ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the range of environmental scholarship by anthropologists since the 1980s, noting especially the ways in which that work has contributed to development and change within the discipline more broadly. Even before anthropology was consolidated as an academic discipline, understanding the relationship between human societies and the natural environments in which they find themselves was a central concern. Scholarship on the environment has encouraged collaboration among the different subdisciplines of anthropology, put anthropology in conversation with other disciplines, and has pushed the boundaries of anthropology as a discipline and of the social theory anthropologists employ. Human evolutionary ecology approaches sociocultural traits in terms of fitness, using theories of optimization in evolutionary theory. A wide variety of environmentally oriented human behavioral ecologists explore human practices in natural environmental in terms of evolutionary theory. Subjects of study range from analysis of lactation and nursing practices in relationship to the environments in which they are found to factors contributing to obesity.
