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Can anthroposophists be considered environmentalists? Based on the author’s recent ethnographic research, this article seeks to delineate the profile of the anthroposophical environmentalist, a figure belonging to a particular form of environmentalism. In the last two centuries, anthroposophy (founded by Rudolf Steiner, 1861-1925) has elaborated a universalistic narrative named “spiritual science.” Today, through a “salvific approach” and a “karstic life,” anthroposophy informs different, blended, environmental practices intertwined with ecological and social issues that include spirituality, anti-modernism, human-nonhuman relationships and alternative sciences. Consequently, the ecological movements inspired by anthroposophy have a wide and increasing diffusion globally and this, in turn, stimulates anthropology to produce appropriate ethnographic knowledge of this form of environmentalism.

En este artículo, se evidencian datos y conceptos articulados por la investigacion de las agencias internacionales (UNWoman, UNICEF, WTO, WHO), con respecto a las consecuencias del cambio climático. Además que las migraciones, son las relaciones de género y el estatus generacional los más involucrados en los cambios, a menudo, gravísimos. La autora se plantea entonces una evaluación de si la antropología pueda contribuir - por medio de sus experiencias etnográficas de estudio del cambio climático – en realizar un avance que podría ser constituido por una antropología de la implementación para la igualdad en las situaciones de cambio climático.

The article analyses the special relationship with the world of plants developed by anthroposophy from the framework of a new perspective called the “plant turn” (Myers 2015). Anthroposophy (AS) is analysed as a peculiar form of Analogism (Descola 2005), historically derived from the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and subsequently evolved into contemporary AS practices that the author encountered during her fieldwork in a community of North-Eastern Italy. Both Steiner’s texts and the analysis of contemporary practices of AS reveal a relationship with the world of plants that the author reads in light of Ingold’s categories of “interweaving” of the world, the interpenetration of elements, and their ceaseless becoming (Ingold 2011). The result is a representation of the vegetal world involving the whole cosmos, humans and non-humans, terrestrial and celestial, in a cosmic expansion of the relations between beings typical of Analogisms. The practices referring to the vegetal world enacted by anthroposophists are intense, engaging, dialogue-based and provocative in their ability to uproot many elements of naturalism and deal with a contemporary world characterised by ecological crisis.

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