ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the origins and evolution of environmental anthropology. Anthropology focuses on culture, and since cultures vary anthropologists reveal the various ways in people have invested the world with cultural significance. This includes the non-human as much as the human world. Using the work of Roy Rappaport as a focus, the chapter shows how anthropologists have not only revealed how different cultures make sense of nature. It also shows how the very distinction between human and non-human is itself culturally specific. This means the environmental anthropology reveals the cultural relativity of views about the environment, including the category ‘environment’ as a cultural invention. It follows that there is no one ‘correct’ way to view the non-human world. Societies invent cultural categories and habits that are useful in their particular engagements with non-humans.
