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Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge

Lesley Green, editor
Contested Ecologies:  Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge
ISBN: 978-0-7969-2428-5
$25.00
2013/284 pages
Distributed for HSRC Press
"This volume offers the first concrete demonstration that it is indeed possible to go beyond the alleged rift between nature and culture, moving us closer towards the elusive goal of  healing our planet through new knowledge formations."— Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"Extraordinarily interesting.... A new anthropology is afoot. Contested Ecologies sets out a new approach beyond the boundaries of modernity as we know it. Here different versions of nature are at play, and a 'political ontology' has emerged to grasp this problem. Cosmopolitics comes into its own in this collection."— Anna Tsing, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

DESCRIPTION

The chapters in this collection contest the framework of knowledge that has deadlocked nature and culture, tradition and modernity, scientific and indigenous, and in doing so makes a case for the value of rethinking knowledge beyond the nature-culture divide.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lesley Green is professor of anthropology in the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology, and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and deputy director of Environmental Humanities South.

CONTENTS

  • Foreword—Crain Soudien.
  • Contested Ecologies: Nature and Knowledge—L. Green.
  • A FIRST INTERVENTION: NATURE VERSUS CULTURE.
  • Notes Towards a Political Ontology of “Environmental” Conflicts—M. Blaser.
  • Economic Development and Cosmopolitical Re-involvement: From Necessity to Sufficiency—E. Viveiros de Castro.
  • On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections—H. Garuba.
  • A SECOND INTERVENTION: SPACE, TIME, LIFE.
  • About "Mariano’s Archive": Ecologies of Stories—M. de la Cadena.
  • The Day-World Hakwri and Its Topologies: On Palikur Alternatives to the Idea of Space—L. Green.
  • Cultivating Krag, Refreshing Gees: Ecologies of Wellbeing in Namaqualand—J.B. Cohen.
  • Are Petitioners Makers of Rain? Rains, Worlds, and Survival in Conflict-Torn Buhera, Zimbabwe—A. Nhemachena.
  • Metaphors for Climate Adaptation from Zimbabwe: Zephaniah Phiri Maseko and the Marriage of Water and Soil—C. Mabeza.
  • A THIRD INTERVENTION: SCIENCES AND PUBLICS.
  • Engagements Between Disparate Knowledge Traditions: Toward Doing Difference Generatively and in Good Faith—H. Verran.
  • The Making of Sutherlandia as Medicine—D. Gibson and S. Kilian.
  • Conservation Conversations: Improving the Dialogue Between Fishers and Fisheries Science Along the Benguela Coast—T-A. Anderson, K. Draper, G. Duggan, L. Green, A. Jarre, J. Rogerson, S. Ragaller, and M. van Zyl.
  • Cape Flats Nature: Rethinking Urban Ecologies—T. Katzschner.
  • Spotting the Leopard: Fieldwork, Science, and Leopard Behavior—I. Glenn.
  • Contesting Ecological Collapse: Rapa Nui, the Island at the End of the World—D. Turnbull.
  • Closing Remarks from the Conclusion of the Contested Ecologies Writing Workshop, September 2011—E. Viveiros de Castro.