Based on field research in villages and towns in the Komi Republic, this article compares the perception of the environment with environmental knowledge, and examines their interrelations in local contexts. An individual's perception of the environment is embedded in his/her everyday engagement with the surroundings. Environmental knowledge is of more cognitive character: it originates mainly from outside the context of everyday life and is imparted via various forms of communication. From the interplay of these two levels arises what we call (...) local environmental knowledge, a kind of knowledge which has its own moral and symbolic dimension within the social, cultural and political setting. Similarly, the concept of environmentalism is increasingly recognised as a wide diversity of 'green' views and actions rather than as a single project of a globally consistent normative character; thus there is a need to examine the contextuality of environmental concern. Our findings explain the failure of the ' information deficit' model, according to which the dissemination of scientific knowledge about environmental problems should result in local inhabitants changing their attitudes towards 'The Environment '. Instead, our findings support the insight that, rather than accepting environmental knowledge from external sources as a factual given, individuals restate it in terms of their everyday life contexts and local discourses about socio-political issues. (shrink)

This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord have recently put forward a critical evaluation of the ontological turn in anthropological theory. According to this philosophically informed theory of ethnographic practice, certain insights of twentieth-century analytic philosophy should play a part in the methodological debates concerning anthropological fieldwork: most importantly, the denial of representationalism and the acceptance of the extended mind thesis. In this paper, I will attempt to evaluate the advantages and potential drawbacks of ontological anthropology—arguing that to become a true alternative (...) to current social scientific thinking about methodology, it has to meet certain philosophical objections. (shrink)