SOSANT4505 – Environmental Anthropology: Living in the Anthropocene, Honours

Environmental Anthropology explores how human societies interact with their environments, especially in the face of pressing global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. The course examines both large-scale forces—such as colonial histories, capitalist production, and consumer culture—and everyday practices that shape environmental outcomes. It takes particular interest in how humans generate knowledge about their environments and their changes, ranging from natural sciences to religion and art, from remote sensing and laboratory experiments to bodily experience. It also considers responses to ecological crises, including conservation efforts, geoengineering, and grassroots activism, while encouraging students to think critically about possible paths forward.

Drawing on ethnographic case studies and long-term fieldwork, the course introduces key theories and methods in environmental anthropology. Students will engage with diverse human-environment relationships across cultures and ecosystems, from domestication and plantation ecologies to bioengineering and landscape histories. A hands-on fieldwork component in the Oslomarka will allow students to apply these concepts locally, exploring how people understand, use, and debate their immediate surroundings.

Drawing on older and recent ethnography, the course deals with topics such as:

• How peoples' understanding of the environment can be related to their sense of self, identity, and moral obligation
• How humans perceive of, know and live with non-humans, including plants and animals, and non-biological and geological substrates of life
• How environments sustain human life and livelihood and are shaped by humans over time and can become sites of contestation and conflict
• How environments can generate diverse knowledges - science, technology, governance, myth, habit - and how different environmental knowledges intersect
• How historically produced global inequality, exploitation and dispossession link to climate change, toxic pollution and biodiversity loss
• How anthropology can contribute to and critically reflect on on-going debates and activisms concerning sustainability and green transition
• How environmental changes and damage are experienced by human bodies and affect human health

Knowledge

• Knowledge of anthropological approaches to environments and environmental change
• Understanding sociocultural, political-economic and historical processes that underlie and contribute to global environmental change
• Knowledge of how words, practices and moral understandings shape our relations to nature

Skills

• The ability to read and understand and critically analyse reasoned arguments
• The ability to articulate theoretical arguments based on readings and case studies
• The ability to engage anthropological methods and theory with other environmental disciplines, and policy and activism

General competence

• Independent academic thought and the ability to apply it to one's lifeworld
• Ability to express analytical arguments verbally and in written form
• Multidisciplinary literacy and openness to collaboration

This course is available for students admitted to the master's supplement in Environmental Humanities and Sciences.

Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.

If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.

The course is made up of a series of lectures, including a half-day workshop to present the results of the mini fieldwork, and one-day mini-fieldwork.

One-day mini-fieldwork (without teachers) in/on the "Marka" - the protected forest areas that surround Oslo - politics: forestry, skiing, construction, pollution, gathering, hunting, property, history, war, ideas about nature.

Lectures include one session to discuss monographs, one session engaging with an invited environmentalist group, and a ½-day workshop about the mini-fieldwork (with teachers).

Compulsory elements

• Submission of 2 short texts (each minimum 450 words and maximum 550 words) - one critically reflecting on the methods used in one or several course readings, and one sketching the planned methods for the mini-fieldwork.
• Submission of 1 report on the mini-fieldwork (minimum 800 words and maximum 1200 words excluding cover page and foot- or endnotes).

The short texts and fieldwork report will be assessed as ‘Approved/Not approved’. Students must have their short texts and fieldwork report approved in order to sit for the exam. Compulsory activities must be approved and the exam passed in the same semester.

Absence from compulsory activities

In the event of illness or other valid reasons, you can apply for a valid absence or postponement of compulsory activity.

• Apply for valid absence from or need for postponement of compulsory activity.

Grades are awarded on a scale from A to F, where A is the best grade and F is a fail. Read more about the grading system.

Also see Grading guidelines in social anthropology.