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THE ENVIRONMENT AND ANTHROPOLOGY 121
creators of our common global ecosystem (Hubbell — Ryan 2022: 81). (For similar
ideas, see the chapter Introduction to the environmental humanities.)
A young woman living in an eco-village I met during my research expressed the
same idea in different words, calling it a community feeling:
“For me, community feeling means that I can feel fellowship not only with my neighbor but
also with the African baby who has no drinking water [...] If we could say that we live in
communion with the flora and fauna and we are one another's fellows in the world, a
different world would evolve around this idea. I would therefore say that communal feeling
is not only a human feeling” (H. L. 2009).
In contemporary ecological and environmental anthropology, two dominant
dilemmas appear to unfold. It is evident in both that a revival of approach and
method is indispensable, whether the researcher is working on “classical” ground
or elsewhere.
One of these affects the applications of anthropology, whether the discipline
can retain its neutral position (many claim that it cannot in any way — see Kottak
1999; Milton 1993a), and how much it can contribute to contemporary
environmental issues (see Kottak 1999; Poncelet 2001). The other, theoretical,
dilemma examines how to resist the modern — or interventionist, as Kottak terms
it — philosophy which outlines a global ethic and wishes to impose it on everything
and everyone, irrespective of cultural differences (Kottak 1999: 26). In a similar
vein, Amelia Moore, who developed the anthropology of the Anthropocene, believes
that we need new frames of thought and a new conceptual set for the new era of
planetary history (Moore 2016). This is supported by the ontological turn, largely
facilitated by questions deliberated in ecological and environmental anthropology:
the indigenous perspective (epistemological and ontological systems), exploring
and foregrounding local ontologies, setting aside Western categories for the goal
of “understanding” and redefining the interrelations of humans, animals, nature,
the environment and society on the basis of new ecological and ethical foundations.
(To this, see the chapters “Environmental Philosophy”, and “Introduction to the
environmental humanities”)
Both dilemmas occur in the work of Csaba Mészáros, who wishes to find the
possibilities and place of anthropology “in working out morally acceptable responses
to climate change” on the basis of his own field research and of ontological
anthropology (Cs. Mészaros 2019: 145). This depends, in part, on a revaluation
of the conceptual apparatus, leading him to rethink conceptual dichotomies such
as nature versus culture, nature versus society, Western/European versus non¬
Western/indigenous, Otherness—Selfness, and the possible anthropological
interpretations of the Anthropocene. He also examines how the results and outlook
of anthropological research could be integrated into the discourse on climate
change, understood in a more accurate way (Cs. Mészáros 2019).