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Stefanie Belharte explores human–environment relations across the interface of the human and the life sciences, drawing on a natural science background, an MSc in conservation, and a PhD in environmental anthropology. Thematically, she has emphasized land and resource use with particular attention to vegetation management and material culture. Geographically, she has focused on rainforests in the humid tropics and, ethnographically, on Melanesia. She has also conducted field research in Papua New Guinea.
Stefanie’s research project at the Rachel Carson Center will look at the concrete, tangible “materialness” of human artefacts as a conduit for studies across the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the crafts. It will ask how object materialities—understood either substantively or experientially—supply evidence of human–environment relations. The project takes the form of three chapters in the context of a volume co-edited with Dr. Christin Kocher Schmid, which explores the theme from conceptual, methodological, and ethnographic perspectives. The two latter chapters refer to a large collection of material culture assembled during field research in Papua New Guinea; the former chapter introduces the volume, integrating all contributions and sketching out a framework for studying the subject systematically.
RCC Research Project: Collecting Human–Environment Relations: An Ecological Approach to Material Culture in Oceania
Selected Publications:
- with Maioli, Veronica, Marcela Stuker Kropf, and Catia Henriques Callado. “Timber Exploitation in Colonial Brazil: A Historical Perspective of the Atlantic Forest.” Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana Y Caribeña (HALAC) Revista De La Solcha 10, no. 2 (2020): 46–73.
- “The Ecological View: Management of Tree Crops and the Transition to Vegeculture in South-East Asia and the Pacific.” In Why Cultivate? Anthropological and Archaeological Approaches to Foraging–Farming Transitions in Southeast Asia, edited by Graeme Barker and Monica Janowski, 27–46. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2011.
- “Sago and the settling of Sahul: How present patterns of plant use may illuminate subsistence prehistory.” In Proceedings of the IVth International Congress of Ethnobotany (ICEB 2005), edited by Z. F. Ertug, 551–556. Istanbul: Yeditepe University Press, 2006.