Conservation, Anthropology and

Abstract

The anthropology of conservation is a subset of environmental anthropology focusing on conservation interventions, and as such it has theoretical and ethnographic roots in human ecology. Many anthropologists of conservation consider themselves to be political ecologists, a loosely defined field stimulated by Marxist thought. A different approach to the anthropology of conservation developed alongside the anthropology of development, using Foucault's theories. This introduced a largely unexamined disjuncture into the anthropology of conservation between Foucauldian and Marxist understandings of power, a disjuncture that has caused some to oversimplify Foucault's concepts. Yet Marx's ideas about the economy are invaluable to understanding conservation, particularly when so many interventions nowadays promote market subjectivities and measure the value of the environment in market terms. The field needs to continue to find ways to use concepts of power from both bodies of theory.