Thinking about fields and embodied work.

I came into the field of environmental history with a background in anthropology. One of the things that really hooked me in to environmental history as opposed to more generalist approaches was the sense of boundary blurring that environmental history inhabits. There’s a tension in trying to do history from a perspective that doesn’t easily come to us, as humans encultured to view the world through human lenses. But it is exciting, illuminating and expansive to try to think through a lens other than what comes ‘naturally’.

This is part of what attracted me to anthropology initially. I love the challenge of seeing the world with different foundational beliefs. What if science is not the bedrock, but something else? Or what if science is just the name we give to truths that are called by other names, other scriptures.

To me, the exciting thing about history, or anthropology – or, probably, most humanities disciplines – is the opportunity to take a step back from your own day to day, well worn view of things. To think about how you think about something, and to think about how someone else thinks about something. At the same time, through your sources – whether they be living or dead, or maps, or artefacts, or dust – you can take a step forward. There’s an element to the practice of environmental history (and anthropology) that is much more embodied than I had assumed it would be back when I was an undergraduate.

Working with your mind, working with your body.

From the outside, looking in at academics at work, history seemed to be an incredibly isolated pursuit. It was a discipline removed from the here and now, and the we. Anthropology has elements of that impression as well – you do spend an awful lot of time setting yourself apart from both your own context of day to day, and from the context of your field work to think in grand scales, to think academically. But to the untrained eye it is easier to see an anthropologist in the field, and to see them embodied in the practice of study.

I’ve learned since, of course, that the apparently isolated and internal work of academic thought is far from exclusively mental. The body is intrinsically involved in the work of thought, and the process of discovery. That old trope of the cartesian binary between the mind and the body is less and less evident as I grow in experience.