Susan Paulson

Preliminary abstract: This workshop rallies ethnographic research and anthropological theory to widen horizons for thought and action in response to global environmental challenges. It joins growing efforts to shift emphasis from adapting environmental governance toward transforming sociocultural systems and models. With empirical focus on a set of radically diverse efforts to recuperate, adapt, and forge paths toward human-environment well-being, we explore concepts and frameworks that support us to think holistically about each phenomenon and comparatively within a common field. Understandings built across profoundly different ways of knowing and being–expressed in the phenomena studied and embodied by workshop participants themselves–promise to widen horizons for recognizing and imagining modes of human-environment existence and well-being. In response to American Anthropological Association (AAA) calls for research and theory engaging climate change, we bring long-evolving ideas of holism and cultural relativism into dialogue with resources from intellectual currents including ecological economics, political ecology, and sustainability science. Our purpose is to develop cross-cultural research and theory that lead to new influences on environmental science and policy, to date largely circumscribed by modern/western ways of knowing and being that have come to seem universal.