Washington University Press Search Results Page
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 30
Gardens 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 details
Shifting 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 details
Disturbed 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 details
The 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 details
Roses 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 details
Working 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
Sacred 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 details
Living 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 details
Caring for Glaciers
Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas
Regional geopolitical processes have turned the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in northwest India, into a strategic border area with an increasing military presence that has decentered the traditional agropastoralist economy. This in turn has led...
ISBN: 9780295744001
more details
Organic Sovereignties
Struggles over Farming in an Age of Free Trade
This first sustained ethnographic study of organic agriculture outside the United States traces its meanings, practices, and politics in two nations typically considered worlds apart: Latvia and Costa Rica. Situated on the frontiers of the...
ISBN: 9780295743110
more details
The Nature of Whiteness
Race, Animals, and Nation in Zimbabwe
The Nature of Whiteness explores the intertwining of race and nature in postindependence Zimbabwe. Nature and environment have played prominent roles in white Zimbabwean identity, and when the political tide turned against white farmers after...
ISBN: 9780295999548
more details
Forests Are Gold
Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam
Forests Are Gold examines the management of Vietnam's forests in the tumultuous twentieth century—from French colonialism to the recent transition to market-oriented economics—as the country united, prospered, and transformed people and landscapes. Forest policy has...
ISBN: 9780295995489
more details
Conjuring Property
Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
Winner of the 2017 James M. Blaut Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers
Honorable Mention for the 2016 Book Prize from the Association for Political and Legal...
ISBN: 9780295995298
more details
Andean Waterways
Resource Politics in Highland Peru
Andean Waterways explores the politics of natural resource use in the Peruvian Andes in the context of climate change and neoliberal expansion. It does so through careful ethnographic analysis of the constitution of waterways, illustrating...
ISBN: 9780295994932
more details
The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze
India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856
The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze considers the European representation and understanding of landscape and nature in early nineteenth-century India. It draws on travel narratives, literary texts, and scientific literature to show the diversity of...
ISBN: 9780295993836
more details
Puer Tea
Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic
Puer tea has been grown for centuries in the “Six Great Tea Mountains” of Yunnan Province, and in imperial China it was a prized commodity, traded to Tibet by horse or mule caravan via the...
ISBN: 9780295993232
more details
From Enslavement to Environmentalism
Politics on a Southern African Frontier
From Enslavement to Environmentalism takes a challenging ethnographic and historical look at the politics of eco-development in the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border zone. David Hughes argues that European colonization in southern Africa--essentially an unsuccessful effort to turn...
ISBN: 9780295988405
more details
Ecological Nationalisms
Nature, Livelihoods, and Identities in South Asia
The works presented in this collection take environmental scholarship in South Asia into novel territory by exploring how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and India. The essays...
ISBN: 9780295993843
more details
Enclosed
Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce Among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders
This impassioned and rigorous analysis of the territorial plight of the Q'eqchi Maya of Guatemala highlights an urgent problem for indigenous communities around the world - repeated displacement from their lands. Liza Grandia uses the...
ISBN: 9780295991665
more details
Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers
The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand
In this far-reaching examination of environmental problems and politics in northern Thailand, Tim Forsyth and Andrew Walker analyze deforestation, water supply, soil erosion, use of agrochemicals, and biodiversity in order to challenge popularly held notions...
ISBN: 9780295988221
more details