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Culture, Place, and Nature: Studies in Anthropology and Environment
Centered in anthropology, the Culture, Place, and Nature series encompasses new interdisciplinary social science research on environmental issues, focusing on the intersection of culture, ecology, and politics in global, national, and local contexts. Contributors to the series view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often conflicting perspectives of various cultural systems.
Series editor: K. Sivaramakrishnan
Please send book proposals to: Lorri Hagman
Showing results 1-20 of 42

Fukushima 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 detailsSustaining 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 details