Abstract
This chapter asks not what anthropology can do for sustainability, but what a more nuanced examination of ‘sustainability’ might do for the reinvigoration of anthropology. By questioning what it is that we seek to sustain and for whom, the politics and assumptions of recent sustainability discourse are brought into the spotlight. The essay argues that anthropology needs to move beyond a straightforward argument for defending or conserving indigenous life-ways to an understanding of interrelated social and environmental change that accounts for the complex temporalities and spatialities of interdependent bodies, agencies and environments, from the microbial to the planetary scale.
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Moore, H.L. (2017). What Can Sustainability Do for Anthropology?. In: Brightman, M., Lewis, J. (eds) The Anthropology of Sustainability. Palgrave Studies in Anthropology of Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56636-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56636-2_4
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