Anthropology 313: Communism, Socialism and the Environment

What can we learn from the history, ideology and practice of socialism, anarchism, and communism when thinking ecologically? Was communism uniformly destructive, marked by catastrophes like the Chernobyl meltdown or Mao’s war on nature? What are the unexpected environmental surprises or sustainable aspects of socialist experiments, including those in state socialism as well as external to the state? This course provides both political theory and case studies to examine what is/was state socialism, anarchism, and the Communist Party in a global context and with special emphasis on peasants, their agricultural practices, revolutionary inclinations, and obstinacy against the state.  The course draws on materials from environmental history, post-socialist anthropology, and political ecology to explore lived realities and utopian projections of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.