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Faculty

Peter Brosius

Professor
Ph.D. Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1992
pbrosius@uga.edu

Both my research and teaching is premised on the belief that anthropology has an important role to play not only in contributing to our understanding of the human impact on the physical and biotic environment, but also in showing how that environment is constructed, represented, claimed, and contested.

PAST RESEARCH

I have a long-standing interest in the human ecology of Southeast Asia, particularly with respect to issues of environmental degradation. In 1990 I published a monograph entitled After Duwagan: Deforestation, Succession, and Adaptation in Upland Luzon, Philippines, which examined the historical ecology of deforestation in the Mt. Pinatubo region of the Philippines. My primary concern was to use succession theory to develop a general model for assessing the long-term impact of the primary forms of anthropogenic disturbance in the area.

Since joining the anthropology faculty at UGA in 1992, my research has focused on the international campaign against logging in the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. In the 1980s logging companies in Sarawak moved into areas occupied by Penan hunter-gatherers. In response the Penan resisted the activities of these companies by erecting blockades, thereby becoming the focus of a broad-based transnational environmental and indigenous rights campaign which has persisted, albeit somewhat diminished, up to the present. Their story has received broad international media coverage and scores of celebrities, from Al Gore and Jerry Garcia to Prince Charles, have spoken out on their behalf. The attention that the Penan have received is deeply resented by the Malaysian government, which has mounted a vigorous response. In the process, Malaysia has come to play an increasingly visible role as a critic of what it regards as neocolonialist attempts at control over environmental affairs in the South. My research focuses on the history of the Sarawak campaign; a campaign which has been transformed from a singular focus on the imperative to stop the progress of bulldozers, to one forced to contend with the Uruguay round of GATT, Post-UNCED conventions, ITTO criteria and indicators of sustainability, Eco-labeling, and the North-South debate.

This research is significant not only because of what it reveals about the contemporary politics of nature, but also because it is an example of what anthropologist George Marcus has termed "multi-sited ethnography". The Sarawak campaign consists not merely of a set of blockades in a remote part of Borneo, but is also manifested in environmentalist direct actions in Los Angeles and Sydney, decisions by the Austrian Parliament, U.S. congressional resolutions condemning the use of Malaysian timber, high-profile Malaysian government delegations to Europe, strategizing meetings, press conferences, benefit concerts, letter-writing campaigns, newspaper articles, faxes, e-mail messages, and more. In my attempts to understand what links all of these, I have carried out "field" research at a diverse number of sites: encampments of nomadic Penan, the Ministry of Primary Industries in Kuala Lumpur, Rainforest Action Network headquarters in San Francisco, WWF International headquarters near Geneva, the Parliament building in Vienna, the offices of the International Tropical Timber Organization in Yokohama, and in London, Copenhagen, Munich, Basel, Sydney, Penang and elsewhere.

I am in the process of bringing this project to an end, with a view toward developing several new projects (see below). In the meantime, I am currently writing two books based on this research: Melted Earth: The Politics and Poetics of Dispossession in Sarawak (under review) and Arresting Images: The Sarawak Rainforest Campaign and Transnational Environmental Politics.

CURRENT RESEARCH: LINKING ANTHROPOLOGY AND CONSERVATION

In June 1997 Anna Tsing (UC Santa Cruz), Charles Zerner (Sarah Lawrence College) and I co-organized a conference with funding from the Ford Foundation entitled Representing Communities: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Resource Management. The purpose of this project -- both the conference and the forthcoming edited volume -- was to examine the history of community-based natural resource management, and to address both some of the tensions and possibilities that emerged out of efforts to reconcile the goals of conservation and social justice.

This project was a precursor of my present research and teaching trajectory which, in recent years, has shifted increasingly toward an engagement with contemporary conservation issues. The broader context of this engagement is described on the website of the Conservation and Community Lab. I am currently developing two new research projects.

Conservation Planning and Implementation in Pulong Tau National Park, Sarawak
The Sarawak State Government has recently decided to gazette a large portion of the Tama Abu mountain range, extending to the Kalimantan border, as Pulong Tau National Park. This highland area of approximately 100,000 hectares on the central spine of Borneo, encompasses the Kelabit highlands and is adjacent to Kayan Mentarang National Park in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. It is inhabited both by intensive rice cultivating Kelabit and settled Penan foragers.

The research project I am presently developing will focus on protected area planning and implementation in Pulong Tau National Park. It is premised on recognition that protected area planning in Sarawak must be viewed in the broader context of other state landscape planning and environmental management agendas, specifically related to timber concessions and plantation development. I am especially interested in understanding how widely accepted international conservation planning and management practices are implemented in the Sarawak context. How do specific government departments (or individuals within those departments) become convinced that particular forms of conservation planning and implementation do, or do not, fit the Sarawak context, and in what ways are these practices altered to fit local priorities? What debates or critiques shape the ways conservation planning and implementation are manifested in Sarawak? To what degree, or in what ways, does this initiative become entangled with other governmental administrative and regulatory apparatuses?

Ecoregional Conservation
I am also developing a new research project focused on emerging technologies of visualization in contemporary conservation. In recent years we have witnessed a shift away from community-based approaches to conservation and toward ecoregional conservation planning and other priority-setting approaches. Such models, promulgated by major woman holding leaf as shadeconservation organizations, are based upon of visualization methods designed to make natural and cultural communities "legible." Examples include WWF's Global 200, TNC's Conservation by Design, and CI's Biodiversity Hotspots.

My research will examine a series of ecoregional approaches as they are applied in specific conservation initiatives. I am especially interested in understanding the consequences of visualizing biodiversity at different scales. I am also interested in how such methodologies produce images of local communities as threats and how they lay the groundwork for various forms of environmental governance. I am in the process of developin g a collaborative proposal for a comparative project focused on elucidating the links between the process of ecoregional conservation planning as it is envisaged from the center -- that is, from headquarters offices in Washington, D.C. and Gland, Switzerland (where the headquarters of both IUCN and WWF International are located) - and the process of implementation at particular conservation sites in Africa, Asia, South America and the Pacific.

GRADUATE STUDENTS

I presently serve on many graduate student committees as major advisor. The research projects of students with whom I work are focused on a broad range of environmental topics. Descriptions of their individual research projects will soon be posted on this site.

Cheryl McClary’s dissertation research integrates theories of ethnoecology, procedural justice, and political ecology to examine how citizens engage in water policy-making in the Mobile Bay area of coastal Alabama. She collected data across a socioeconomic gradient to learn what conditions enhance or inhibit participation in decision-making.

David Meek plans to conduct dissertation research in the Amazonian state of Para, Brazil, focusing on how agroecological education is used within the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement. Combining ethnographic techniques with  various cartographic methodologies and those of analytical soil science, David endeavors to articulate a broad theory of the political ecology of education, specifically illustrating how a social movement  employs education tactically to obtain its objectives of social and environmental transformation within an explicitly contented landscape.

Annie MacFadyen (annmac@uga.edu) is developing a dissertation research project that will examine the livelihood and landscape interventions and environmental governance of the Biodiversity Conservation Corridors project in the highlands of Vietnam. 

Danyel Addes is currently developing a dissertation research project examining community based natural resource management of marine protected areas and the political ecology of eco-tourism in the Melanesian nation of Vanuatu. 

Kate Dunbar is currently conducting her dissertation research in Peru, examining how increasing environmental variability combined with changing patterns of and attitudes towards water use, and the political history of water management in the Andes contribute to perceptions of environmental change and strategies for future management.

Rebecca Witter (mariposa@uga.edu) conducted dissertation field research in Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) from July 2006 to July 2007.  She is currently finishing her dissertation which focuses on the relationship between territory and mobility in the Makandezulu region of the LNP and the significance of this relationship in the context of conservation related resettlement. 

Jonathan S. Penland  is a PhD Student in the Department of Ecological and Environmental Anthropology currently researching how ecological tourism programs that utilize home stays produce educationally transformative opportunities at the intersection of cultural adaptation and conservation education.

Geoff Kelley is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork for his dissertation, "Transboundary to Local: Conservation Across Boundaries on the U.S. - Mexico Border."  His work in the greater Big Bend region investigates multi-scalar social and political dynamics of land use and resource management in the El Carmen - Big Bend Transboundary Conservation Area, a network of six adjacent protected areas in Texas, Chihuahua, and Coahuila along the Rio Grande/Bravo.

Ted Maclin is researching institutional relations, organizational culture, and network processes within the World Wildlife Fund International (WWF) Arctic Network Initiative, particularly focusing on the links between informal institutions, networked knowledge, and conservation outcomes.
 
Michelle Palma (mpalma@uga.edu) is working on her PhD in geography and plans to conduct research in Fiji, focusing on how various forms of tourism influence and are influenced by local Fijian knowledge, culture, and landscape.  She is interested in cross-cultural interactions; the mutual constitution of place and identity; and the social production/construction of nature.

David Himmelfarb is a PhD candidate in Anthropology. His research focuses on the long-term effects of displacement on people's abilities to cope with food shortages in the Benet Resettlement Area, located on margins of Mt. Elgon National Park, Uganda. He began working there in the summer of 2005 through a grant from the World Agroforestry Centre, and will return in September 2009, for 12 months to continue his research.

Heather Gallivan is a research assistant at the CICR and a doctoral student at the University of Georgia (UGA).  Her interests include the political ecology of marine conservation, the anthropology of organizations, and science and technology studies. Her research will consider the institutional and local dynamics of coral reef conservation in Indonesia. Prior to attending graduate school at UGA, Heather dedicated 10 years to working and teaching in the field of Montessori education. She has a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Arizona and a M.Ed. from Loyola College in Maryland.

Elaina Lill (lille@uga.edu) will investigate the cultural production of “Malagasy traditional customary law” by various actors in a community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) effort located on the southwestern coast of Madagascar. The second component of this research will investigate how markets influence local participation in the CBNRM project, local welfare, and perceptions of the environment.


FORMER STUDENTS

Adam Henne did his fieldwork in Chile with environmentalists, foresters, scientists, loggers, and labor and indigenous activist. His dissertation was titled "Making Good Wood: Technologies of Value and the Forest Stewardship Council in Chile." He is now an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at University of Wyoming.

Joshua Lockyer is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. His research focuses on the global ecovillage movement and other contemporary utopian intentional communities. He is also on the executive committee of Eco-City USA, an interdisciplinary initiative that conducts research on and raises awareness about intentional living as a potential antidote to a variety of social, economic and environmental problems.

TEACHING

Since coming to the University of Georgia in 1992 I have dedicated my teaching efforts to meeting the programmatic needs of the department at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

At the undergraduate level, I teach Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 4050/6050) on an annual basis, generally during the spring semester. This course is designed to provide undergraduate majors with a comprehensive overview of the history of anthropology. The course syllabus can be found here.

In 2004 I began teaching a new undergraduate course called How the World (really) Works: The Anthropology of Consumption and Globalization (ANTH 3200), which I will teach each Spring. The syllabus for this course can be found here.

At the graduate level, I have consistently taught core courses, including History of Anthropological Theory (ANTH 6520) and Foundations of Ecological Anthropology (ANTH 6490). Additionally, I have developed and taught a number of elective courses, including Contemporary Theory in Anthropology (ANTH 4090/6090) and Environmentalism: Movements, Rhetorics, Representations (ANT 850).

At present my graduate teaching is focused mostly on Conservation and Community (ANTH 8500). This course typically attracts students both from Anthropology and from the Institute of Ecology, especially those who are pursuing certificates or degrees in the Conservation Ecology and Sustainable Development Program. Conservation and Community is a prerequisite for students interested in participating in research activities associated with the Conservation and Community Lab. A syllabus for Conservation and Community can be found here.

Recent publications:

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