Description
Berghahn Books Ethnographies of Conservation Environmentalism and the Distribution of Privilege 2003 Edition by David G. Anderson, Eeva Berglund
Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate. Table of contents :- Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Ecological UnderprivilegeE. Berglund and D. AndersonChapter 1. Nature as Contested Terrai: Conflicts over Wilderness Protection and Local Livelihoods in Rio San Juan, NicaraguaA. NygrenChapter 2. Pitfalls of Synchronicity: A Case Study of the Caicaras in the Atlantic Rainforest of South-eastern BrazilC. AdamsChapter 3. The Environment at the Periphery: Conflicting Discourses on the Forest in Tanimbar, Eastern IndonesiaN. Frost and R. WranghamChapter 4. Protest, Conflict and Litigation: Dissent or Libel in Resistance to a Conservancy in North-West NamibiaS. SullivanChapter 5. Environmentalism in the Syrian Badia: The Assumptions of Degradation, Protection and Bedouin MisuseD. ChattyChapter 6. "Ecocide and Genocide": Explorations of Environmental Justice in Lakota Sioux CountryB. HalderChapter 7. Promoting Consumption in the Rainforest: Global Conservation in Papua New GuineaD. EllisChapter 8. "We still are Soviet People": Youth Ecological Culture in the Republic of Tatarstan and the Legacy of the Soviet UnionL. RolleChapter 9. The Ecology of Markets in Central SiberiaD. AndersonChapter 10. Contrasting Landscapes, Conflicting Ontologies: Assessing Environmental Conservation on Palawan Island, The PhilippinesD. NovellinoChapter 11. Ecologism as an Idiom in Amazonian AnthropologyS. NugentNotes on ContributorsBibliographyIndex