Reimagining Political Ecology

by Biersack, Aletta; Greenberg, James B.

• ISBN13: 9780822336853
• ISBN10: 0822336855
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Reimagining Political Ecologyis a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by post-structuralism, feminism, practice theory, and cultural studies. As these essays illustrate, contemporary political ecology moves beyond binary thinking, focusing instead on the interchanges between nature and culture, the symbolic and the material, and the local and the global.Aletta Biersack's introduction takes stock of where political ecology has been, assesses the field's strengths, and sets forth a bold research agenda for the future. Two essays offer wide-ranging critiques of modernist ecology, with its artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, faith in the scientific management of nature, and related tendency to dismiss local knowledge. The remaining eight essays are case studies of particular constructions and appropriations of nature, and the complex politics that come into play regionally, nationally, and internationally when nature is brought within the human sphere. Written by some of the leading thinkers in environmental anthropology, these rich ethnographies are based in locales around the world: in Belize, Papua New Guinea, the Gulf of California, Iceland, Finland, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Collectively, they demonstrate that political ecology speaks to concerns shared by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists alike. And they model the kind of work that this volume identifies as the future of political ecology: place-based "ethnographies of nature" keenly attuned to the conjunctural effects of globalization.

Table of Contents

About the Series	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Color plates follow	214
INTRODUCTION
Reimagining Political Ecology: Culture/Power/History/Nature	3	(40)
Aletta Biersack
BEYOND MODERNIST ECOLOGIES
Equilibrium Theory and Interdisciplinary Borrowing: A Comparison of Old and New Ecological Anthropologies	43	(27)
Michael R. Dove
Nature and Society in the Age of Postmodernity	70	(27)
Gisli Palsson
CONSTRUCTING AND APPROPRIATING NATURE
Ecopolitics through Ethnography: The Cultures of Finland's Forest-Nature	97	(24)
Eeva Berglund
The Political Ecology of Fisheries in the Upper Gulf of California	121	(28)
James B. Greenberg
``But the Young Men Don't Want to Farm Any More'' Political Ecology and Consumer Culture in Belize	149	(22)
Richard Wilk
Properties of Nature, Properties of Culture: Ownership, Recognition, and the Politics of Nature in a Papua New Guinea Society	171	(24)
Joel Robbins
ETHNOGRAPHIES OF NATURE
Progress of the Victims: Political Ecology in the Peruvian Amazon	195	(38)
Soren Hvalkof
Red River, Green War: The Politics of Place along the Porgera River	233	(48)
Aletta Biersack
Between Politics and Poetics: Narratives of Dispossession in Sarawak, East Malaysia	281	(44)
J. Peter Brosius
BETWEEN NATURE AND CULTURE
Rappaport's Rose: Structure, Agency, and Historical Contingency in Ecological Anthropology	325	(34)
J. Stephen Lansing
John Schoenfelder
Vernon Scarborough
Works Cited	359	(48)
Contributors	407	(2)
Index	409