Toward conservational anthropology: addressing anthropocentric bias in anthropology

Abstract

Anthropological literature addressing conservation and development often blames ‘conservationists’ as being neo-imperialist in their attempts to institute limits to commercial activities by imposing their post-materialist eco-ideology. The author argues that this view of conservationists is ironic in light of the fact that the very notion of ‘development’ is arguably an imposition of the (Western) elites. The anthropocentric bias in anthropology also permeates constructivist ethnographies of human–animal ‘interactions,’ which tend to emphasize the socio-cultural complexity and interconnectivity rather than the unequal and often extractive nature of this ‘interaction.’ Anthropocentrism is argued to be counteractive to reconciling conservationists’ efforts at environmental protection with the traditional ontologies of the interdependency of human-nature relationship.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.