Dr. Rachel Cypher

Rachel Cypher is an anthropologist and author redefining how we understand the lived experience of environmental change in the Americas. Her interdisciplinary research reveals that infrastructures built to manage scarcity are generating novel ecologies that increasingly sustain human and multispecies life.

Her first monograph, Heartland: Belonging at the Edge of Extraction (under review), advances a groundbreaking account of industrial agriculture in Argentina’s Pampas. Cypher reveals a paradox missed by dominant explanations: farmers’ profound emotional attachments to land and livelihood propel the very practices that are degrading soil, water, and multispecies habitats. The ethnography pairs theoretical rigor with literary depth to illuminate how affect structures environmental decision-making.

Her commitment to methodological innovation is reflected in her recent co-edited volume, Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene: Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds (UMP 2023), produced with Nils Bubandt and Astrid Oberborbeck-Andersen. A sequel to the influential Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (UMP 2017), the book emerges from her years of collaboration with Anna Tsing’s Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) project between 2014 and 2019 and extends ongoing debates about how anthropology can attend to damaged and emergent multispecies worlds.

As a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina teaching at the Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, and a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (2022-2025), Cypher conducted collaborative ethnographic research on climate adaptation. During this time she developed an analytic vocabulary for living with ecologies becoming the backbone of life in a rapidly changing world. Her current book project emerges from this research, and offers the first ethnographic account of effluent-fed river restoration in the American West.

Cypher’s intellectual formation is deeply shaped by place. Born and raised in Tucson partly within the visionary Biosphere 2 cult, she grew up inside the contradictions of utopian environmental futurism. This early proximity to ecological aspiration and its undoing fuels her lifelong inquiry into how people inhabit worlds under conditions of rupture.