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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 nonWestern/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).
