EKW
Institut für
Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (Anthropological Studies in
Culture and History)
What are environmental relations? On the relationship between ethnographic research and the environmental humanitiesLecture by Oliver Liebig at the Institute Colloquium of the Institute for Anthropological Studies in Culture and Historyt
17 April 2025
Photo: Liburkina
Dr. Oliver Liebig is editor of the "UmweltEthnologie" series published by transcript Verlag.
Environmental relations are a central concept in the environmental humanities – and yet they remain surprisingly difficult to grasp. While political conflicts over resources, environmental justice, or climate policies are the focus of much work in the environmental humanities, environmental relations themselves – as everyday, experience-based interconnections between people and their environment – are often overlooked.
Attempting to analyze environmental relations as complex, situational practices of being-in-the-world opens up a dimension that extends far beyond political aspects. Ethnographic approaches are particularly suitable for such an analysis. These approaches allow us to take the relational quality of environmental conditions seriously and thus contribute both to conceptual clarification and to more detailed descriptions in the environmental humanities
