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Sustaining Natures
An Environmental Anthropology Reader
Environmental anthropology is at its best when firmly grounded in respectful and systematic ethnographic research and writing that spotlights uncommon perspectives on widely recognized issues confronting the world. Intentionally crafted for undergraduate course use in...
ISBN: 9780295751450
more detailsFukushima Futures
Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape
Both before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi visited nearby communities, collecting accounts of life and livelihoods along...
ISBN: 9780295751344
more detailsEcologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900
The perception, valuation, and manipulation of human environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years when successive empires struggled to harness lands...
ISBN: 9780295751498
more detailsThe Camphor Tree and the Elephant
Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia
What is the role of religion in shaping interactions and relations between the human and nonhuman in nature? Why are Muslim and Christian organizations generally not a potent force in Southeast Asian environmental movements? The...
ISBN: 9780295751184
more detailsLahore Cinema
Between Realism and Fable
Commercial cinema has been among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization in South Asia. So argues Iftikhar Dadi in his provocative examination of cinema produced between 1956 and 1969—the long sixties—in Lahore,...
ISBN: 9780295750811
more detailsSpawning Modern Fish
Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon
Since the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural development and fisheries management in northern Japan have been profoundly shaped by how people within and beyond Japan have compared Hokkaido's landscapes to those of other places, as part of efforts...
ISBN: 9780295750392
more detailsUpland Geopolitics
Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush
In the twenty-first century, land deals in the Global South have become increasingly prevalent and controversial. Transnational access to arable land in impoverished "land-rich" countries in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia highlights the...
ISBN: 9780295750491
more detailsTurning Land into Capital
Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region
In Southeast Asia reversals of earlier agrarian reforms have rolled back "land-to-the-tiller" policies created in the wake of Cold War–era revolutions. This trend, marked by increased land concentration and the promotion of export-oriented agribusiness at...
ISBN: 9780295750460
more detailsNew Lives in Anand
Building a Muslim Hub in Western India
In 2002 widespread communal violence tore apart towns and villages in rural parts of Gujarat, India. In the aftermath, many Muslims living in Hindu-majority villages sought safety in the small town of Anand. Following such...
ISBN: 9780295749648
more detailsMisreading the Bengal Delta
Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh
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 do adaptation projects address...
ISBN: 9780295749617
more detailsMumbai Taximen
Autobiographies and Automobilities in India
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...
ISBN: 9780295749860
more detailsAdivasi Art and Activism
Curation in a Nationalist Age
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...
ISBN: 9780295749716
more detailsOrdering the Myriad Things
From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China
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...
ISBN: 9780295749464
more detailsTimber and Forestry in Qing China
Sustaining the Market
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...
ISBN: 9780295748870
more detailsOutcaste Bombay
City Making and the Politics of the Poor
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...
ISBN: 9780295748504
more detailsConsuming Ivory
Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England
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...
ISBN: 9780295748818
more detailsMapping Water in Dominica
Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism
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...
ISBN: 9780295748726
more detailsSacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian
The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India
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...
ISBN: 9780295747880
more detailsMountains of Blame
Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands
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...
ISBN: 9780295748160
more detailsThe Ends of Kinship
Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York
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...
ISBN: 9780295747699
more details