Anna L. Peterson 
Being Human 
Ethics, Environment, and Our Place in the World

Being Human examines the complex connections among conceptions of human nature, attitudes toward non-human nature, and ethics. Anna Peterson proposes an ‘ethical anthropology’ that examines how ideas of nature and humanity are bound together in ways that shape the very foundations of cultures. Peterson discusses mainstream Western understandings of what it means to be human, as well as alternatives to these perspectives, and suggests that the construction of a compelling, coherent environmental ethics will revise our ideas not only about nature but also about what it means to be human.

Table of Content

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. Not of the World: Human Exceptionalism in Western Tradition

3. The Social Construction of Nature and Human Nature

4. The Relational Self: Asian Views of Nature and Human Nature

5. Person and Nature in Native American Worldviews

6. Relationships, Stories, and Feminist Ethics

7. Evolution, Ecology, and Ethics

8. In and Of the World: Toward a Chastened Constructionist Anthropology

9. Different Natures

Bibliography

About the author

Anna L. Peterson is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Florida and author of Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvador’s Civil War (1997) and co-editor of the forthcoming Christianity, Social and and Globalization in the Americas(2001), with Manuel Vasquez and Philip Williams.