“No one who loves elephants or how humans interact with wildlife should pass up Jacob Shell’s remarkable book.” —Dan Flores, author of Coyote America Giants of the Monsoon Forest journeys deep into the mountainous rainforests of Burma and India to explore the world of teak logging elephants and their intriguing alliance with humans. Jacob Shell’s narrative vividly depicts elephants’ extraordinary intelligence, and the complicated bond with individual human riders, a partnership that can last for decades. Giants of the Monsoon Forest reveals an unexpected relationship between evolution in the natural world and political struggles in the human one, while considering how Asia’s secret forest culture might offer a way to help protect the fragile spaces both elephants and humans need to survive.
Elephants are a keystone species and have been a part of the magic of the thickly forested land of South Africa for millennia. This book focuses on the history and work of Knysna Elephant Park, a leading South African elephant research facility that has been home to more than 40 elephants in 25 years. Unfortunately, all the mystique of the Knysna elephant has been reduced to a single elephant left alive. Exploring a wide range of topics, this book covers the impact of elephants' interactions with tourists, how they recover from trauma and even their relevance in human healthcare. Renowned elephant researchers explain the majesty of the elephant brain, which has the largest temporal lobe devoted to communication, language, spatial memory and cognition. To this effect, the book emphasizes the threat of poaching to these gentle giants, which has almost forced them to extinction. Perhaps if humans pay attention to how elephants symbolize our relationship with nature, we can learn important lessons about humanity itself.
Elephant tourism is a growing activity in many countries across Asia and Africa and is popular with tourists from all parts of the world. Elephant tourism has grown rapidly, providing the only viable way for elephants and their owners to survive since the banning of logging. Old logging camps have been developed into sanctuaries for some elephants, but many other camps were established as entertainment centres, resulting in serious welfare issues for the elephants and their mahouts. The profits from elephant tourism in Asia have encouraged African operators to follow a similar business model. This book draws attention to the need for a comprehensive and rigorous focus on local solutions to improve the welfare of captive elephants, their mahouts and local residents, and to enhance tourists' experiences of elephant tourism.
How to dwell in a forest alongside giants, avoid disturbing a living god, assist an animal with their manners, and help an elephant cross the road. The Presence of Elephants is an anthropological consideration of coexistence, grounded in people’s everyday interactions with Asian elephants. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Assam, Northeast India, this book examines human–elephant copresence and how minds, tasks, identities, and places are shared between the two species. Sharing lives and landscapes with such formidable beings is a continuously shifting and negotiated exchange inherently composed of tensions, asymmetries, and uncertainties – especially in the Anthropocene when breakdowns in communication increasingly have a violent effect. Developing a multifaceted picture of human–elephant relations in a postcolonial setting, each chapter focuses on a different dimension of encounter, where elephants adapt to human norms, people are subject to elephant projects, and novel interspecies possibilities emerge at the threshold of nature and society. Vulnerability is a common experience intensified in contemporary human–elephant relations, felt through the elephant’s power to disrupt and transform human lives, as well as the risks these endangered animals are exposed to. This book will be of interest to scholars of multispecies ethnography and human–animal relations, environmental humanities, conservation, and South Asian studies.
The Routledge Companion to Northeast India is a trans-disciplinary and comprehensive compendium of a vital yet under-researched region in South Asia. It provides a unique guide to prevailing themes, theories, arguments, and history of Northeast India by discussing its life-forms – human and not – languages, landscapes, and lifeways in all its diversity and difference. The companion contains authoritative entries from leading specialists from and on the region and offers clear, concise, and illuminating explanations of key themes and ideas. A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this companion fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning, and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.
This one-volume encyclopedia examines jobs and occupations from around the world that are unique and out of the ordinary, from bike fishermen in the Netherlands and professional wedding guests in South Korea to elephant dressers in India. It's not surprising that the first question we are asked by strangers often has to do with what we do for a living. It's another way of asking, "Who are you, and what are you about?" But what happens when the answer to that question is "I am a gondolier" or "I am an Instagram influencer?" This book tries to answer that question, focusing on approximately 100 unusual occupations around the world. Arranged alphabetically, entries define the jobs and detail their historical, social, and cultural significance. Entries also examine where the job is located, how it came to be, how people get into the position, and what the economic and future outlook is for that job. While the entries focus on contemporary jobs, the encyclopedia also includes sidebars that highlight unique jobs from history to give the reader a sense of how unusual (and often terrible!) some jobs once were. Students will find this book useful in looking at cultures around the world.
Provides an up-to-date overview of the present state Visual Cultural Studies, featuring new original content, topics, and methods The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to Visual Culture brings together original research by both established scholars and new voices in the dynamic field, exploring the history, current state, and possible future directions of visual cultural studies. Organized as a series of non-traditional keyword essays, this innovative volume engages readers with a diversity of ideas and perspectives to broaden and enrich their understanding of visual culture and its operations. This accessible, reader-friendly volume begins with a brief introduction to the history and practices of visual studies, featuring interviews and conversations with key figures such as W.J.T. Mitchell and Douglas Crimp. The majority of the text explores key concepts within a broad framework of history, ecologies, mediations, agencies, and politics while placing particular emphasis on interdisciplinarity and intersectionality. Essays cover keyword topics including Identities, Representation, Institutions, Architectures, Memes, Environment, Temporality, and many more. Offering a unique approach to the subject, this timely resource: Presents new work from a diverse group of scholars with a broad range of social, cultural, and generational perspectives Emphasizes the importance of activism and political urgency in humanities scholarship Discusses engaging objects and discourses beyond film and art, such as architecture, video games, political activism, and the nonhuman Highlights the diverse and interconnecting elements of visual culture scholarship Includes case studies and short introductions that provide context and reinforce core concepts The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to Visual Culture is essential reading for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in the fields of visual studies, art history, film studies, and media studies.
Explores how, over centuries, Amazonian people and their cultures have interacted with rainforests William Balée is a world-renowned expert on the cultural and historical ecology of the Amazon basin. His new collection, Sowing the Forest, is a companion volume to the award-winning Cultural Forests of the Amazon, published in 2013. Sowing the Forest engages in depth with how, over centuries, Amazonian people and their cultures have interacted with rainforests, making the landscapes of palm forests and other kinds of forests, and how these and related forests have fed back into the vocabulary and behavior of current indigenous occupants of the remotest parts of the vast hinterlands. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Substrate of Intentionality,” comprises chapters on historical ecology, indigenous palm forests, plant names in Amazonia, the origins of the Amazonian plantain, and the unknown “Dark Earth people” of thousands of years ago and their landscaping. Together these chapters illustrate the phenomenon of feedback between culture and environment. In Part 2, “Scope of Transformation,” Balée lays out his theory of landscape transformation, which he divides into two rubrics—primary landscape transformation and secondary landscape transformation—and for which he provides examples and various specific effects. One chapter compares environmental and social interrelationships in an Orang Asli group in Malaysia and the Ka’apor people of eastern Amazonian Brazil, and another chapter covers loss of language and culture in the Bolivian Amazon. A final chapter addresses the controversial topic of monumentality in the rainforest. Balée concludes by emphasizing the common thread in Amazonian historical ecology: the long-term phenomenon of encouraging diversity for its own sake, not just for economic reasons.
Arranged logically to follow the most widely adopted course structure, this text will leave students with a full understanding of the unique structure, function, and living patterns of all vertebrates.
Buzz Books 2020 presents passionate readers with an insider’s look at 30 of the buzziest books due out this fall season. Our “digital convention” features such major bestselling authors as Ken Follett, Matt Haig, Jonathan Lethem, and Sue Miller. Other sure-to-be popular titles are by Rumaan Alam, J’nell Ciesielski, Vendela Vida, and Bryan Washington. Buzz Books has had a particularly stellar track record with highlighting the most talented, exciting debut authors. Simon Stephenson’s novel about a humanlike bot has already been optioned for film, while Finnish sensation Max Seeck’s thriller is due out as a television series. Robert Jones Jr.’s The Prophets and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club were both sold at auction. Our nonfiction selections include an inspirational World War II story, Three Ordinary Girls: The Remarkable Story Of Hannie Schaft And The Oversteegen Sisters, Teenaged Saboteurs And Nazi Assassins by Tim Brady); a true crime read, We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper; and the incisive Can't Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation by BuzzFeed columnist Anne Helen Petersen. Finally, we present early looks at new work from up-and-coming young adult authors: Alexandra Bracken, Caroline George, and Cole Nagamatsu. And be sure to download Buzz Books 2020: Romance, also available now.
