An Ethnography Of Global Environmentalism

What the struggle over the Indonesian rainforests can teach us about the social frictions that shape the world around us Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light while one stick alone is just a stick. It is the friction that produces movement, action, and effect. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a clash of cultures, developing friction as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. Tsing focuses on the rainforests of Indonesia, where in the 1980s and 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, province, or nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforests includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, United Nations funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students—all drawn into unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out. Providing an invaluable portfolio of methods for the study of global interconnections, Friction shows how cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter and reveals how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global.

Based on nine years of research, this is the first book to offer an in-depth ethnographic study of a transnational environmentalist federation and of activists themselves. The book presents an account of the daily life and the ethical strivings of environmental activist members of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), exploring how a transnational federation is constituted and maintained, and how different people strive to work together in their hope of contributing to the creation of "a better future for the globe." In the context of FoEI, a great diversity of environmentalisms from around the world are negotiated, discussed and evolve in relation to the experiences of the different cultures, ecosystems and human situations that the activists bring with them to the federation. Key to the global scope of this project is the analysis of FoEI experiments in models for intercultural and inclusive decision-making. The provisional results of FoEI’s ongoing experiments in this area offer a glimpse of how different notions of the environment, and being an environmentalist, can come to work together without subsuming alterity.

Located in a wide spectrum of current research and practice, from analyses of green ideology and imagery, enviromental law and policy, and local enviromental activism in the West to ethnographic studies of relationships between humans and their enviroments in hunter/gatherer societies, Enviromentalism: The View from Anthropology offers an original perspective on what is probably the best-known issue of the late twentieth century. It will be particularly useful to all social scientists interested in environmentalism and human ecology, to environmental policy-makers and to undergraduates, lecturers and researchers in social anthropology, development studies and sociology.

Crate presents the first cultural ecological study of a Siberian people: the Viliui Sakha, contemporary horse and cattle agropastoralists in northeastern Siberia. The author links the local and global economic forces, and provides an intimate view of how a seemingly remote and isolated community is directly affected by the forces of modernization and globalization. She details the severe environmental and historical factors that continue to challenge their survival, and shows how the multi-million dollar diamond industry, in part run by ethnic Sakha, raises issues of ethnic solidarity and indigenous rights as well as environmental impact. Her new book addresses key topics of interest to both economic and environmental anthropology, and to practitioners interested in sustainable rural development, globalization, indigenous rights in Eurasia, and post-Soviet and environmental issues.

Environmental Winds challenges the notion that globalized social formations emerged solely in the Global North prior to impacting the Global South. Instead, such formations have been constituted, transformed, and propelled through diverse, site-specific social interactions that complicate and defy divisions between 'global' and 'local.' The book brings the reader into the lives of Chinese scientists, officials, villagers, and expatriate conservationists who were caught up in environmental trends over the past 25 years. Hathaway reveals how global environmentalism has been enacted and altered in China, often with unanticipated effects, such as the rise of indigenous rights, or the reconfiguration of human/animal relationships, fostering what rural villagers refer to as "the revenge of wild elephants."

Environmental mega conferences have become the format of choice in environmental governance. Conferences of the Parties (COPs) under the climate change and biodiversity conventions in particular attract global media attention and an ever-growing number of increasingly diverse actors, including scholars of global environmental politics. They are arenas for interstate negotiation, but also temporary interfaces that constitute and represent world society, and they focalise global struggles over just and sustainable futures. Collaborative event ethnography (CEE) as a research methodology emerged as a response to these developments. This volume retraces its genealogy, explains its conceptual and methodological foundations and presents insights into its practice. It is meant as an introduction for students, an overview for curious newcomers to the field, and an invitation for experienced researchers wishing to experiment with a new method. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Written from a critical perspective, these essays question many of the assumptions about nature and local peoples made by members of ecological and environmental movements and pressure groups. The contributors draw attention to the patronising attitudes that help maintain indigenous peoples in abject poverty.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Although modernity's understanding of nature and culture has now been superseded by that of environmentalism, the power to define the meaning of both, and hence the meaning of the world itself, remains in the same (Western) hands. This bold argument is at the center of this provocative book that challenges the widespread assumption that environmentalism reflects a radical departure from modernity. Our perception of nature may have changed, the author maintains, but environmentalism remains a thoroughly modernist project. It reproduces the cultural logic of modernity, a logic that finds meaning in unity and therefore strives to efface difference, and to reconfirm the position of the West as the source of all legitimate signification.