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The Anthroposcene of Weather and Climate
Ethnographic Contributions to the Climate Change Debate
Sillitoe, P. (ed)
While it is widely acknowledged that climate change is among the greatest global challenges of our times, it has local implications too. This volume forefronts these local issues, giving anthropology a voice in this great debate, which is otherwise dominated by natural scientists and policy makers. It shows what an ethnographic focus can offer in furthering our understanding of the lived realities of climate debates. Contributors from communities around the world discuss local knowledge of, and responses to, environmental changes that need to feature in scientifically framed policies regarding mitigation and adaptation measures if they are to be effective.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies Sustainable Development Goals
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Arctic Abstractive Industry
Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North
Mason, A. (ed)
Through diverse engagements with natural resource extraction and ecological vulnerability in the contemporary Arctic, contributors to this volume apprehend Arctic resource regimes through the concept of abstraction. Abstraction refers to the creation of new material substances and cultural values by detaching parts from existing substances and values. The abstractive process differs from the activity of extractive industries by its focus on the conceptual resources that conceal processes of exploitation associated with extraction. The study of abstraction can thus help us attune to the formal operations that make appropriations of value possible while disclosing the politics of extraction and of its representation.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Circumpolar
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At Home on the Waves
Human Habitation of the Sea from the Mesolithic to Today
King, T. J. & Robinson, G. (eds)
Contemporary public discourses about the ocean are routinely characterized by scientific and environmentalist narratives that imagine and idealize marine spaces in which humans are absent. In contrast, this collection explores the variety of ways in which people have long made themselves at home at sea, and continue to live intimately with it. In doing so, it brings together both ethnographic and archaeological research – much of it with an explicit Ingoldian approach – on a wide range of geographical areas and historical periods.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Archaeology Environmental Studies (General)
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Between the Forest and the Road
The Waorani Struggle for Living Well in the Ecuadorian Oil Circuit
Bravo Díaz, A.
During the past two decades Ecuadorians have engaged in a national debate around Buen Vivir (living well). This ethnography discusses one of the ways in which people experience well-being or aspire to live well in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Waponi Kewemonipa (living well) is a Waorani notion that embraces ideas of good conviviality, health and certain ecological relations. For the Waorani living along the oil roads, living well has taken many pathways. Notably, they have developed new spatial organizations as they move between several houses, and navigate between the economy of the market and the economy of the forest.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
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Beyond the Lens of Conservation
Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another
Keller, E.
The global agenda of Nature conservation has led to the creation of the Masoala National Park in Madagascar and to an exhibit in its support at a Swiss zoo, the centerpiece of which is a mini-rainforest replica. Does such a cooperation also trigger a connection between ordinary people in these two far-flung places? The study investigates how the Malagasy farmers living at the edge of the park perceive the conservation enterprise and what people in Switzerland see when looking towards Madagascar through the lens of the zoo exhibit. It crystallizes that the stories told in either place have almost nothing in common: one focuses on power and history, the other on morality and progress. Thus, instead of building a bridge, Nature conservation widens the gap between people in the North and the South.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology
Areas: Africa Europe
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Beyond Wild and Tame
Soiot Encounters in a Sentient Landscape
Oehler, A. C.
Responding to recent scholarship, this book examines animal domestication and offers a Soiot approach to animals and landscapes, which transcends the wild-tame dichotomy. Following herder-hunters of the Eastern Saian Mountains in southern Siberia, the author examines how Soiot and Tofa households embrace unpredictability, recognize sentience, and encourage autonomy in all their relations with animals, spirits, and land features. It is an ethnography intended to help us reinvent our relations with the earth in unpredictable times.
Subject: Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Asia-Pacific
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Birds of Passage
Hunting and Conservation in Malta
Falzon, M.-A.
Bird migration between Europe and Africa is a fraught journey, particularly in the Mediterranean, where migratory birds are shot and trapped in large numbers. In Malta, thousands of hunters share a shrinking countryside. They also rub shoulders with a strong bird-protection and conservation lobby. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, this book traces the complex interactions between hunters, birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the dynamics and politics of bird conservation. Birds of Passage looks at the practice and meaning of hunting in a specific context, and raises broader questions about human-wildlife interactions and the uncertain outcomes of conservation.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Southern Europe
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Border Aesthetics
Concepts and Intersections
Schimanski, J. & Wolfe, S. F. (eds)
Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.
Subjects: Literary Studies Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)
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Choreographies of Landscape
Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park
Ness, S. A.
As an international ecotourism destination, Yosemite National Park welcomes millions of climbers, sightseers, and other visitors from around the world annually, all of whom are afforded dramatic experiences of the natural world. This original and cross-disciplinary book offers an ethnographic and performative study of Yosemite visitors in order to understand human connection with and within natural landscapes. By grounding a novel “eco-semiotic” analysis in the lived reality of parkgoers, it forges surprising connections, assembling a collective account that will be of interest to disciplines ranging from performance studies to cultural geography.
Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Area: North America
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Constructing Risk
Disaster, Development, and the Built Environment
Bender, S. O.
Reviewing current policies and practices, the book assesses the financial, economic and physical risk of building in hazardous areas, and looks at how societies approach economic development while trying to create a more resilient built environment in spite of the dangers. It examines the vulnerability of economic and social infrastructure to natural hazard events, looks at policies which imperil infrastructure, and proposes new development approaches to be undertaken by sovereign states, international development banks, NGOs, and bilateral aid agencies.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
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Contemporary Megaprojects
Organization, Vision, and Resistance in the 21st Century
Schindler, S., Fadaere, S., Brockington, D. (eds)
Contemporary megaprojects have evolved from the discreet, modernist projects undertaken in the past by centralized authorities to encompass everything from large-scale construction to space exploration. Contemporary Megaprojects explores how these projects have been impacted by cutting-edge technology, the private sector, and the processes of decentralization and dematerialization. With case studies ranging from mega-plantations in Southeast Asia to ocean mapping to sports events, the contributions in this collected volume demonstrate the increasing ambition and pervasiveness of these projects, as well as their significant impact on both society and the environment.
Subjects: Development Studies Environmental Studies (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
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Contextualizing Disaster
Button, G. V. & Schuller, M. (eds)
Contextualizing Disaster offers a comparative analysis of six recent "highly visible" disasters and several slow-burning, "hidden," crises that include typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical spills, and the unfolding consequences of rising seas and climate change. The book argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences. Rather, building on insights developed by political ecologists, this book makes a compelling argument for understanding disasters as transnational and global phenomena.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology
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Cooling Down
Local Responses to Global Climate Change
Hoffman, S. M., Eriksen, T. H., & Mendes, P. (eds)
Climate change is a slowly advancing crisis sweeping over the planet and affecting different habitats in strikingly diverse ways. While nations have signed treaties and implemented policies, most actual climate change assessments, adaptations, and countermeasures take place at the local level. People are responding by adjusting their practices, livelihoods, and cultures, protesting and migrating. This book portrays the diversity of explanations and remedies as expressed at the community level and its emphasis on the crucial importance of ethnographic detail in demonstrating how people in different parts of the world are scaling down the phenomenon of global warming.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Urban Studies Sustainable Development Goals
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Corporate Social Responsibility and the Paradoxes of State Capitalism
Ethnographies of Norwegian Energy and Extraction Businesses Abroad
Knudsen, S. (ed)
Through a series of case studies in diverse regions of the world, this book explores how transnational Norwegian energy and extractive industries handle corporate social responsibility (CSR) when operating abroad in places such as China, Brazil, and Turkey. With significant state ownership and embeddedness in the Nordic societal model, Norwegian capitalism is often represented as “benign” or ethical. By tracing CSR policy and practice—from headquarters to operations—this volume critically explores the workings of Norwegian corporate capitalism and its engagement with key issues of responsibility, accountability, and sustainability.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Northern Europe
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Delta Life
Exploring Dynamic Environments where Rivers Meet the Sea
Krause, F. & Harris, M. (eds)
Proposing a series of innovative steps towards better understanding human lives at the interstices of water and land, this volume includes eight ethnographies from deltas around the world. The book presents ‘delta life’ with intimate descriptions of the predicaments, imaginations and activities of delta inhabitants. Conceptually, the collection develops ‘delta life’ as a metaphor for approaching continual and intersecting sociocultural, economic and material transformations more widely. The book revolves around questions of hydrosociality, volatility, rhythms and scale. It thereby yields insights into people’s lives that conventional, hydrological approaches to deltas cannot provide.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Sociology
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Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia
Transitioning to an Alternative World System
Baer, H. A.
As global economic and population growth continues to skyrocket, increasingly strained resources have made one thing clear: the desperate need for an alternative to capitalism. In Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia, Hans Baer outlines the urgent need to reevaluate historical definitions of socialism, commit to social equality and justice, and prioritize environmental sustainability. Democatic eco-socialism, as he terms it, is a system capable of mobilizing people around the world, albeit in different ways, to prevent on-going human socio-economic and environmental degradation, and anthropogenic climate change.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)
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Disaster Upon Disaster
Exploring the Gap Between Knowledge, Policy and Practice
Hoffman, S. M. & Barrios, R. E. (eds)
A consistent problem that confronts disaster reduction is the disjunction between academic and expert knowledge and policies and practices of agencies mandated to deal with the concern. Although a great deal of knowledge has been acquired regarding many aspects of disasters, such as driving factors, risk construction, complexity of resettlement, and importance of peoples’ culture, very little has become protocol and procedure. Disaster Upon Disaster illuminates the numerous disjunctions between the suppositions, realities, agendas, and executions in the field, goes on to detail contingencies, predicaments, old and new plights, and finally advances solutions toward greatly improved outcomes.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Applied Anthropology
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Dust Inside
Fighting and Living with Asbestos-Related Disasters in Brazil
Mazzeo, A.
Toxic production, disrupted lives and contaminated bodies. Care for unacknowledged suffering, incurable cancers, and immeasurable losses. This book bears witness to the invisible disasters provoked by the asbestos market worldwide and gives a voice to the communities of survivors who struggle daily in the name of social and environmental justice. Grounded in a profound, touching ethnography, this book offers an original contribution to understanding global health disasters and grassroots health-based activism.
Subjects: Medical Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
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Ecological Migrants
The Relocation of China's Ewenki Reindeer Herders
Xie, Y.
Reindeer-herding Ewenki hunters have lived in the forests of China’s Greater Khingan Range for over three hundred years. They have sustained their livelihoods by collecting plants and herbs, hunting animals and herding reindeer. This ethnography details changing Ewenki ways of life brought first by China’s modernization and development policies and more recently by ecological policies that aim to preserve and restore the badly damaged ecologies of western China. Xie reflects on modernization and urbanization in China through this study of ecological migration policies and their effects on relocated Aoluguya Ewenki hunters.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Asia-Pacific
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Ecological Nostalgias
Memory, Affect and Creativity in Times of Ecological Upheavals
Angé, O. & Berliner, D. (eds)
Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies
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Edges, Fringes, Frontiers
Integral Ecology, Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainability in Guyana
Henfrey, T. B.
Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence use of Amazonian forests by Wapishana people in Guyana, Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use. Developing an original framework for holistic analysis, it demonstrates that flexible interplay among multiple modes of environmental understanding and decision-making allows the Wapishana to navigate socio-ecological complexity successfully in ways that reconcile short-term material needs with long-term maintenance and enhancement of the resource base.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
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Embracing Landscape
Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia
Küçüküstel, S.
Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. It focuses on the role of the spirited landscape which embraces all living creatures and acts as a unifying concept at the center of the human and non-human relations.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Asia
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Engaging Environments in Tonga
Cultivating Beauty and Nurturing Relations in a Changing World
Perminow, A. A.
On March 11, 2011, a tsunami warning was issued for Tonga in Polynesia. On the low and small island of Kotu, people were unperturbed in the face of impending catastrophe. The book starts out from the puzzle of peoples’ responses and reactions to this warning as well as their attitudes to a gradual rise of sea level and questions why people seemed so unconcerned about this and the accompanying loss of land. The book is an ethnography of the relationship between people and their environment based on fieldwork over three decades.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies
Area: Asia-Pacific
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Ethnographies of Power
A Political Anthropology of Energy
Loloum, T., Abram, S., & Ortar, N. (eds)
Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
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Fault Lines
Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy
Parrinello, G.
Earth’s fractured geology is visible in its fault lines. It is along these lines that earthquakes occur, sometimes with disastrous effects. These disturbances can significantly influence urban development, as seen in the aftermath of two earthquakes in Messina, Italy, in 1908 and in the Belice Valley, Sicily, in 1968. Following the history of these places before and after their destruction, this book explores plans and developments that preceded the disasters and the urbanism that emerged from the ruins. These stories explore fault lines between “rural” and “urban,” “backwardness” and “development,” and “before” and “after,” shedding light on the role of environmental forces in the history of human habitats.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present
Area: Southern Europe
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The Feeling of the Fall
An Ethnographic Writing Experiment between the Belize Barrier Reef and the Edges of Toronto, Ontario
Taccone, I.
As an inquiry into engagements with forces of loss and threat, this work explores experimental ways to write about climate crisis in anthropology. From Belize to Ontario and back, this ambitious piece of ethnographic writing set during a time “beyond ruin” in a fictional, ecotourist community in the year 2040. Here, loss is taken up through an inventive form of ethnographic storytelling that brings together people, animals, landscapes, and the weather in a world beyond the climate crisis right now where new entanglements with things which have fallen to ruin emerge in imagined milieus in which loss and life converge.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Urban Studies
Areas: North America Latin America and the Caribbean
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Fig Trees and Humans
Ficus Ecology and Mutualisms across Cultures
Aumeeruddy-Thomas, Y.
Humans and figs form hybrid communities within the context of anthropogenic landscapes, supported by biocultural mutualisms driven by traits of Ficus species and people’s imagination and practices, and where humans also positively influence Ficus species ecology. Fig Trees and Humans examines the interactions between the biology and ecology of the genus Ficus and how humans use and think of Ficus species across the tropics and in the Mediterranean region. It demonstrates a high level of convergence of material and symbolic uses of human-fig interactions that affect various aspects of human culture, as well as the ecology of wild or cultivated Ficus species.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Southern Europe
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Floating Economies
The Cultural Ecology of the Dal Lake in Kashmir, India
Casimir, M. J.
In the Himalayas of the Indian part of Kashmir three communities depend on the ecology of the Dal lake: market gardeners, houseboat owners and fishers. Floating Economies describes for the first time the complex intermeshing economy, social structure and ecology of the area against the background of history and the present volatile socio-political situation. Using a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, the author deals with the socioeconomic strategies of the communities whose livelihoods are embedded here and analyses the ecological condition of the Dal, and the reasons for its progressive degradation.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia
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Footprints in Paradise
Ecotourism, Local Knowledge, and Nature Therapies in Okinawa
Murray, A. E.
The economic imperative of sustainable tourism development frequently shapes life on small subtropical islands. In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores the transformation in community and sense of place as Okinawans come to view themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist consumer, and as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources. The rediscovery and revaluing of local ecological knowledge strengthens Okinawan or Uchinaa cultural heritage, despite the controversial presence of US military bases amidst a hegemonic Japanese state.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Asia-Pacific
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Global Sustainability and Communities of Practice
Maida, C. A. & Beck, S, (eds)
Collaboration between experts and the public is vital for effective community engagement aimed at improving the lives of the most vulnerable in society, whether at the local or global level. Using case-based and theoretical chapters that examine rural and urban communities of practice, this volume illustrates how participatory researchers and students, as well as policy and community leaders, find ways to engage with the broader public when it comes to global sustainability research and practice.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
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Going Forward by Looking Back
Archaeological Perspectives on Socio-Ecological Crisis, Response, and Collapse
Riede, F. & Sheets, P. (eds)
Catastrophes are on the rise due to climate change, as is their toll in terms of lives and livelihoods as world populations rise and people settle into hazardous places. While disaster response and management are traditionally seen as the domain of the natural and technical sciences, awareness of the importance and role of cultural adaptation is essential. This book catalogues a wide and diverse range of case studies of such disasters and human responses. This serves as inspiration for building culturally sensitive adaptations to present and future calamities, to mitigate their impact, and facilitate recoveries.
Subjects: Archaeology Applied Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
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The Horse in My Blood
Multispecies Kinship in the Altai and Saian Mountains
Peemot, V. S.
A fascinating interspecies relationship can be seen among the horse breeding pastoralists in the Altai and Saian Mountains of Inner Asia. Victoria Soyan Peemot herself grew up in a community with close human-horse relationships and uses her knowledge of the local language and horsemanship practices. Building upon Indigenous research epistemologies, she engages with the study of how the human-horse relationships interact with each other, experience injustices and develop resilience strategies as multispecies unions.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Sociology
Area: Asia
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Humanism Revisited
An Anthropological Perspective
Pinxten, R.
The West emancipated itself from the old humanism long ago and in doing so distanced itself from ‘heteronomy’: it declared that man, and not a non-human power, should be the first reference to approach people and nature. Today, as heirs of this tradition, we are still stuck in Eurocentrism (and often racism), and now even threaten to ruin nature by destroying biodiversity and causing the climate to warm up dangerously. Applied through an anthropological perspective, this book calls for a NEED-humanism: Not-Eurocentric, Ecological and (economically) Durable approach that can help promote inclusion and pluralism.
Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
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Hunters, Predators and Prey
Inuit Perceptions of Animals
Laugrand, F. & Oosten, J.
Inuit hunting traditions are rich in perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and human beings. The authors examine key figures such as the raven, an animal that has a central place in Inuit culture as a creator and a trickster, and qupirruit, a category consisting of insects and other small life forms. After these non-social and inedible animals, they discuss the dog, the companion of the hunter, and the fellow hunter, the bear, considered to resemble a human being. A discussion of the renewal of whale hunting accompanies the chapters about animals considered ‘prey par excellence’: the caribou, the seals and the whale, symbol of the whole. By giving precedence to Inuit categories such as ‘inua’ (owner) and ‘tarniq’ (shade) over European concepts such as ‘spirit ‘and ‘soul’, the book compares and contrasts human beings and animals to provide a better understanding of human-animal relationships in a hunting society.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Areas: North America Circumpolar
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Indigeneity and the Sacred
Indigenous Revival and the Conservation of Sacred Natural Sites in the Americas
Sarmiento, F. & Hitchner, S. (eds)
This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies
Areas: North America Latin America and the Caribbean
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Indigenous Resurgence
Decolonialization and Movements for Environmental Justice
Dhillon, J.
From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community’s protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology Colonial History Sustainable Development Goals
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Island Historical Ecology
Socionatural Landscapes of the Eastern and Southern Caribbean
Siegel, P. (ed)
In the first book-length treatise on historical ecology of the West Indies, Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural interventions over approximately eight millennia of human occupations. Environmental coring carried out in carefully selected wetlands allowed for the reconstruction of pre-colonial and colonial landscapes on islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Comparisons with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific islands place this case study into a larger context of island historical ecology.
Subjects: Archaeology Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
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Lands of the Future
Anthropological Perspectives on Pastoralism, Land Deals and Tropes of Modernity in Eastern Africa
Gabbert, E. C., Gebresenbet, F., Galaty, J. G., & Schlee, G. (eds)
Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa, based on long-term field research, that vividly illustrate the struggles and strategies of those who face dispossession and also discredit ideological false modernist tropes like ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Mobility Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
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Life as a Hunt
Thresholds of Identities and Illusions on an African Landscape
Marks, S. A.
The "extensive wilderness" of Zambia’s central Luangwa Valley is the homeland of the Valley Bisa whose cultural practices have enriched this environment for centuries. Beginning with the intrusions of warlords and later British colonials, successive generations have experienced the callousness and challenges of colonialism. Their homeland, a slender corridor surrounded by three national parks and an escarpment, is a microcosm of the political, economic and cultural battlefields surrounding most African protected areas today. The story of the Valley Bisa diverges from the myths that conservationists, administrators, and philanthropists, tell about Africa’s environmental and wildlife crises.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Africa
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Living on a Time Bomb
Local Negotiations of Oil Extraction in a Mexican Community
Schöneich, S.
Providing a holistic understanding of extensive oil extraction in rural Mexico, this book focuses on a campesino community, where oil extraction is deeply inscribed into the daily lives of the community members. The book shows how oil shapes the space where it is extracted in every aspect and produces multiple uncertainties. The community members express these uncertainties using the metaphor of the time bomb. The book shows how they find ways to "live off the time bomb" by using mechanisms of short-term coping and long-term adaptation and thus, developing the capability to determine their lives despite the ever-changing challenges.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
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Moving Places
Relations, Return and Belonging
Gregorič Bon, N. & Repič, J. (eds)
Moving Places draws together contributions from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, exploring practices and experiences of movement, non-movement, and place-making. The book centers on “moving places”: places with locations that are not fixed but relative. Locations appearing to be reasonably stable, such as home and homeland, are in fact always subject to practices, imaginaries, and politics of movement. Bringing together original ethnographic contributions with a clear theoretical focus, this volume spans the fields of anthropology, human geography, migration, and border studies, and serves as teaching material in related programs.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Environmental Studies (General)
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Nature Wars
Essays Around a Contested Concept
Ellen, R.
Organized around issues, debates and discussions concerning the various ways in which the concept of nature has been used, this book looks at how the term has been endlessly deconstructed and reclaimed, as reflected in anthropological, scientific, and similar writing over the last several decades. Made up of ten of Roy Ellen’s finest articles, this book looks back at his ideas about nature and includes a new introduction that contextualizes the arguments and takes them forward. Many of the chapters focus on research the author has conducted amongst the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)
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Nimby Is Beautiful
Cases of Local Activism and Environmental Innovation around the World
Hager, C. & Haddad, M. A. (eds)
NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) protests are often criticized as parochial and short-lived, generating no lasting influence on broader processes related to environmental politics. This volume offers a different perspective. Drawing on cases from around the globe, it demonstrates that NIMBY protests, although always arising from a local concern in a particular community, often result in broader political, social, and technological change. Chapters include cases from Europe, North America, and Asia, engaging with the full political spectrum from established democracies to non-democratic countries. Regardless of political setting, NIMBY movements can have a positive and proactive role in generating innovative solutions to local as well as transnational environmental issues. Furthermore, those solutions are now serving as models for communities and countries around the world.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Sociology
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Powerless Science?
Science and Politics in a Toxic World
Boudia, S. & Jas, N. (eds)
In spite of decades of research on toxicants, along with the growing role of scientific expertise in public policy and the unprecedented rise in the number of national and international institutions dealing with environmental health issues, problems surrounding contaminants and their effects on health have never appeared so important, sometimes to the point of appearing insurmountable. This calls for a reconsideration of the roles of scientific knowledge and expertise in the definition and management of toxic issues, which this book seeks to do. It looks at complex historical, social, and political dynamics, made up of public controversies, environmental and health crises, economic interests, and political responses, and demonstrates how and to what extent scientific knowledge about toxicants has been caught between scientific, economic, and political imperatives.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Medical Anthropology
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Reclaiming the Forest
The Ewenki Reindeer Herders of Aoluguya
Kolås, Å. & Xie, Y. (eds)
The reindeer herders of Aoluguya, China, are a group of former hunters who today see themselves as “keepers of reindeer” as they engage in ethnic tourism and exchange experiences with their Ewenki neighbors in Russian Siberia. Though to some their future seems problematic, this book focuses on the present, challenging the pessimistic outlook, reviewing current issues, and describing the efforts of the Ewenki to reclaim their forest lifestyle and develop new forest livelihoods. Both academic and literary contributions balance the volume written by authors who are either indigenous to the region or have carried out fieldwork among the Aoluguya Ewenki since the late 1990s.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Asia-Pacific
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Risk on the Table
Food Production, Health, and the Environment
Creager, A. N. H. & Gaudilière, J.-P. (eds)
Over the last century, the industrialization of agriculture and processing technologies have made food abundant and relatively inexpensive for much of the world’s population. Simultaneously, pesticides, nitrates, and other technological innovations intended to improve the food supply’s productivity and safety have generated new, often poorly understood risks for consumers and the environment. From the proliferation of synthetic additives to the threat posed by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the chapters in Risk on the Table zero in on key historical cases in North America and Europe that illuminate the history of food safety, highlighting the powerful tensions that exists among scientific understandings of risk, policymakers’ decisions, and cultural notions of “pure” food.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present Food & Nutrition Sustainable Development Goals
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Risky Futures
Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities in the Uncertain Circumpolar North
Ulturgasheva, O. & Bodenhorn, B. (eds)
The volume examines complex intersections of environmental conditions, geopolitical tensions and local innovative reactions characterising ‘the Arctic’ in the early twenty-first century. What happens in the region (such as permafrost thaw or methane release) not only sweeps rapidly through local ecosystems but also has profound global implications. Bringing together a unique combination of authors who are local practitioners, indigenous scholars and international researchers, the book provides nuanced views of the social consequences of climate change and environmental risks across human and non-human realms.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Sociology Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Circumpolar
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The Sea Commands
Community and Perception of the Environment in a Portuguese Fishing Village
Mendes, P.
Azenha do Mar is a fishing community on the southwest coast of Portugal. It came into existence around forty years ago, as an outcome of the abandonment of work in the fields and of propitious ecological conditions. This book looks at the migration processes since the founding of the community and how they relate to the social inequalities for property and labour which prevail today. The book also reflects upon the personal experience of the ethnographer in the field balancing the importance of methodology on the one hand and fieldwork as a research process on the other.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Southern Europe
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A Sea of Transience
Poetics, Politics and Aesthetics along the Black Sea Coast
Khalvashi, T. & Demant Frederiksen, M. (eds)
Transience is found in every meeting and form of coexistence between people and things that live and exist by, or move across or along, the Black Sea. It may come in various forms and guises, from de facto states, tourism, migration, trafficking or military troops, and it needs to be written and captured in sensuous, affective and imaginative ways. With particular attention to poetics, politics and aesthetics, this volume focuses on the scales of transient moments and histories, and enables readers to see and sense the many forms of transience that occur in a given landscape, sea or space.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Environmental Studies (General)
Areas: Central/Eastern Europe Asia
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Sentient Ecologies
Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape
Coțofană, A. & Kuran, H. (eds)
Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing. While the field of sentient landscapes has gained critical attention, the literature rarely seems to question the intentionality of sentient landscapes, which are often romanticized as pure, good, and just, and perceived as protectors of those who are powerless, indigenous, and colonized. The book takes a new stance on sentient landscapes with the intention of dispelling the denial of “coevalness” represented by their scholarly romanticization.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology
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Sovereign Forces
Everyday Challenges to Environmental Governance in Latin America
McNeish, J.-A.
Sovereignty is a significant force regarding the ownership, use, protection and management of natural resources. By placing an emphasis on the complex intertwined relationship between natural resources and diverse claims to resource sovereignty, this book reveals the backstory of contemporary resource contestations in Latin America and their positioning within a more extensive history of extraction in the region. Exploring cases of resource contestation in Bolivia, Colombia and Guatemala, Sovereign Forces highlights the value of these relationships to the practice of environmental governance and peacebuilding in the region.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Peace and Conflict Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Latin America and the Caribbean
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The State Otherwise
Green Space, Citizenship and Advocating for the Public in Beirut
Stefanelli, A.
The city of Beirut is increasingly congested, polluted and suffocating. Its already limited green public spaces are under growing threat of privatisation and redevelopment. The State Otherwise examines the difficult predicament of Beirut’s public green spaces from the vantage point of the civic campaign to reopen Horsh al Sanawbar, the city’s largest public park. Analysing the relationship between neoliberal sectarianism, private interest and political action, the book asks questions about the nature of privatisation of public property, civic society’s potential to mobilise individuals and the role of public authorities in promoting the public good.
Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General) Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Middle East & Israel
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Sustainable Development
An Appraisal from the Gulf Region
Sillitoe, P. (ed)
With growing evidence of unsustainable use of the world’s resources, such as hydrocarbon reserves, and related environmental pollution, as in alarming climate change predictions, sustainable development is arguably the prominent issue of the 21st century. This volume gives a wide ranging introduction focusing on the arid Gulf region, where the challenges of sustainable development are starkly evident. The Gulf relies on non-renewable oil and gas exports to supply the world’s insatiable CO2 emitting energy demands, and has built unsustainable conurbations with water supplies dependent on energy hungry desalination plants and deep aquifers pumped beyond natural replenishment rates. Sustainable Development has an interdisciplinary focus, bringing together university faculty and government personnel from the Gulf, Europe, and North America -- including social and natural scientists, environmentalists and economists, architects and planners -- to discuss topics such as sustainable natural resource use and urbanization, industrial and technological development, economy and politics, history and geography.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Middle East & Israel
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Trees, Knots, and Outriggers
Environmental Knowledge in the Northeast Kula Ring
Damon, F. H.
Trees, Knots and Outriggers (Kaynen Muyuw) is the culmination of twenty-five years of work by Frederick H. Damon and his attention to cultural adaptations to the environment in Melanesia. Damon details the intricacies of indigenous knowledge and practice in his sweeping synthesis of symbolic and structuralist anthropology with recent developments in historical ecology. This book is a long conversation between the author’s many Papua New Guinea informants, teachers and friends, and scientists in Australia, Europe and the United States, in which a spirit of adventure and discovery is palpable.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Asia-Pacific
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Understanding Conflicts about Wildlife
A Biosocial Approach
Hill, C. M., Webber, A. D. & Priston, N. E. C. (eds)
Conflicts about wildlife are usually portrayed and understood as resulting from the negative impacts of wildlife on human livelihoods or property. However, a greater depth of analysis reveals that many instances of human-wildlife conflict are often better understood as people-people conflict, wherein there is a clash of values between different human groups. Understanding Conflicts About Wildlife unites academics and practitioners from across the globe to develop a holistic view of these interactions. It considers the political and social dimensions of ‘human-wildlife conflicts’ alongside effective methodological approaches, and will be of value to academics, conservationists and policy makers.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
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The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective
Knörr, J. & Kohl, C. (eds)
For centuries, Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at how such encounters have continued into the present day, identifying the disruptions and continuities in religion, language, economics and various other social phenomena. These accounts show a region that, while still grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade, is both shaped by and an important actor within ever-denser global networks, exhibiting consistent transformation and creative adaptation.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) History (General) Colonial History
Area: Africa
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Urban Natures
Living the More-than-Human City
Edwards, F., PEttersen, I. N. & Popartan, L. (eds)
Efforts to create greener urban spaces have historically taken many forms, often disorganized and undisciplined. Recently, however, the push towards greener cities has evolved into a more cohesive movement. Drawing from multidisciplinary case studies, Urban Natures examines the possibilities of an ethical lively multi-species city with the understanding that humanity’s relationship to nature is politically constructed. Covering a wide range of sectors, cities, and urban spaces, as well as topics ranging from edible cities to issues of power, and more-than-human methodologies, this volume pushes our imagination of a green urban future.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Sustainable Development Goals
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Urban Sustainability in the Arctic
Measuring Progress in Circumpolar Cities
Orttung, R. W.
Urban Sustainability in the Arctic advances our understanding of cities in the far north by applying elements of the international standard for urban sustainability (ISO 37120) to numerous Arctic cities. In delivering rich material about northern cities in Alaska, Canada, and Russia, the book examines how well the ISO 37120 measures sustainability and how well it applies in northern conditions. In doing so, it links the Arctic cities into a broader conversation about urban sustainability more generally.
Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology Urban Studies Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Circumpolar
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Water, Life, and Profit
Fluid Economies and Cultures of Niamey, Niger
Keough, S. B. & Youngstedt, S. M
Water, Life, and Profit offers a holistic analysis of the people, economies, cultural symbolism, and material culture involved in the management, production, distribution, and consumption of drinking water in the urban context of Niamey, Niger. Paying particular attention to two key groups of people who provide water to most of Niamey’s residents - door-to-door water vendors, and those who sell water in one-half-liter plastic bags (sachets) on the street or in small shops – the authors offer new insights into how Niamey’s water economies affect gender, ethnicity, class, and spatial structure today.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sustainable Development Goals
Area: Africa
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Waterworlds
Anthropology in Fluid Environments
Hastrup, K. & Hastrup. F. (eds)
In one form or another, water participates in the making and unmaking of people’s lives, practices, and stories. Contributors’ detailed ethnographic work analyzes the union and mutual shaping of water and social lives. This volume discusses current ecological disturbances and engages in a world where unbounded relationalities and unsettled frames of orientation mark the lives of all, anthropologists included. Water emerges as a fluid object in more senses than one, challenging anthropologists to foreground the mutable character of their objects of study and to responsibly engage with the generative role of cultural analysis.
Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)
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Wolf Conflicts
A Sociological Study
Skogen, K., Krange, O., & Figari, H.
Wolf populations have recently made a comeback in Northern Europe and North America. These large carnivores can cause predictable conflicts by preying on livestock, and competing with hunters for game. But their arrivals often become deeply embedded in more general societal tensions, which arise alongside processes of social change that put considerable pressure on rural communities and on the rural working class in particular. Based on research and case studies conducted in Norway, Wolf Conflicts discusses various aspects of this complex picture, including conflicts over land use and conservation, and more general patterns of hegemony and resistance in modern societies.
Subjects: Sociology Environmental Studies (General)
Area: Northern Europe
