Andrew S. Mathews

I am currently a full Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My research, both in Mexico, and more recently in Italy, has focused on the relationship between people forests, and with environmental change more broadly. Around the world, peasants and indigenous people developed very long term traditions of experimenting with plants, animals, and soils. We can learn from these traditions of experimentation, and we can bring them to bear upon contemporary climate change politics, including questions of state formation, political economy, and ecological modeling. In addition to my concern with human/environment relations, I have research and teaching interests in anthropology of bureaucracy and financial markets, anthropology of law and illegality, political ecology, environmental history, landscape history, sociology of knowledge, science and technology studies and state building. More recently I have been learning to draw and diagram plant form, and I have been exploring how drawing and diagramming are methods for attending to long term or long past events, from tree cutting, to forest fires and disease. My work spans the range from environmental humanities, to anthropology, to collaborations with ecologists and ecological modelers.

Since 2013, I have been working on histories of cultivation, landscape shaping and disaster in Central Italy. My most recent book, Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes, Yale, 2022, used historical ecology and natural history methods to study forest histories and climate change politics. I use drawings and diagrams to explore the slow temporalities of trees and landscape forms, and I argue that humans have the capacity to care for very long term processes through our capacity to tend and care for the shapes of trees and landscapes.