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Adivasi Art and Activism

Curation in a Nationalist Age

By Alice Tilche

As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic development, indigenous tribal people known as adivasis continue to be overrepresented among the country’s poor. Adivasis make up more than eight hundred communities in India, with a...

Mumbai Taximen

Autobiographies and Automobilities in India

By Tarini Bedi

In this first book-length study of Mumbai’s taxi industry and of the livelihoods that surround it, Tarini Bedi draws from the lives and voices of chillia taxi drivers who have sustained a hereditary trade for...

New Lives in Anand

Building a Muslim Hub in Western India

By Sanderien Verstappen

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749655

In 2002 widespread communal violence tore apart hundreds of towns and villages in rural parts of Gujarat, India. In the aftermath, many Muslims living in Hindu-majority villages sought safety in the...

Misreading the Bengal Delta

Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal​ Bangladesh

By Camelia Dewan. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749624

Perilously close to sea level and vulnerable to floods, erosion, and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for climate change adaptation. Yet, to what extent...

Ordering the Myriad Things

From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China

By Nicholas K. Menzies. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

China’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth...

Timber and Forestry in Qing China 

Sustaining the Market

By Meng Zhang

In the Qing period (1644–1912), China's population tripled, and the flurry of new development generated unprecedented demand for timber. Standard environmental histories have often depicted this as an era of reckless deforestation, akin to the...

Consuming Ivory

Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England

By Alexandra Celia Kelly. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

The economic prosperity of two nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New England towns rested on factories that manufactured piano keys, billiard balls, combs, and other items made of ivory imported from East Africa. Yet while towns like...

Mapping Water in Dominica

Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism

By Mark W. Hauser

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748733

Dominica, a place once described as “Nature’s Island,” was rich in biodiversity and seemingly abundant water, but in the eighteenth century a brief, failed attempt by colonial administrators to replace cultivation...

Outcaste Bombay

City Making and the Politics of the Poor

By Juned Shaikh

Over the course of the twentieth century, Bombay’s population grew twentyfold as the city became increasingly industrialized and cosmopolitan. Yet beneath a veneer of modernity, old prejudices endured, including the treatment of the Dalits. Even...

Mountains of Blame

Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands

By Will Smith. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Swidden agriculture has long been considered the primary cause of deforestation throughout Southeast Asia, and the Philippine government has used this belief to exclude the indigenous people of Palawan Island from their ancestral lands and...

The Ends of Kinship

Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York

By Sienna R. Craig

For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary wage labor abroad have shaped...

Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian

The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India

By James Staples. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu...

Gardens of Gold

Place-Making in Papua New Guinea

By Jamon Alex Halvaksz. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Since the start of colonial gold mining in the early 1920s, the Biangai villagers of Elauru and Winima in Papua New Guinea have moved away from planting yams and other subsistence foods to instead cultivating...

Shifting Livelihoods

Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia

By Daniel Tubb. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest Colombia: Rural Afro-Colombian artisanal miners work hillsides with hand tools or dredge mud from river bottoms. Migrant miners level the...

Making Kantha, Making Home

Women at Work in Colonial Bengal

By Pika Ghosh

In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use...

Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories

Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands

By Jonathan Padwe. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

In the hill country of northeast Cambodia, just a few kilometers from the Vietnam border, sits the village of Tang Kadon. This community of hill rice farmers of the Jarai ethnic minority group survived aerial...

A Secular Need

Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India

By Jeffrey A. Redding

Whether from the perspective of Islamic law’s advocates, secularism’s partisans, or communities caught in their crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islamic law and secularism as antagonistic and increasingly discordant. In the United States...

Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet

Eating with the World in Mind

By Nico Slate

Mahatma Gandhi redefined nutrition as fundamental to building a more just world. What he chose to eat was intimately tied to his beliefs, and his key values of nonviolence, religious tolerance, and rural sustainability developed...

The Snow Leopard and the Goat

Politics of Conservation in the Western Himalayas

By Shafqat Hussain. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Following the downgrading of the snow leopard’s status from “endangered” to “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2017, debate has renewed about the actual number of snow leopards in the wild...

Making the Modern Slum

The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay

By Sheetal Chhabria

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay,...