Description
Book SynopsisExplores how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. This work provides an insight into the motivations of national governments in managing nature, and deals with the different kinds of regional political conflicts that invoke nationalist sentiment through claims on nature.
Trade Review"The editors of this volume have begun a valuable process of understanding which must now be pursued."
* Journal of Contemporary Asia *
"The cases in Ecological Nationalisms— much too rich to summarize here— all take different positions on the relative importance of the ideas, interests, and identities activated or deployed in the politics of nature. . . . Beautifully produced, rich in content, and important; it is genuinely South Asian in scope and both international and interdisciplinary in execution."
* Journal of Asian Studies *
"Ecological Nationalisms, an edited volume of essays. . . is an ambitious and successful addition to the steadily growing literature on South Asian environmental history. . . . This work asks many good questions and should inspire subsequent research."
* Environmental History *
"[Ecological Nationalisms] opens the door to a remarkably wide body of research and enquiry. Most of the studies are not only very detailed but soundly based in an historical and conceptual background. The result is not easy reading but certainly provides an excellent base for understanding the interactive patterns at work in each of the areas studied.. it would be very valuable indeed to post-graduate students focusing on related problems and to senior practitioners."
* Electronic Green Journal *
"Informative and thought-provoking . . . Ecological Nationalisms is a must-read for serious scholars of South Asia studies."
* American Anthropologist *
Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction: Ecological Nationalisms: Claiming Nature for Making History / K. Sivaramakrishnan and Gunnel Cederlof
Part One | Regional Natures, Nations, and Empire
2. Environmental History, the Spice Trade, and the State in South India / Kathleen D. Morrison
3. The Toda Tiger: Debates on Custom, Utility, and Rights in Nature, South India 1820-1843 / Gunnel Cederlof
4. Contested Forests in North-West Pakistan: The Bureaucracy between the "Ecological," the "National," and the Realities of a Nation's Frontier / Urs Geiser
Part Two | Competing Nationalisms
5. Indigenous Forests: Rights, Discourses, and Resistance in Chotanagpur, 1860-2002 / Vinita Damodaran
6. Nature and Politics: The Case of Uttarakhand, North India / Antje Linkenbach
7. Indigenous Natures: Forest and Community Dynamics in Meghalaya, North-East India / Bengt G. Karlsson
8. Sacred Forests of Kodagu: Ecological Value and Social Role / Claude A. Garcia and J.-P. Pascal
Part Three | Commodified Nature and National Visions
9. Knowledge Against the State: Local Perceptions of Government Interventions in the Fishery (Kerala, India) / Gotz Hoeppe
10. Shifting Cultivation, Images, and Development in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh / Wolfgang Mey
11. Forest Managementin a Pukhtun Community: The Construction of Identities / Sarah Southwold-Llewellyn
12. "There Is No Life Without Wildlife": National Parks and National Identity in Bardia National Park, Western Nepal / Nina Bhatt
Bibliography
Index
