The distinguished environmentalists in this collection offer an in-depth analysis and call to advocacy for community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). Their overview of this transnational movement reveals important links between environmental management and social justice agendas for sustainable use of resources by local communities. In this volume, leaders who have been instrumental in creating and shaping CBNRM describe their model programs; the countermapping movement and colle...

2020: Bushfires, drought, mass extinction, global heating, oceanic acidification, superstorms, and finally pandemic. Human-centric development has brought great violence to the land and other beings, but we are now enduring a series of crises that force us to confront our ecological entanglement.Ian McHarg argued that landscape architects "must become the stewards of the biosphere". But perhaps this position too sits within the tradition of human-centredness? Bruno Latour contends ...

"A poetic and remarkably fertile exploration of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment."—Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian"I'm very grateful to have this book."—Ursula K. Le GuinThe acclaimed and award-winning book about what a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planetA Flavorwire and Times Higher Education Book of the YearMatsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the w...

In this highly original and much-anticipated ethnography, Anna Tsing challenges not only anthropologists and feminists but all those who study culture to reconsider some of their dearest assumptions. By choosing to locate her study among Meratus Dayaks, a marginal and marginalized group in the deep rainforest of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, Tsing deliberately sets into motion the familiar and stubborn urban fantasies of self and other. Unusual encounters with her remarkably creative and un...

Co-Winner of the Senior Book Prize, American Ethnological SocietyWhat the struggle over the Indonesian rainforests can teach us about the social frictions that shape the world around usRubbing two sticks together produces heat and light while one stick alone is just a stick. It is the friction that produces movement, action, and effect. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifie...

What the struggle over the Indonesian rainforests can teach us about the social frictions that shape the world around usRubbing two sticks together produces heat and light while one stick alone is just a stick. It is the friction that produces movement, action, and effect. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing challenges the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a clash of cultures, developing friction as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting ...

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?A ...

Nature has gone feral. How can we re-attune ourselves to the new nature? A field guide can help.While the global scientific community recently made headlines by ruling the Anthropocene—an era many date to the Industrial Revolution when human action truly began to transform the planet—did not qualify for a geological epoch quite yet, understanding the nature of human transformation of the Earth is more important than ever. The effects of human activity are global in...

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth.As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included ar...

Carole L. Crumley has brought together top scholars from across anthropology in a benchmark volume that displays the range of exciting new work on the complex relationship between humans and the environment. Continually pursuing anthropology's persistent claim that both the physical and the mental world matter, these environmental scholars proceed from the holistic assumption that the physical world and human societies are always inextricably linked. As they incorporate diverse forms of kn...

What a Mushroom Lives For pushes today's mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life.The book tells the fascinating story of one particularly prized species, the matsut...

This collection of ethnographic and interpretive essays fundamentally alters the debate over indigenous land claims in Southeast Asia and beyond. Based on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia and Indonesia during the 1980s and 1990s, these studies explore new terrain at the intersection of environmental justice, nature conservation, cultural performance, and the politics of making and interpreting claims.Calling for radical redefinitions of development and ownership and for new understan...