Environmental complexities: Variations on the study of the ecosystem-culture relationship from anthropology

By Felipe Cárdenas-Támara

The book should be called: A Dissident Indigenous Anthropologist's Journey to Study the Ecosystem-Culture Relationship. Anyone who reads the book to the end will understand the meaning of this statement, which is based on the search for scientific truth about ecological, cultural, social, and political issues. This is a book of theoretical exploration of my anthropological studies of the ecosystem-culture relationship, which I frame within the field of complexity studies. The seven texts that make up this book, including the preface, can be read as excerpts from my diary or personal log, in which I have reflected on my perceptions and studies of environmental and even political issues. This preface reflects my intentions as a vice-presidential candidate, based on my participation as a member of the Colombian environmental movement in the presidential campaign of Enrique Parejo González, who at that time led the so-called National Reconstruction Movement, whose voice was fundamentally opposed to the second government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2006-2010). I was invited to participate as a vice-presidential candidate, representing certain sectors of Colombian environmentalism. Our electoral performance was very modest; we did not receive more than sixty thousand votes. The national press never invited us to participate in any forum. I was exploring new areas of work and was not really interested in the electoral issue, in the sense that my participation or opinions would compromise the academic work I was trying to do, after I had been dismissed from the Faculty of Environmental and Rural Studies at the Javeriana University for showing solidarity with professors who had been unfairly dismissed and for accompanying the Colombian homeopathic movement, where I myself had trained as a homeopath. The real political figure was Enrique Parejo, but at that time he had no support and no social or political movement that supported him in a real and concrete way. I ventured into the electoral world with joy, discovering that the mainstream press in Colombia acts as an agent of censorship, denying real participation to candidates and citizens. The following text was published in a newspaper of the National Reconstruction Movement, and I use it in the book to show how environmental thinking can make inroads both in politics (in a populist way, of course, President Gustavo Petro would teach us a lot about this a few years later) and in the practice of science. The following chapters are structured within an analytical framework that includes approaches based on the study of the ecosystem-culture relationship in an initial theoretical presentation (chapter 1); a study of the relationship of life from a perceptual field (chapter 2); the problems of environmentalism as a religion and structures of oppression (chapter 3); the role of political ecology and environmental land-use planning (chapter 4); the dilemmas of environmental planning are addressed through the defense of the Thomas van der Hammen Forest Reserve, studying the expression of the overlap and confrontation of two seemingly irreconcilable logics: The role of Eastern Christianity in its readings of meta-environmentalism or meta-ecology is addressed in an in-depth research paper based on an analysis of the ecology of the sacred in Orthodox Christianity (chapter 6). The last chapter is presented as an epistemological reflection on the exercise of scientific construction from elements of a nomadic anthropology open to the sense of theoretical exploration.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F63FFR4G
• ISBN13: 9798281021531
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 195 Pages
• Dimensions: 11.7" x 0.4" x 8.3"