Description
Book SynopsisAn investigation of environmental politics in light of Foucault's work, drawing on and extending work done in feminist environmentalism, political ecology, and common property scholarship, explains why villagers in the Kumaon Himalaya have begun to conserve forests.
Trade Review“Arun Agrawal achieves, in
Environmentality, something of a breakthrough to new analytical territory where the binaries of state and society, structure and agency, public and private are transcended. He parlays the humble subject of community-based forestry and Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ into the makings of an original and subtle analysis of modernity and nature.”—James C. Scott, Yale University
“Arun Agrawal has written an amazing book that draws on a very-long-term case study to make general lessons. He analyzes the development of the mentality of citizens and officials related to the environment in a particular setting undergoing major shifts from centralization to a form of decentralization. All of us can take some important lessons from this book about how people’s mentalities change when they have power and knowledge to cope with a problem. That shift in knowledge and power took time and effort, but is one of the rare success stories of recent history.”—Elinor Ostrom, coeditor of
Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Human-Environment Interactions in Forest Ecosystems“
Environmentality offers readers in the fields of anthropology, environmental studies, and history a useful and interesting case study. . . .
Environmentality is an excellent piece of scholarship, and a valuable addition to the fields of environmental anthropology and history, as well as to the general literature on colonial and postcolonial India.” -- Sarah Strauss * American Anthropologist *
"[A] particularly useful and timely piece of scholarship as it attempts to transgress what are often distant and diverse literatures. This book helps to shed light on the connections between environmental regulation, practice and subjectivity. And in that way, this book illustrates the complexity and connectivity of environmental conflicts and struggles that are often overlooked by more limited or constrained analytical approaches. The book is very clearly organized and well written. . . ." -- Michael Mascarenhas * Rural Sociology *
"Interesting. . . . The strength of the book lies in its exploration of agency among the local populations and the serious treatment of the culture that environmental regulation affects. . . . This book offers an insightful critique of the assumptions that both the state and peasant resistance are monolithic . . . and provides a useful starting point to understand the phenomena of community forestry that governments are implementing around the world." -- Gregory Barton * American Historical Review *
Table of ContentsAbout the Series ix
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
1. Introduction: The Politics of Nature and the Making of Environmental Subjects 1
Part I: Power/Knowledge and the Creation of Forests 25
2. Forests of Statistics: Colonial Environmental Knowledges 32
3. Struggles over Kumaon's Forests, 1815–1916 65
Part II: A New Technology of Environmental Government: Politics, Institutions, and Subjectivities 87
4. Governmentalized Localities: The Dispersal of Regulation 101
5. Inside the Regulatory Community 127
6. Making Environmental Subjects: Intimate Government 164
7. Conclusion: The Analytics of Environmentality 201
Notes 231
Bibliography 279
Index 309
