ANTH4500 — Phil & Practice of Commons
What does it mean to “think like a commoner”? Before the modern state and global capitalist economies, local villagers in Japan used cultural practices called “satoyama” to collectively care for and sustainably provision from their nearby forests. In Bali, to this day, an entire mountain irrigation system called “subak” is effectively managed by a collection of villages who hold regular festivals and make offerings at strategically placed water temples that control a synchronized release of water down the mountain to their terraced rice paddies. These cultural practices and local social rules are what we, in English, call “commons.” They exist around the world and provide diverse and enduring ways for people to sustain local, equitable livelihoods in relations of resilient reciprocity with the nearby natural world. This course looks at ancient and contemporary social-ecological commoning practices, including the new commons experiments in community ownership of renewable energy, community participatory budgeting, seed sharing, and more. Students will engage in fieldwork through the instructor’s community-engaged “Solar Commons Project” and learn from Engineers Without Borders who build community-scale resilience infrastructure in the U.S. and around the world. A final project allows students to design a commons that brings together local history, public art, creative legal and peer governance strategies, and community economics to solve a specific social-ecological problem. Students leave with an anthropologically grounded, regenerative community design “toolkit” that will allow them to “think like a commoner” and contribute to solutions work building communities rooted in nature, social justice, biomimicry, and land stewardship. prereq: Minimum 90 credits or grad student