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Mountains 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 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 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 detailsGardens of Gold
Place-Making in Papua New Guinea
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...
ISBN: 9780295747590
more detailsShifting Livelihoods
Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia
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...
ISBN: 9780295747538
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 detailsMaking Kantha, Making Home
Women at Work in Colonial Bengal
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...
ISBN: 9780295746999
more detailsDisturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories
Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands
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...
ISBN: 9780295746906
more detailsA Secular Need
Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India
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...
ISBN: 9780295747088
more detailsGandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet
Eating with the World in Mind
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...
ISBN: 9780295744964
more detailsThe Snow Leopard and the Goat
Politics of Conservation in the Western Himalayas
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...
ISBN: 9780295746579
more detailsRoses from Kenya
Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers
Kenya supplies more than 35 percent of the fresh-cut roses and other flowers sold annually in the European Union. This industry—which employs at least 90,000 workers, most of whom are women—is lucrative but enduringly controversial....
ISBN: 9780295746500
more detailsMaking the Modern Slum
The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay
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,...
ISBN: 9780295746272
more detailsHistory and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000
In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting...
ISBN: 9780295746210
more detailsWorking with the Ancestors
Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands
Throughout the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, forest spirits share space with ancestral ruins and active agricultural plots, affecting land use and heritage preservation. As Marquesans continue their efforts to establish UNESCO World Heritage status,...
ISBN: 9780295745831
more detailsClimate Change and the Art of Devotion
Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850
In the enchanted world of Braj, the primary pilgrimage center in north India for worshippers of Krishna, each stone, river, and tree is considered sacred. In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion, Sugata Ray...
ISBN: 9780295745374
more detailsLiving with Oil and Coal
Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India
The nineteenth-century discovery of oil in the eastern Himalayan foothills, together with the establishment of tea plantations and other extractive industries, continues to have a profound impact on life in the region. In the Indian...
ISBN: 9780295743950
more detailsBhakti and Power
Debating India's Religion of the Heart
Bhakti, a term ubiquitous in the religious life of South Asia, has meanings that shift dramatically according to context and sentiment. Sometimes translated as “personal devotion,” bhakti nonetheless implies and fosters public interaction. It is...
ISBN: 9780295745503
more detailsMountain Temples and Temple Mountains
Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas
From approximately the third century BCE through the thirteenth century CE, the remote mountainous landscape around the glacial sources of the Ganga (Ganges) River in the Central Himalayas in northern India was transformed into a...
ISBN: 9780295744513
more detailsMarrying for a Future
Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War
The civil war between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil militants, which ended in 2009, lasted more than three decades and led to mass migration, mainly to India, Canada, England, and continental Europe. In Marrying...
ISBN: 9780295745411
more details