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Viable Ecologies

Conservation and Coexistence on the Galápagos Islands

By Paolo Bocci. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

How humans living amid an abundance of diverse flora and fauna help us rethink conservation

Famous for their geographic isolation and high proportion of endemic species, the Galápagos Islands have long been promoted as the premier...

China's Camel Country

Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier

By Thomas White. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

How animal conservation became a defense against cultural erasure

China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing...

Crafting a Tibetan Terroir

Winemaking in Shangri-La

By Brendan A. Galipeau. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

How wine has transformed Tibetan land and lives

Set in the Sino-Tibetan border region renamed "Shangri-La" by the Chinese government for tourism promotion, Crafting a Tibetan Terroir considers how the deployment of the French notion of...

Sustaining Natures

An Environmental Anthropology Reader

By Sarah R. Osterhoudt, K. Sivaramakrishnan

Highlights new directions in the field and topics of interest to undergraduate students

Environmental anthropology is at its best when firmly grounded in respectful and systematic ethnographic research and writing that spotlights uncommon perspectives on widely...

Fukushima Futures

Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape

By Satsuki Takahashi. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

A probe of the environmental and sociocultural effects of industrialization and nuclear disaster on coastal livelihoods

Both before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear...

Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900

By Sumit Guha. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Reveals how imperial power and local resistance have shaped landscapes

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...

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant

Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia

By Faizah Zakaria. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Uncovers a spiritual dimension in the transition to the Anthropocene

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...

Spawning Modern Fish

Transnational Comparison in the Making of Japanese Salmon

By Heather Anne Swanson. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Winner of the Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology

Multispecies ethnography turns its attention to the bodies of fish

Since the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural development and fisheries management in northern Japan have...

Upland Geopolitics

Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush

By Michael B. Dwyer. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Cold War legacies in Southeast Asia enable new geographies of enclosure

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...

Turning Land into Capital

Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region

By Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah, Michael B. Dwyer, K. Sivaramakrishnan

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...

Misreading the Bengal Delta

Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh

By Camelia Dewan. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

An unexpected story of climate change initiatives that threaten a complex waterscape

Perilously close to sea level and vulnerable to floods, erosion, and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for...

Ordering the Myriad Things

From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China

By Nicholas K. Menzies. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Longlisted for the 2024 SHNH Natural History Book Prize

An exploration of plant wisdom, from the Southern Mountain Tea Flower to the Dawn Redwood

China’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural...

Timber and Forestry in Qing China 

Sustaining the Market

By Meng Zhang. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Winner of the 2022 Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for best book on forest and conservation history, sponsored by the Forest History Society

Honorable Mention for the 2022 ISCLH First Biennial Book Prize, sponsored by the International...

Consuming Ivory

Mercantile Legacies of East Africa and New England

By Alexandra Celia Kelly. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Examines the complex global impact of the ivory trade

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...

Mapping Water in Dominica

Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism

By Mark W. Hauser

How sugarcane monoculture decimated an island's water supply and people

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...

Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian

The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India

By James Staples. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Challenges popular generalizations about cow protection and beef consumption

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...

Mountains of Blame

Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands

By Will Smith. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Explores the unsettling phenomenon of indigenous self-blame for climate change

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...

Shifting Livelihoods

Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia

By Daniel Tubb. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Honorable Mention for the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) Book Prize

The many dimensions of gold in a shadow economy

People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest...

Gardens of Gold

Place-Making in Papua New Guinea

By Jamon Alex Halvaksz. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

“This is a soya bean,” the Biangai villager explained, “a money bean.”

Since the start of colonial gold mining in the early 1920s, the Biangai villagers of Elauru and Winima in Papua New Guinea have moved...

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...