Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, practice theory, and cultural studies. As these essays illustrate, contemporary political ecology moves beyond binary thinking, focusing instead on the interchanges between nature and culture, the symbolic and the material, and the local and the global.

Aletta Biersack’s introduction takes stock of where political ecology has been, assesses the field’s strengths, and sets forth a bold research agenda for the future. Two essays offer wide-ranging critiques of modernist ecology, with its artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, faith in the scientific management of nature, and related tendency to dismiss local knowledge. The remaining eight essays are case studies of particular constructions and appropriations of nature and the complex politics that come into play regionally, nationally, and internationally when nature is brought within the human sphere. Written by some of the leading thinkers in environmental anthropology, these rich ethnographies are based in locales around the world: in Belize, Papua New Guinea, the Gulf of California, Iceland, Finland, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Collectively, they demonstrate that political ecology speaks to concerns shared by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists alike. And they model the kind of work that this volume identifies as the future of political ecology: place-based “ethnographies of nature” keenly attuned to the conjunctural effects of globalization.

Contributors. Eeva Berglund, Aletta Biersack, J. Peter Brosius, Michael R. Dove, James B. Greenberg, Søren Hvalkof, J. Stephen Lansing, Gísli Pálsson, Joel Robbins, Vernon L. Scarborough, John W. Schoenfelder, Richard Wilk

Aletta Biersack is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She is the editor of Papuan Borderlands: Huli, Duna, and Ipili Perspectives on the Papua New Guinea Highlands and Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology. James B. Greenberg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and Professor at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology. He is the author of Blood Ties: Life and Violence in Rural Mexico and Santiago’s Sword: Chatino Peasant Religion and Economics.

  

  

  

  

CONTENTS

ix About the Series
xi Acknowledgments
Color plates follow p. 214

Introduction
3 Reimagining Political Ecology: Culture/Power/History/Nature
Aletta Biersack
Beyond Modernist Ecologies
43 Equilibrium Theory and Interdisciplinary Borrowing: A Comparison of Old and New
Ecological Anthropologies
Michael R. Dove
70 Nature and Society in the Age of Postmodernity
Gisli Palsson
Constructing and Appropriating Nature
97 Ecopolitics through Ethnography: The Cultures of Finland’s Forest-Nature
Eeva Berglund
121 The Political Ecology of Fisheries in the Upper Gulf of California
James B. Greenberg
149 “But the Young Men Don’t Want to Farm Any More”: Political Ecology and Consumer
Culture in Belize
Richard Wilk
171 Properties of Nature, Properties of Culture: Ownership, Recognition, and the Politics of
Nature in a Papua New Guinea Society
Joel Robbins
Ethnographies of Nature
195 Progress of the Victims: Political Ecology in the Peruvian Amazon
Soren Hvalkof
233 Red River, Green War: The Politics of Place Along the Porgera River
Aletta Biersack
281 Between Politics and Poetics: Narratives of Dispossession in Sarawak, East Malaysia
J. Peter Brosius
Between Nature and Culture
325 Rappaport’s Rose: Structure, Agency, and Historical Contingency in Ecological
Anthropology
J. Stephen Lansing, John Schoenfelder, and Vernon Scarborough

359 Works cited
407 Contributors
409 Index