The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center's video: Contemporary Applications of Anthropological Concepts

In this lecture on contemporary applications of anthropological concepts, Dr. Monique Borgerhoff Mulder presents several examples of topics and research areas that are currently explored in environmental anthropology. She starts with biodiversity and lays out the different lenses that different actors bring to the definition of biodiversity and its social benefits. She connects biodiversity to the idea of environmentally noble savages, that indigenous people are synonymous with conservation, and she highlights the complex relationship between cultural and biological diversity. She then focuses on traditional ecological knowledge as a topic within which many assumptions are made and argues that it is not static over time or necessarily aligned with the scale of environmental change. Finally, she uses examples of the tragedy of the commons and the opposite idea, protected areas for conservation, and notes that anthropologists have critiqued assumptions in each of these approaches to understanding environmental problems.