Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India
Agrarian Environments questions the dichotomies that have structured earlier analyses of environmental processes in India and offers a new way of looking at the relationship between agrarian transformation and environmental change. The contributors claim that attempts to explain environmental conflicts in terms of the local versus the global, indigenous versus outsiders, women versus men, or the community versus the market or state obscure vital dynamics of mobilization and organization that critically influence thought and policy.
Editors Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan claim that rural social change in India cannot be understood without exploring how environmental changes articulate major aspects of agrarian transformations—technological, cultural, and political—in the last two centuries. In order to examine these issues, they have reached beyond the confines of single disciplinary allegiances or methodological loyalties to bring together anthropologists, historians, political scientists, geographers, and environmental scientists who are significantly informed by interdisciplinary research. Drawing on extensive field and archival research, the contributors demonstrate the powerful political implications of blurring the boundaries between dichotomous cultural representations, combine conceptual analyses with specific case studies, and look at why competing powers chose to emphasize particular representations of land use or social relations. By providing a more textured analysis of how categories emerge and change, this work offers the possibility of creating crucial alliances across populations that have historically been assumed to lack mutual goals.
Agrarian Environments will be valuable to those in political science, Asian studies, and environmental studies.

Contributors. Arun Agrawal, Mark Baker, Molly Chattopadhyaya, Vinay Gidwani, Sumit Guha, Shubhra Gururani, Cecile Jackson, David Ludden, Haripriya Rangan, Paul Robbins, Vasant Saberwal, James C. Scott, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Ajay Skaria, Jennifer Springer, Darren Zook

1117782899
Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India
Agrarian Environments questions the dichotomies that have structured earlier analyses of environmental processes in India and offers a new way of looking at the relationship between agrarian transformation and environmental change. The contributors claim that attempts to explain environmental conflicts in terms of the local versus the global, indigenous versus outsiders, women versus men, or the community versus the market or state obscure vital dynamics of mobilization and organization that critically influence thought and policy.
Editors Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan claim that rural social change in India cannot be understood without exploring how environmental changes articulate major aspects of agrarian transformations—technological, cultural, and political—in the last two centuries. In order to examine these issues, they have reached beyond the confines of single disciplinary allegiances or methodological loyalties to bring together anthropologists, historians, political scientists, geographers, and environmental scientists who are significantly informed by interdisciplinary research. Drawing on extensive field and archival research, the contributors demonstrate the powerful political implications of blurring the boundaries between dichotomous cultural representations, combine conceptual analyses with specific case studies, and look at why competing powers chose to emphasize particular representations of land use or social relations. By providing a more textured analysis of how categories emerge and change, this work offers the possibility of creating crucial alliances across populations that have historically been assumed to lack mutual goals.
Agrarian Environments will be valuable to those in political science, Asian studies, and environmental studies.

Contributors. Arun Agrawal, Mark Baker, Molly Chattopadhyaya, Vinay Gidwani, Sumit Guha, Shubhra Gururani, Cecile Jackson, David Ludden, Haripriya Rangan, Paul Robbins, Vasant Saberwal, James C. Scott, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Ajay Skaria, Jennifer Springer, Darren Zook

34.95 Out Of Stock
Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India

Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India

Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India

Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representations, and Rule in India

Paperback

$34.95 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Temporarily Out of Stock Online
  • PICK UP IN STORE

    Your local store may have stock of this item.

Related collections and offers


Overview

Agrarian Environments questions the dichotomies that have structured earlier analyses of environmental processes in India and offers a new way of looking at the relationship between agrarian transformation and environmental change. The contributors claim that attempts to explain environmental conflicts in terms of the local versus the global, indigenous versus outsiders, women versus men, or the community versus the market or state obscure vital dynamics of mobilization and organization that critically influence thought and policy.
Editors Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan claim that rural social change in India cannot be understood without exploring how environmental changes articulate major aspects of agrarian transformations—technological, cultural, and political—in the last two centuries. In order to examine these issues, they have reached beyond the confines of single disciplinary allegiances or methodological loyalties to bring together anthropologists, historians, political scientists, geographers, and environmental scientists who are significantly informed by interdisciplinary research. Drawing on extensive field and archival research, the contributors demonstrate the powerful political implications of blurring the boundaries between dichotomous cultural representations, combine conceptual analyses with specific case studies, and look at why competing powers chose to emphasize particular representations of land use or social relations. By providing a more textured analysis of how categories emerge and change, this work offers the possibility of creating crucial alliances across populations that have historically been assumed to lack mutual goals.
Agrarian Environments will be valuable to those in political science, Asian studies, and environmental studies.

Contributors. Arun Agrawal, Mark Baker, Molly Chattopadhyaya, Vinay Gidwani, Sumit Guha, Shubhra Gururani, Cecile Jackson, David Ludden, Haripriya Rangan, Paul Robbins, Vasant Saberwal, James C. Scott, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Ajay Skaria, Jennifer Springer, Darren Zook


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822325741
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 10/20/2000
Pages: 328
Product dimensions: 5.83(w) x 8.95(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Arun Agrawal is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is the author of Greener Pastures: Politics, Markets, and Community among a Migrant Pastoral People, also published by Duke UniversityPress.

K. Sivaramakrishnan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington and author of Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India.

Table of Contents

Foreword / James C. Scott vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Agrarian Environments / Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan 1

State Economic Policies and Changing Regional Landscapes in the Uttarakhand Himalaya, 1818–1947 / Haripriya Rangan 23

Colonial Influences on Property, Community, and Land Use in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh / J. Mark Baker 47

Environmental Alarm and Institutionalized Conservation in Himachal Pradesh, 1865–1994 / Vasant K. Saberwal 68

State Power and Agricultural Transformation in Tamil Nadu / Jenny Springer 86

Famine in the Landscape: Imagining Hunger in South Asian History, 1860–1990 / Darren C. Zook 107

Economic Rents and Natural Resources: Common Conflicts in Premodern India / Sumit Guha 132

Identities and Livelihoods: Gender, Ethnicity, and Nature in a South Bihar Village / Cecile Jackson and Molly Chattopadhyay 147

Regimes of Control, Strategies of Access: Politics of Forest Use in the Uttarakhand Himalaya, India / Shubhra Gururani 170

Pastoralism and Community in Rajasthan: Interrogating Categories of Arid Lands Development / Paul Robbins 191

Labored Landscapes: Agro-ecological Change in Central Gujarat, India / Vinay Gidwani 216

Reflections

Agrarian Histories and Grassroots Development in South Asia / David Ludden 251

Cathecting the Natural / Ajay Skaria 265

Bibliography 277

Contributors 303

Index 307
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews