Alchemy In The Rain Forest
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Alchemy In The Rain Forest
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Author : Jerry K. Jacka
language : en
Publisher: Duke University Press
Release Date : 2015-10-23
Alchemy In The Rain Forest written by Jerry K. Jacka and has been published by Duke University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2015-10-23 with Social Science categories.
In Alchemy in the Rain Forest Jerry K. Jacka explores how the indigenous population of Papua New Guinea's highlands struggle to create meaningful lives in the midst of extreme social conflict and environmental degradation. Drawing on theories of political ecology, place, and ontology and using ethnographic, environmental, and historical data, Jacka presents a multilayered examination of the impacts large-scale commercial gold mining in the region has had on ecology and social relations. Despite the deadly interclan violence and widespread pollution brought on by mining, the uneven distribution of its financial benefits has led many Porgerans to call for further development. This desire for increased mining, Jacka points out, counters popular portrayals of indigenous people as innate conservationists who defend the environment from international neoliberal development. Jacka's examination of the ways Porgerans search for common ground between capitalist and indigenous ways of knowing and being points to the complexity and interconnectedness of land, indigenous knowledge, and the global economy in Porgera and beyond.
Rain Forest Floor
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Author : Yves Earhart
language : en
Publisher: Publifye AS
Release Date : 2025-01-25
Rain Forest Floor written by Yves Earhart and has been published by Publifye AS this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2025-01-25 with Science categories.
Rain Forest Floor: The Unseen Engine of Tropical Ecosystems unveils the hidden world beneath rainforest canopies, where decomposers like fungi, bacteria, and insects drive processes essential to planetary health. The book’s central theme explores how decomposition sustains tropical ecosystems, detailing how fallen leaves and decaying matter are transformed into nutrients that fuel forest growth and regulate Earth’s carbon cycle. It reveals startling insights: a single teaspoon of rainforest soil contains millions of microbes critical to soil health, and termites alone can recycle up to a third of dead wood in some regions, acting as “ecosystem engineers.” These processes, the author argues, are not just local curiosities but global safeguards—tropical forests store 25% of the world’s terrestrial carbon, with decomposition balancing carbon release and sequestration. The book uniquely frames the forest floor as a dynamic, interconnected system, challenging readers to view soil organisms as active players in conservation. Through case studies from the Amazon to Southeast Asia, it demonstrates how deforestation and agrochemicals disrupt microbial communities, reducing decomposition efficiency and amplifying climate change. Unlike traditional conservation narratives focused on visible species, this work highlights innovative tools like DNA barcoding to map microbial diversity, bridging microbiology and policy. Structured in three sections, it progresses from ecological fundamentals to human impacts and solutions. Accessible yet rigorous, it blends storytelling with science, advocating for soil-centric conservation strategies. By spotlighting the unseen engine beneath our feet, Rain Forest Floor redefines rainforest resilience, urging readers to protect these vital underground networks as fiercely as the iconic canopy above.
Understanding Extractivism
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Author : Anna J. Willow
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2018-07-27
Understanding Extractivism written by Anna J. Willow and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018-07-27 with Social Science categories.
Understanding ExtrACTIVISM surveys how contemporary resource extractive industry works and considers the responses it inspires in local citizens and activists. Chapters cover a range of extractive industries operating around the world, including logging, hydroelectric dams, mining, and oil and natural gas extraction. Taking an activist anthropological stance, Anna Willow examines how culture and power inform recent and ongoing disputes between projects’ proponents and opponents, beneficiaries and victims. Through a series of engaging case studies, she argues that diverse contemporary natural resource conflicts are underlain by a culturally constituted ‘extractivist’ mind-set and embedded in global patterns of political inequity. Offering a synthesizing framework for making sense of complex interconnections among environmental, social, and political dimensions of natural resource disputes, Willow reflects on why extractivism exists, why it matters, and what we might be able to do about it. The book is valuable reading for students and researchers in the environmental social sciences as well as for activists and practitioners.
A Forest Of Dreams
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Author : Noah Theriault
language : en
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Release Date : 2025-09-30
A Forest Of Dreams written by Noah Theriault and has been published by University of Hawaii Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2025-09-30 with Social Science categories.
"After the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986, the Philippines became the first country in Asia to codify Indigenous rights. This hard-fought reform aimed to protect the ancestral lands of the archipelago's remaining Indigenous communities. Since then, these communities have become increasingly embroiled in resource politics, and many have found that claiming their rights does as much to facilitate their dispossession as to prevent it. In A Forest of Dreams, Noah Theriault examines the entanglement of capitalism, conservation, and indigeneity in southern Palawan, a place widely coveted as the Philippines' "last frontier." Drawing on a decade of research, Theriault reveals how bureaucrats, investors, and conservationists impose their own designs on Indigenous rights as they vie for land, labor, and legitimacy. But he also asks how those designs collide with the dreams-both figurative and literal-of Indigenous persons themselves. What results is a story of unexpected agency and contingency, in which humans, wildlife, and powerful forest beings complicate prevailing theories of social and environmental change. Through the experiences of a specific community, A Forest of Dreams traces how Palawan families understand and influence the powerful forces that have enclosed them within an ancestral domain, a protected landscape, and an expanding plantation zone. Each chapter opens with a memorable historical or ethnographic episode-from Lapulapu's fateful battle with Magellan and the primitivist visions of Charles Lindbergh to truckloads of tree-planting college students, a screeching civet, oneiric owl sorcery, and a bitter dispute over almaciga resin. Informed by Palawan analyses of their own history, Theriault argues that efforts to "save the last frontier" have reinforced, rather than disrupted, long-term processes of colonization and capitalist expansion. Yet he also shows how studies of the environment, development, and human rights in Southeast Asia can better account for the critical agency of those whose lands are at stake"--
Ancestral Lines
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Author : John Barker
language : en
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Release Date : 2016-04-05
Ancestral Lines written by John Barker and has been published by University of Toronto Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-04-05 with Social Science categories.
This compelling ethnography offers a nuanced case study of the ways in which the Maisin of Papua New Guinea navigate pressing economic and environmental issues. Beautifully written and accessible to most readers, Ancestral Lines is designed with introductory cultural anthropology courses in mind. Barker has organized the book into chapters that mirror many of the major topics covered in introductory cultural anthropology, such as kinship, economic pursuit, social arrangements, gender relations, religion, politics, and the environment. The second edition has been revised throughout, with a new timeline of events and a final chapter that brings readers up to date on important events since 2002, including a devastating cyclone and a major court victory against the forestry industry.
The Politics Of Custom
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Author : John L. Comaroff
language : en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date : 2018-03-08
The Politics Of Custom written by John L. Comaroff and has been published by University of Chicago Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018-03-08 with History categories.
How are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post–Cold War era—changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated. This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises—from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers–but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that “traditional” authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa’s history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.
Unsustainable
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Author : Matthew Archer
language : en
Publisher: NYU Press
Release Date : 2024-02-06
Unsustainable written by Matthew Archer and has been published by NYU Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2024-02-06 with Business & Economics categories.
A behind-the-scenes look at how corporate and financial actors enforce a business-friendly approach to global sustainability In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility. And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often just hollow symbols. Unsustainable contends with the world of big banks and multinational corporations, where sustainability begins and ends with measuring and reporting. Drawing on five years of research among sustainability professionals in the US and Europe, Unsustainable shows how this depoliticizing tendency to frame sustainability as a technical issue enhances and obscures corporate power while doing little, if anything, to address the root causes of the climate crisis and issues of social inequality. Through this obsession with metrics and indicators, the adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure transforms into a belief that once you’ve measured social and environmental impacts, the market will simply manage them for you. The book draws on diverse sources of evidence—ethnographic fieldwork among a wide array of sustainability professionals, interviews with private bankers, and apocalyptic science fiction—and features analyses of name-brand companies including Volkswagen, Unilever, and Nestlé. Making the case for the limits of measuring and reporting, Archer seeks to mobilize alternative approaches. Through an intersectional lens incorporating Black and Indigenous theories of knowledge, power and value, he offers a vision of sustainability that aims to be more effective and more socially and ecologically just.
The Melanesian World
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Author : Eric Hirsch
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2019-03-28
The Melanesian World written by Eric Hirsch and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019-03-28 with Social Science categories.
This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.
Roots Of Power
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Author : Michael Sheridan
language : en
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Release Date : 2023-04-21
Roots Of Power written by Michael Sheridan and has been published by Taylor & Francis this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2023-04-21 with Science categories.
Roots of Power tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality. In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet’s tropics. These plants’ deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants’ social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method.
Hard Work
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Author : Tuomas Tammisto
language : en
Publisher: Helsinki University Press
Release Date : 2024-12-19
Hard Work written by Tuomas Tammisto and has been published by Helsinki University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2024-12-19 with Social Science categories.
For the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea, ‘hard work’ does not refer to drudgery or physically exhausting labour. Instead, it involves creating and recreating social relations through acts of care, marriages, ceremonial events, sharing, and working the land together. ‘Work’ as the Mengen see it, produces value understood as meaningful social relations. This differs significantly from the way colonial officials, loggers, and planters perceived value. Hard Work examines human-environmental relations, value production, natural resource extraction, and state formation within the context of the Mengen. It delves into how the Mengen engage with their land and outside actors like companies, NGOs, and the state through agriculture, logging, plantation labour, and environmental conservation. These practices have shaped the Mengen’s lived environment, while also sparking debates on what is considered valuable and how value is created. Tammisto’s monograph explores the complexities of natural resource extraction, looking at both large-scale processes and personal human-environment interactions. It combines a political ecology focus on the connection between environmental issues and power relations with a focus on how value is produced, represented, and materialized.