Books in the Culture, Place, and Nature series

Considering the European representation and understanding of landscape and nature in early nineteenth-century India, this book shows the diversity of European (especially British) responses to the Indian environment and the ways in which these contributed to the wider colonizing process.

Examines the different trajectories of landscape change and land use among communities who call themselves Akha in political contexts. Drawing on anthropological debates on the state in Southeast Asia, this book shows how people live in a state of negotiated boundaries - political, social, and ecological.

Discusses land-use issues by examining how resources were used in Sabah from 1881 to 1996 and rights of access to land and resources enjoyed by local people. This book looks at how control over and access to resources have been defined, negotiated, and contested by colonial state agents, the postcolonial Malaysian state, and local people.

Offers an explanation for the durability of the kuhls of Kangra in the face of recurring environmental shocks and socioeconomic change. This book describes how farmers use and organize the kuhls and employs varied lines of theory and empirical data to account for the persistence of kuhls in the late twentieth century.

Forests of Belonging examines the history and ongoing transformation of ethnic and social relationships among four distinct communities--Bangando, Baka, Bakwle, and Mbomam--in the Lobk forest region of southeastern Cameroon. By slotting forest communities into ecological categories such as "e;hunters"e; and "e;gatherers,"e; previous analyses of social relationships in tropical forests have resulted in binary frameworks that render real-life relationships invisible and that have perpetuated correspondingly misleading labels, such as "e;pygmy."e; Through rich descriptive detail resulting from field work among the Bangando, Stephanie Rupp illustrates the complexity of social ties among groups and individuals, and their connections with the natural world. She demonstrates that social and ethno-ecological relations in equatorial African forests are nuanced, contested, and shifting, and that the intricacy of these links must be considered in the design and implementation of aid policies and strategies for conservation and development.

Winner of the 2013 ICAS Book Prize (Social Sciences)The Tahiti that most people imagine - white-sand beaches, turquoise lagoons, and beautiful women - is a product of 18th century European romanticism and persists today as the bedrock of Tahitis tourism industry. This postcard image, however, masks a different reality. The dreams and desires that the tourism industry promotes distract from the medical nightmares and environmental destruction caused by Frances 30-year nuclear testing program in French Polynesia. Tahitians see the burying of a bomb in their land as deeply offensive. For Tahitians, the land abounds with ancestral fertility, and genealogical identity, and is a source of physical and spiritual nourishment. These imagined and lived perspectives seem incompatible, yet are intricately intertwined in the political economy.Tahiti Beyond the Postcard engages with questions about the subtle but ubiquitous ways in which power entangles itself in place-related ways. Miriam Kahn uses interpretive frameworks of both Tahitian and European scholars, drawing upon ethnographic details that include ancient chants, picture postcards, antinuclear protests, popular song lyrics, and the legacy of Paul Gauguins art, to provide fresh perspectives on colonialism, tourism, imagery, and the anthropology of place.

In the Kangra Valley of India's western Himalaya, farmers have for centuries relied on community-managed kuhl systems - intricate networks of collectively built and maintained irrigation channels - for their rice and wheat farming. Over the years, earthquakes and floods have repeatedly destroyed villagers' kuhls. More recently, increasing nonfarm employment has drawn labor away from kuhl maintenance and from farming itself. Prevailing theories of common property resource management suggest that such conditions should cause the kuhls to die out; instead, most have beentransformed and remain alive and well.In this book, Mark Baker offers a comprehensive explanation for the durability of the kuhls of Kangra in the face of recurring environmental shocks and socioeconomic change. In addition to describing how farmers use and organize the kuhls, he employs varied lines of theory and empirical data to account for the persistence of most kuhls (and the demise of a few) in the late twentieth century. Into his explanatory framework he incorporates the history of regional politics and economics as they affected kuhls during the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods; the role of state involvement in kuhl construction and management; the benefits of exchanges of labor and water among members of networked kuhls; and the ways in which kuhl systems are embedded in and reproduce core cultural beliefs and practices.Scholars interested in common property resource regimes have long focused on self-organizing, community-based irrigation systems. Yet their theories cannot entirely account for the durability of common property regimes under the extreme conditions of ecological stress, economic change, and social differentiation that exist in Kangra. Baker adds new dimensions to such theories by reaching beyond them to incorporate "e;exogenous"e; factors such as the roles statemaking practices play in common property resource regimes, the importance of networks in buffering individual resource regimes from environmental stress, and the ways in which regimes are sites for reproducing and occasionally contesting the relations that constitute place and region. In doing so, he advances a new way of thinking about community-based systems of resource management--a timely subject given recent trends in many countries toward the devolution of authority over natural resource management from government to rural communities.

In 1990, shortly after a Malaysian politician announced that the boundaries of Kinabalu Park, a primary tourist destination, were to be expanded to include the species-rich tropical forest known locally as Bukit Hempuen, most of the area was burned to the ground, allegedly by local people. What would motivate the people who had for generations hunted and gathered forest products there to act so destructively?In this volume, Amity Doolittle illuminates this and other contemporary land-use issues by examining how resources were used historically in Sabah from 1881 to 1996 and what customary rights of access to land and resources were enjoyed by local people. Drawing upon anthropology, political science, environmental history, and political ecology, she looks at how control over and access to resources have been defined, negotiated, and contested by colonial state agents, the postcolonial Malaysian state, and local people.The study is grounded in methodological and theoretical advances in the field of political ecology, merging the traditions of human ecology and political economy and looking at environmental conflicts in terms of the particulars of place, culture, and history. Doolittle assumes that environmental problems have causes that are complex and changing and that solutions must be specific to time and place. Using a political ecology perspective allows her to focus on the root causes of environmental degradation, exposing the underlying political, economic, and social forces at work. The challenge in the twenty-first century, she writes, is to move beyond blaming local people for resource degradation and to find ways to achieve equitable access to natural resources and more sustainable land use practices.Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia has great relevance to development studies, political ecology, environmental planning, anthropology, and legal studies in natural resource management.

Shared concern for nature can be a way of transcending national, ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries, yet conservation efforts often pit the interests of historically rooted or indigenous peoples against the state and international environmental organizations, eroding local autonomy while saving rural land for animals and tourists. Wild Sardinias examination of the cultural politics around nature conservation and the traditional Commons on an Italian island illustrates the complexities of environmental stewardship. Long known as the home of fiercely independent shepherds (often typecast as rustics, bandits, or eco-vandals), as well as wild mouflon sheep, magnificent eagles, and rare old oak forests, the town of Orgosolo has for several decades received notoriety through local opposition to Gennargentu National Park.Interweaving rich ethnographic description of highland central Sardinia with analysis grounded in political ecology and reflexive cultural critique, Wild Sardinia illuminates the ambivalent and open-ended meanings of many Sardinians acts and memories of resistance to environmental projects. This groundbreaking case study of the tension between living cultural landscapes and the emerging ecological imaginaries envisioned through policy discourses and new media -- the global dreamtimes of environmentalism -- has relevance far beyond its Mediterranean locale.

From Enslavement to Environmentalism takes a challenging ethnographic and historical look at the politics of eco-development in the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border zone. David Hughes argues that European colonization in southern Africa--essentially an unsuccessful effort to turn the region into another North America or Australia--has profoundly reshaped rural politics and culture and continues to do so, as neoliberal developers commoditize the lands of African peasants in the name of conservation and economic progress.Hughes builds his engaging analysis around a sort of natural experiment: in the past, whites colonized British Zimbabwe but avoided Portuguese Mozambique almost entirely. In Zimbabwe, chiefdoms that had historically focused on controlling people began to follow the English example of consolidating political power by dividing and controlling land. Meanwhile, in Mozambique, Portugal perpetuated traditional practices of recruiting and distributing forced labor as the primary means of securing power. The territory remained unmapped. For almost the entire twentieth century, a sharp disjuncture in the politics of land, leadership, labor, and resource use marked the border zone.In the late 1990s, as white South Africans began to establish timber plantations in Mozambique, that difference began to be effaced. Under the banner of environmentalism and economic progress, tourism firms were allowed to claim peasant farmland. The objectives of liberal conservationists and developers, though high-minded, led them to commoditize ancestral lands. Southern African policymakers supported this new form of colonization as a form of racial integration between white investors and black peasants, paving the way for an ironic and contentious situation in which ethnic tolerance, gentrification, and land-grabbing have gone hand in hand.From Enslavement to Environmentalism engages topics central to current debates in anthropology, resource politics, and development policy, and will be of interest to both regional specialists and generalists.

In this comparative, interdisciplinary study based on extensive fieldwork as well as historical sources, Janet Sturgeon examines the different trajectories of landscape change and land use among communities who call themselves Akha (known as Hani in China) in contrasting political contexts. She shows how, over the last century, processes of state formation, construction of ethnic identity, and regional security concerns have contributed to very different outcomes for Akha and their forests in China and Thailand, with Chinese Akha functioning as citizens and grain producers, and Akha in Thailand being viewed as "e;non-Thai"e; forest destroyers.The modern nation-state grapples with local power hierarchies on the periphery of the nation, with varied outcomes. Citizenship in China helps Akha better protect a fluid set of livelihood practices that confer benefits on them and their landscape. Denied such citizenship in Thailand, Akha are helpless when forests and other resources are ruthlessly claimed by the state. Drawing on current anthropological debates on the state in Southeast Asia and more generally on debates on property theory, states and minorities, and political ecology, Sturgeon shows how people live in a continuous state of negotiated boundaries - political, social, and ecological.This pioneering comparison of resource access and land use among historically related peoples in two nation-states will be welcomed by scholars of political ecology, environmental anthropology, ethnicity, and politics of state formation in East and Southeast Asia.

New in Paperback--A thought-provoking look at indigenous stories, cultural institutions, and ways of knowing, and what they can teach us about living sustainably.

Discusses how ecology activists in Slovakia generated a social movement that led to political dialogue about freedom, ethnicity, and power. This work explains why Slovakia's ecology movement, so strong under socialism, fell apart so rapidly despite the persistence of serious ecological maladies in the region.

Explores how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. This work provides an insight into the motivations of national governments in managing nature, and deals with the different kinds of regional political conflicts that invoke nationalist sentiment through claims on nature.

In Being and Place among the Tlingit, anthropologist Thomas F. Thornton examines the concept of place in the language, social structure, economy, and ritual of southeast Alaska's Tlingit Indians. Place signifies not only a specific geographical location but also reveals the ways in which individuals and social groups define themselves.The notion of place consists of three dimensions - space, time, and experience - which are culturally and environmentally structured. Thornton examines each in detail to show how individual and collective Tlingit notions of place, being, and identity are formed. As he observes, despite cultural and environmental changes over time, particularly in the post-contact era since the late eighteenth century, Tlingits continue to bind themselves and their culture to places and landscapes in distinctive ways. He offers insight into how Tlingits in particular, and humans in general, conceptualize their relationship to the lands they inhabit, arguing for a study of place that considers all aspects of human interaction with landscape.In Tlingit, it is difficult even to introduce oneself without referencing places in Lingit Aani (Tlingit Country). Geographic references are embedded in personal names, clan names, house names, and, most obviously, in k-waan names, which define regions of dwelling. To say one is Sheet'ka K-waan defines one as a member of the Tlingit community that inhabits Sheet'ka (Sitka).Being and Place among the Tlingit makes a substantive contribution to the literature on the Tlingit, the Northwest Coast cultural area, Native American and indigenous studies, and to the growing social scientific and humanistic literature on space, place, and landscape.

Forests Are Gold examines the management of Vietnam's forests in the tumultuous twentieth centuryfrom French colonialism to the recent transition to market-oriented economicsas the country united, prospered, and transformed people and landscapes. Forest policy has rarely been about ecology or conservation for natures sake, but about managing citizens and society, a process Pamela McElwee terms environmental rule. Untangling and understanding these practices and networks of rule illuminates not just thorny issues of environmental change, but also the birth of Vietnam itself.

Since the 1960s, when Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization, violence and confusion have often accompanied national policies concerning land reform, corporate colonization, indigenous land rights, environmental protection, and private homesteading. Conjuring Property shows how, in a region that many perceive to be stateless, colonists - from highly capitalized ranchers to landless workers - adopt anticipatory stances while they await future governance intervention regarding land tenure. For Amazonian colonists, property is a dynamic category that becomes salient in the making: it is conjured through papers, appeals to state officials, and the manipulation of landscapes and memories of occupation. This timely study will be of interest to development studies scholars and practitioners, conservation ecologists, geographers, and anthropologists.

Presents the analyses that consider how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and India and provide insight into the motivations of colonial and national governments in controlling or managing nature.

The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze considers the European representation and understanding of landscape and nature in early nineteenth-century India. It draws on travel narratives, literary texts, and scientific literature to show the diversity of European (especially British) responses to the Indian environment and the ways in which these contributed to the wider colonizing process. Through its close examination of the correlation between tropicality and otherness, and of science as a means of colonial appropriation, the book offers a new interpretation of the history of colonial India and a critical contribution to the understanding of environmental history and the tropical world. It will be of interest to historians of the environment, science, and colonialism; South Asianists; and cultural and environmental anthropologists and geographers.

In this far-reaching examination of environmental problems and politics in northern Thailand, Tim Forsyth and Andrew Walker analyze deforestation, water supply, soil erosion, use of agrochemicals, and biodiversity in order to challenge popularly held notions of environmental crisis. They argue that such crises have been used to support political objectives of state expansion and control in the uplands. They have also been used to justify the alternative directions advocated by an array of NGOs.In official and alternative discourses of economic development, the peoples living in Thailand's hill country are typically cast as either guardians or destroyers of forest resources, often depending on their ethnicity. Political and historical factors have created a simplistic, misleading, and often scientifically inaccurate environmental narrative: Hmong farmers, for example, are thought to exhibit environmentally destructive practices, whereas the Karen are seen as linked to and protective of their ancestral home. Forsyth and Walker reveal a much more complex relationship of hill farmers to the land, to other ethnic groups, and to the state. They conclude that current explanations fail to address the real causes of environmental problems and unnecessarily restrict the livelihoods of local people.The authors' critical assessment of simplistic environmental narratives, as well as their suggestions for finding solutions, will be valuable in international policy discussions about environmental issues in rapidly developing countries. Moreover, their redefinition of northern Thailand's environmental problems, and their analysis of how political influences have reinforced inappropriate policies, demonstrate new ways of analyzing how environmental science and knowledge are important arenas for political control.This book makes valuable contributions to Thai studies and more generally to the fields of environmental science, ecology, geography, anthropology, and political science, as well as to policy making and resource management in the developing world.

The Nature of Whiteness explores the intertwining of race and nature in postindependence Zimbabwe. Nature and environment have played prominent roles in white Zimbabwean identity, and when the political tide turned against white farmers after independence, nature was the most powerful resource they had at their disposal. In the 1970s, Mlilo, a private conservancy sharing boundaries with Hwange National Park, became the first site in Zimbabwe to experiment with wildlife production, and by the 1990s, wildlife tourism had become one of the most lucrative industries in the country. Mlilo attained international notoriety in 2015 as the place where Cecil the Lion was killed by a trophy hunter.Yuka Suzuki provides a balanced study of whiteness, the conservation of nature, and contested belonging in twenty-first-century southern Africa. The Nature of Whiteness is a fascinating account of human-animal relations and the interplay among categories of race and nature in this embattled landscape.