A collection of ethnographies grounded in second-generation political ecology, which focuses on the interchanges between nature and culture, and the local and the global.
Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, practice theory, and cultural studies. As these essays illustrate, contemporary political ecology moves beyond binary thinking, focusing instead on the interchanges between nature and culture, the symbolic and the material, and the local and the global. Aletta Biersack’s introduction takes stock of where political ecology has been, assesses the field’s strengths, and sets forth a bold research agenda for the future. Two essays offer wide-ranging critiques of modernist ecology, with its artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, faith in the scientific management of nature, and related tendency to dismiss local knowledge. The remaining eight essays are case studies of particular constructions and appropriations of nature and the complex politics that come into play regionally, nationally, and internationally when nature is brought within the human sphere. Written by some of the leading thinkers in environmental anthropology, these rich ethnographies are based in locales around the world: in Belize, Papua New Guinea, the Gulf of California, Iceland, Finland, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Collectively, they demonstrate that political ecology speaks to concerns shared by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists alike. And they model the kind of work that this volume identifies as the future of political ecology: place-based “ethnographies of nature” keenly attuned to the conjunctural effects of globalization. Contributors. Eeva Berglund, Aletta Biersack, J. Peter Brosius, Michael R. Dove, James B. Greenberg, Søren Hvalkof, J. Stephen Lansing, Gísli Pálsson, Joel Robbins, Vernon L. Scarborough, John W. Schoenfelder, Richard Wilk
This volume traces the socioeconomic and environmental changes taking place in the Gran Chaco, a vast and richly biodiverse ecoregion at the intersection of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Representing a wide range of contemporary anthropological scholarship that has not been available in English until now, Reimagining the Gran Chaco illuminates how the region’s many Indigenous groups are negotiating these transformations in their own terms. The essays in this volume explore how the region has become a complex arena of political, cultural, and economic contestation between actors that include the state, environmental groups and NGOs, and private businesses and how local actors are reconfiguring their subjectivities and political agency in response. With its multinational perspective, and its examination of major themes including missionization, millenarian movements, the Chaco war, industrial enclaves, extractivism, political mobilization, and the struggle for rights, this volume brings greater visibility to an underrepresented, complex region. Contributors: Nancy Postero | César Ceriani Cernadas | Hannes Kalisch | Rodrigo Villagra | Federico Bossert | Paola Canova | Joel Correia | Bret Gustafson | Mercedes Biocca | Silvia Hirsch | Denise Bebbington | Gastón Gordillo | Guido Cortez
Responding to climate change has become an industry. Governments, corporations, activist groups and others now devote billions of dollars to mitigation and adaptation, and their efforts represent one of the most significant policy measures ever dedicated to a global challenge. Despite its laudatory intent, the response industry, or ‘Climate Inc.’, is failing. Reimagining Climate Change questions established categories, routines, and practices that presently constitute accepted solutions to tackling climate change and offers alternative routes forward. It does so by unleashing the political imagination. The chapters grasp the larger arc of collective experience, interpret its meaning for the choices we face, and creatively visualize alternative trajectories that can help us cognitively and emotionally enter into alternative climate futures. They probe the meaning and effectiveness of climate protection ‘from below’—forms of community and practice that are emerging in various locales around the world and that hold promise for greater collective resonance. They also question climate protection "from above" in the form of industrial and modernist orientations and examine large-scale agribusinesses, as well as criticize the concept of resilience as it is presently being promoted as a response to climate change. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, global environmental politics, and environmental studies in general, as well as climate change activists.
This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life. They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy. This concise and accessible book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, geography, urban studies, cultural studies and politics. .
What are the contemporary issues in abortion politics globally? What factors explain variations in access to abortion between and within different countries? This text provides a transnationally-focused, interdisciplinary analysis of trends in abortion politics using case studies from around the Global North and South. It considers how societal influences, such as religion, nationalism and culture, impact abortion law and access. It explores the impact of international human rights norms, the increasing displacement of people due to conflict and crisis and the role of activists on law reform and access. The book concludes by considering the future of abortion politics through the more holistic lens of reproductive justice. Utilising a unique interdisciplinary approach, this book provides a major contribution to the knowledge base on abortion politics globally. It provides an accessible, informative and engaging text for academics, policy makers and readers interested in abortion politics.
This republished Special Issue highlights recent and emergent concepts and approaches to water governance that re-centers the political in relation to water-related decision making, use, and management. To do so at once is to focus on diverse ontologies, meanings and values of water, and related contestations regarding its use, or its importance for livelihoods, identity, or place-making. Building on insights from science and technology studies, feminist, and postcolonial approaches, we engage broadly with the ways that water-related decision making is often depoliticized and evacuated of political content or meaning—and to what effect. Key themes that emerged from the contributions include the politics of water infrastructure and insecurity; participatory politics and multi-scalar governance dynamics; politics related to emergent technologies of water (bottled or packaged water, and water desalination); and Indigenous water governance.
In Reimagining Social Medicine from the South, Abigail H. Neely explores social medicine's possibilities and limitations at one of its most important origin sites: the Pholela Community Health Centre (PCHC) in South Africa. The PCHC's focus on medical and social factors of health yielded remarkable success. And yet South Africa's systemic racial inequality hindered health center work, and witchcraft illnesses challenged a program rooted in the sciences. To understand Pholela's successes and failures, Neely interrogates the “social” in social medicine. She makes clear that the social sciences the PCHC used failed to account for the roles that Pholela's residents and their environment played in the development and success of its program. At the same time, the PCHC's reliance on biomedicine prevented it from recognizing the impact on health of witchcraft illnesses and the social relationships from which they emerged. By rewriting the story of social medicine from Pholela, Neely challenges global health practitioners to recognize the multiple worlds and actors that shape health and healing in Africa and beyond.
In a world of dwindling natural resources and mounting environmental crisis, who is devising ways of living that will work for the long haul? And how can we, as individuals, make a difference? To answer these fundamental questions, Professor Karen Litfin embarked upon a journey to many of the world’s ecovillagesÑintentional communities at the cutting-edge of sustainable living. From rural to urban, high tech to low tech, spiritual to secular, she discovered an under-the-radar global movement making positive and radical changes from the ground up. In this inspiring and insightful book, Karen Litfin shares her unique experience of these experiments in sustainable living through four broad windows - ecology, economics, community, and consciousness - or E2C2. Whether we live in an ecovillage or a city, she contends, we must incorporate these four key elements if we wish to harmonize our lives with our home planet. Not only is another world possible, it is already being born in small pockets the world over. These micro-societies, however, are small and time is short. Fortunately - as Litfin persuasively argues - their successes can be applied to existing social structures, from the local to the global scale, providing sustainable ways of living for generations to come. You can learn more about Karen's experiences on the Ecovillages website: http://ecovillagebook.org/
This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;