Ecologic relationships of ethnic groups in Swat, north Pakistan. American Anthropologist 58:1079-1088.
Bennett, John W. 1975. Ecosystem analogies in cultural ecology. In Steven Polgar, ed., Population, Ecology and Social Evolution, The Hague: Mouton Pub., pp. 273-303.
Boas, Franz. 1887. The study of geography. Science 9:137-141.
Frake, Charles O. 1962. Cultural ecology and ethnography. American Anthropologist 62:53-59.
Geertz, Clifford. 1963. The ecological approach in anthropology, In Agricultural Involution, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 1-11.
Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Blurred genres: The reconfiguration of social thought. In Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, pp. 19-35.
Heider, Karl G. 1972. Environment, subsistence, and society. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 1:207-226.
Montgomery, Edward, J. W. Bennett, and Thayer Scudder, 1973. The impact of human activities on the physical and social environments: New directions in anthropological ecology. Annual Review of Anthropology 2:27-61.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1964. Culture and environment: The study of cultural ecology. In Sol Tax, ed., Horizons in Anthropology, pp. 132-147.
Steward, Julian. 1955. Theory of Culture Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 30-42.
Vayda, Andrew P., and Roy A. Rappaport, 1968. Ecology, cultural and non-cultural. In Clifton, James A., ed., 1968, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Vayda, Andrew P. 1969. An ecological approach to cultural anthropology. Bucknell Review, 17:112-119.
Vayda, Andrew P., and Bonnie J. McCay, 1975. New directions in ecology and ecological anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 4:293-306.
Allan, William. 1965. The African Husbandman. New York: Barnes and Noble, pp. 1-65.
Boserup, Ester. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. Chicago: Aldine, 122 pp.
Datoo, Bashir. 1978. Toward a reformulation of Boserup's theory of agricultural change. Economic Geography 54:135-144.
Harvey, David. 1974. Population, resources and the ideology of science. Economic Geography 50:256-277.
Netting, Robert McC., 1974. Agrarian ecology. Annual Review of Anthropology 3:21-56.
Turner, B.L., II, Robert O Hanham, and Anthony V. Portararo. 1977. Population pressure and agricultural intensity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76:3:384-396.
Burton, Ian and Robert W. Kates. 1964. The floodplain and the seashore. Geographical Review 54:366-385.
Fleuret, Patrick, and Anne Fleuret. 1991. Social organization, resource management, and child nutrition in the Taita Hills, Kenya. American Anthropologist 93:1:91-114.
Hohenemser, C, R. W. Kates, and P. Slovic. 1983. The nature of technological hazard. Science 220:378-384.
McCorriston, Joy, and Frank Hole. 1991. The ecology of seasonal stress and the origins of agriculture in the Near East. American Anthropologist 93:1:46-69.
Moran, Emilio F. 1991. Human adaptive strategies in Amazonian blackwater ecosystems. American Anthropologist 93:2:361-382.
Porter, Philip W. 1965. Environmental potentials and economic opportunities - A background for cultural adaptation. American Anthropologist 67:409-420.
Bryant, Raymond L. 1992. Political ecology: An emerging research agenda in Third-world studies. Political Geography 11:1:12-36.
Collins, Jane. 1992. Marxism confronts the environment: labor, ecology, and environmental change. In Sutti Ortiz and Susan Lees, eds., Understanding Economic Process, Monographs in Economic Anthropology, No. 10, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 179-188.
Lowe, Philip D., and Wolfgang Rudig, 1985. Review article: political ecology and the social sciences--the state of the art. British Journal of Political Science 16:513-550.
Luke, Timothy P. 1987. Social ecology as critical political economy. Social Science Journal 24:3:303-315.
Martinez-Alier, Juan, and Lori Ann Thrupp. 1992. A political ecology of the South. Latin American Perspectives 19:148-152.
Nash, June. 1994. Global integration and subsistence insecurity. American Anthropologist 96:1:730.
Rappaport, Roy. 1993. Distinguished lecture in general anthropology: the anthropology of trouble. American Anthropologist. 95:2:295-303.
Yapa, Lakshman. 1993. What are improved seeds? An epistemology of the Green Revolution. Economic Geography 69:254-273.
For your future edification: We will not be reading about Energetics, Systems Ecology, and Ecological Economics. In previous seminars we have read on this theme, but there isn't time this quarter. The Maruyama article is a classic, and you would enjoy reading it.
Daly, Herman E., and John B. Cobb, Jr. 1989. For the Common Good, Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston: Beacon Press.
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. 1975. Energy and economic myths. Southern Economic Journal 41:347-381.
Holden, Constance. 1990. Multidisciplinary look at a finite world. Science 49:18-19.
Maruyama, Magorah. 1963. The second cybernetics: Deviation amplifying mutual causal processes. American Scientist 51:164-179.
Rappaport, Roy. 1971. The flow of energy in an agricultural society. Scientific American 224:116-132.
Von Bertalanffy, L. 1968. General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. New York: George Braziller.
For a list of books and monographs, follow this link:
This page maintained by Robert Kuhlken, assistant professor of geography
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