ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

This is an interactive teaching style course. Classes will consist of seminar meetings, film screenings, individual and collective discussion papers on the assigned reading material, special guests' lectures, and a final written assignment. All students will be expected to actively engage with readings, lectures, and class discussion. Students’ general attendance, consistence, punctuality, and personal contribution to daily debates significantly shape their overall assessment and final grade.

Attendance is mandatory. A maximum of three classes can be missed, provided that student emailed me in advance.

In today policies of world heritage construction environmental heritage is considered a universal good to be protected for its social, aesthetic, economic, historic and natural values. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, for instance, the designation of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) requires an area to evidence a combination of the following "natural beauty criterion": landscape quality, scenic quality, relative wildness, relative tranquillity, natural heritage features and cultural heritage. In a generalized effort to see natural resources as a key asset for the redefinition of a "global hierarchy of values", environments and landscapes are proceduralized as tangible and intangible goods, classified and valued as enclosed natural reserves, aboriginal sacred places and objects, and indigenous cosmologies, traditions and memories inherited from the past. However, the link between heritage and environment is anything but obvious and uncritical. Entanglements between heritage and the environment indeed are affected by the different modes of relations that individuals and collectives establish with the world they live in, and with their more-than-human surrounding. And above all, they are the always unstable result of complex political dynamics of appropriation, symbolic and material reconfiguration, and economic valorization that operate on both a local and global scale.

Focusing on key anthropological concepts, theories and methods, this course will offer a deep and critical understanding of initiatives to protect and improve what is often presented to the public as "our common natural world". We will explore the historical, cultural and political assumptions behind the establishment or candidature of ecological zones as world heritage goods in the Mediterranean through the analysis of various case studies: urban, indigenous, and post-industrial areas, wildlife management and wilderness zones, archaeological sites, coastal and marine environments, community-conserved areas, and land-trust preserves. Particular attention will be paid to problems and controversies that stem out of environmental heritage conservation since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention. The course is also designed to take into consideration global environmental trends and heritage consumption strategies, and the ways they are negotiated and manipulated by different interest groups, such as environmental organizations, development agencies, policymakers, local representatives, and those who wielded power in processes of heritage construction.

The course aims to provide students with a critical anthropological understanding of "environmental heritage conservation" in the Mediterranean. In particular, seminars and class activities will give students the chance to:

• Become familiar with key concepts and theories related to heritage construction in anthropology;
• Acquire a more anthropologically nuanced and theoretically informed understanding of the changing conditions of heritage regulation and the political struggles in which new “heritagized” claims are now imbricated, exspecially when uneven efforts of heritagization of natural assets are at stake, in diverse historical and socio-cultural settings;
• Learn how to proactively contribute to contemporary debates over sustainability, natural conservation and heritage politics at local and global scale;
• Acquire informed ethnographic knowledge about the modalities and moral implications of environmental conservation in heritagization processes, with a specific focus on the Mediterranean;
• Think back to common representations of the environment as a "universal human value" that need to be protected, just like this is often misleadingly described in the press, popular culture and in heritage policy documents;
• Reflect on the challenges and risks of an anthropological engagement in public discourse and transformative social practices when heritage politics meets urgent ecological challenges.

Rodney Harrison, 2013, Heritage. A critical Approach, Routledge

[Other reading materials (short papers and book chapters) will be available on Studium]