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This module for Involving Anthropology presents an account of one of the plenary debates held at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) World Congress held at Manchester University, 5-10 August 2013. The module begins with a brief introduction to provide the context for the debate, which included two speakers for (Amita Baviskar and Don Nonini) and two speakers against (Helen Kopnina and Veronica Strang) the motion: ‘Justice for people must come before justice for the environment’. The introduction is followed by an edited transcript of John Gledhill’s welcome and introduction, the texts of the arguments made by each speaker for and against the motion (with the exception of Veronica Strang, whose presentation is being published elsewhere a summary of the comments and questions subsequently invited from the floor of the hall, and then a transcript of the responses of the presenters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introductory essay presents a genealogy, admittedly partial, of Robert Tonkinson’s theorisation, focusing upon how his mode of conceptualising the ethnographic issues he has traversed is basically a dialectical approach. In part such conceptualisation is understandable in terms of how his background has brought together a number of contrasting perspectives—detailed ethnography of specific situations and an abiding ‘uncontrolled’ comparative perspective, Aboriginal Australia and Melanesia, British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology, and others. The approach that he has developed in synthesising all these influences in his ethnographic and theoretical work has a powerful precedent in the ‘dynamic theory’ of Raymond Firth. This heritage helps explain both the convergence of Bob’s analyses with contemporary practice theory and the dialectical mode of argumentation he has adopted throughout his analyses, although he uses such terms as ‘paradoxes’, ‘adaptive strategies’, and ‘accommodations’ rather than thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The introduction concludes by analysing how the articles contributed to this special issue build upon Tonkinson’s work in providing their own original syntheses for analysing their own research situations, in some cases also understandable as ‘paradoxes’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]