Nature in the Global South

Nature in the Global South

Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia

  • Author: Greenough, Paul; Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt; Anderson, Warwick; Zerner, Charles
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822331506
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822385004
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2003
  • Month: August
  • Pages: 440
  • DDC: 333.7/2/0954
  • Language: English
A nuanced look at how nature has been culturally constructed in South and Southeast Asia, Nature in the Global South is a major contribution to understandings of the politics and ideologies of environmentalism and development in a postcolonial epoch. Among the many significant paradigms for understanding both the preservation and use of nature in these regions are biological classification, state forest management, tropical ecology, imperial water control, public health, and community-based conservation. Focusing on these and other ways that nature has been shaped and defined, this pathbreaking collection of essays describes projects of exploitation, administration, science, and community protest.

With contributors based in anthropology, ecology, sociology, history, and environmental and policy studies, Nature in the Global South features some of the most innovative and influential work being done in the social studies of nature. While some of the essays look at how social and natural landscapes are created, maintained, and transformed by scientists, officials, monks, and farmers, others analyze specific campaigns to eradicate smallpox and save forests, waterways, and animal habitats. In case studies centered in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, and South and Southeast Asia as a whole, contributors examine how the tropics, the jungle, tribes, and peasants are understood and transformed; how shifts in colonial ideas about the landscape led to extremely deleterious changes in rural well-being; and how uneasy environmental compromises are forged in the present among rural, urban, and global allies.

Contributors:
Warwick Anderson
Amita Baviskar
Peter Brosius
Susan Darlington
Michael R. Dove
Ann Grodzins Gold
Paul Greenough
Roger Jeffery
Nancy Peluso
K. Sivaramakrishnan
Nandini Sundar
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Charles Zerner

  • CONTENTS
  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • PART I Scales, Logics, and Agents
    • The Natures of Culture: Environment and Race in the Colonial Tropics
    • Dividing Lines: Nature, Culture, and Commerce in Indonesia’s Aru Islands, 1856–1997
    • A Move from Minor to Major: Competing Discourses of Nontimber Forest Products in India
    • Forest Discourses in South and Southeast Asia: A Comparison with Global Discourses
    • Agrarian Allegory and Global Futures
    • Foreign Trees: Lives and Landscapes in Rajasthan
  • PART II Toward Livable Environments: Compromises and Campaigns
    • Pathogens, Pugmarks, and Political ‘‘Emergency’’: The 1970s South Asian Debate on Nature
    • Territorializing Local Struggles for Resource Control: A Look at Environmental Discourses and Politics in Indonesia
    • Scientific Forestry and Geneaologies of Development in Bengal
    • Tribal Politics and Discourses of Indian Environmentalism
    • Voices for the Borneo Rain Forest: Writing the History of an Environmental Campaign
    • Practical Spirituality and Community Forests: Monks, Ritual, and Radical Conservatism in Thailand
  • Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index

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