Nature in the Global South
Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia
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- 25,99 €
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- 25,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Certainly his clearest and most accessible, this taut and memorable sixth outing from Gander (Science & Steepleflower) may also be his breakout work. One of its four mid-length poems describes ten beautiful photographs by Sally Mann (also reproduced here), emphasizing their spiritual resonance as well as their technical flair: in a misty picture of a half-destroyed tree, "at the border between a tangible and an intangible world, life climbs onto death's shoulders." The other three mid-length poems flaunt narrative components: "Burning Towers, Standing Wall" (its title an allusion to 9/11 and to W. B. Yeats) examines Mayan architecture in Mexico, turning the visible stones, their "mutilated stelae" and "rubbed out glyphs," into a plea for patience in the face of violence, and there are deliberate and ambitious poems on the North American landscape. Perhaps the most powerful parts of this powerful volume are four prose poems called "Ligatures," reactions to difficult moments in the poet's family life, and in the life of his teenage son: here even the hardest domestic conflicts finally promise emotional reward, "as if inside experience, bright with meaning, there were another experience, pendant, unnamable."
