Description
Book SynopsisDiscusses extinction as a force shaping socio-cultural and biological life
Trade ReviewIn an age of academic interdisciplinarity, it is often worth reading well outside the confines of one's discipline, for one can find valuable and unexpected insights. This volume of essays explores the connections, similarities, and sometimes interactions between biological and cultural extinctions. It emphasizes the nuances of language used to define extinctions and pending extinctions, drawing on each of the main sub-fields of anthropology. Genese Marie Sodikoff, the volume's editor, has drawn together an eclectic group of authors, resulting in a very loose-knit set of ideas, but a set that provocatively makes one think about extinction in novel ways.
* Biological Conservation *
If extinctions are seen as unfamiliar, faraway events, we often fail to think about them, let alone take conscious action to prevent them. Future studies in extinction discourse will do well to further interrogate the relationship between extinctions in 'local' and 'foreign' contexts, while interrogating the assumptions that undergird these very designations. A valuable step in this direction, The Anthropology of Extinction gives us the tools we need to bring us closer to the discomfiting, disorienting, destabilizing real.
* Make Magazine *
The Anthropology of Extinction offers compelling explorations of issues of widespread concern.
* The Birdbooker Report *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Accumulating Absence—Cultural Productions of the Sixth Extinction \ Genese Marie Sodikoff
Part 1. The Social Construction of Biotic Extinction
1. A Species Apart: Ideology, Science, and the End of Life \ Janet Chernela
2. From Ecocide to Genetic Rescue: Can Technoscience Save the Wild? \ Tracey Heatherington
3. Totem and Taboo Reconsidered: Endangered Species and Moral Practice in Madagascar \ Genese Marie Sodikoff
Part 2. Endangered Species and Emergent Identities
4. Tortoise Soup for the Soul: Finding a Space for Human History in Evolution's Laboratory \ Jill Constantino
5. Global Environmentalism and the Emergence of Indigeneity: The Politics of Cultural and Biological Diversity in China \ Michael Hathaway
Part 3. Red-Listed Languages
6. Last Words, Final Thoughts: Collateral Extinctions in Maliseet Language Death \ Bernard C. Perley
7. Dying Young: Pidgins, Creoles, and Other Contact Languages as Endangered Languages \ Paul B. Garrett
Part 4. Prehistories of an Apex Predator
8. Demise of the Bet Hedgers: A Case Study of Human Impacts on Past and Present Lemurs of Madagascar \ Laurie R. Godfrey and Emilienne Rasoazanabary
9. Disappearing Wildmen: Capture, Extirpation, and Extinction as Regular Components of Representations of Putative Hairy Hominoids \ Gregory Forth
Epilogue: Prolegomenon for a New Totemism \ Peter M. Whiteley
List of Contributors
Index
