Aquatopia documents Harmattan Theater’s ecological interventions and traces its engagements with water-bound landscapes, colonial histories, climate change, and public space across New York City, Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Cochin. The volume uses Harmattan’s site-specific performances as a point of departure to consider climate change and rising sea levels as geographical, ecological, and urban phenomena. Instead of a collection of flat, static surfaces, the Aquatopia...

Debating the practices of museums, galleries, and festivals, Exhibiting Cultures probes the often politically charged relationships among aesthetics, contexts, and implicit assumptions that govern how art and artifacts are displayed and understood. The contributors—museum directors, curators, and scholars in art history, folklore, history, and anthropology—represent a variety of stances on the role of museums and their function as intermediaries between the makers of art or artifa...

The seductiveness of touristed landscapes is simultaneously local and global, as travelled places are formed and reworked by the activities of diverse, mobile people, in their desires to experience situated, sensuous qualities of difference. Cartier and Lew’s interesting and informative book explores contemporary issues in travel and tourism and human geography, and the complex cultural, political, and economic activities at stake in touristed landscapes as a result of globalization.

When journalists, developers, surf tourists, and conservation NGOs cast Papua New Guineans as living in a prior nature and prior culture, they devalue their knowledge and practice, facilitating their dispossession. Paige West's searing study reveals how a range of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today's globalized world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust understanding of the ideological work tha...

The English translation of this bestselling graphic novel tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets in Bangkok, as he decides to leave the city and return to his native village.Through reflections on contemporary Bangkok and flashbacks to his past, Nok reconstructs a journey through the slums of migrant workers, the rice fields of Isaan, the tourist villages of Ko Pha Ngan, and the Red Shirt protests of 2010.Based on a decade of anthropological research,

First Published in 1998. The so-called 'cultural tum' in contemporary geography has brought new ways of thinking about geography and culture, taking cultural geography into exciting new terrain to produce new maps of space and place. Cultural Geography introduces culture from a geographical perspective, focusing on how cultures work in practice and looking at cultures embedded in real-life situations, as locatable, specific phenomena. Definitions of 'culture' are diverse and complex, and C...

Exploring the endings of species, languages, cultures, and ways of life, this collection "provocatively makes one think about extinction in novel ways." — Biological ConservationWe live in an era marked by an accelerating rate of species death, but since the early days of the discipline, anthropology has contemplated the death of languages, cultural groups, and ways of life. The essays in this collection examine processes of—and our understanding of—extinct...

With In the Shadow of the Palms, Sophie Chao examines the multispecies entanglements of oil palm plantations in West Papua, Indonesia, showing how Indigenous Marind communities understand and navigate the social, political, and environmental demands of the oil palm plant. As Chao notes, it is no secret that the palm oil sector has destructive environmental impacts: it greatly contributes to tropical deforestation and is a major driver of global warming. Situating the plant and the...

In 1884 a community of Brazilians was "discovered" by the Western world. The Ecology of Power examines these indigenous people from the Upper Xingu region, a group who even today are one of the strongest examples of long-term cultural continuity. Drawing upon written and oral history, ethnography, and archaeology, Heckenberger addresses the difficult issues facing anthropologists today as they "uncover" the muted voices of indigenous peoples and provides a fascinating portrait of ...

In a world of increasing globalisation, where one high street becomes interchangeable with the next, Identity by Design addresses the idea of place-making and the concept of identity, looking at how these things can be considered as an integral part of the design process. Structured around a series of case studies including Prague, Mexico, Malaysia and Boston, the authors discuss an array of design approaches to explain and define the complex interrelated concepts. The concluding sections ...

In Waves of Knowing Karin Amimoto Ingersoll marks a critical turn away from land-based geographies to center the ocean as place. Developing the concept of seascape epistemology, she articulates an indigenous Hawaiian way of knowing founded on a sensorial, intellectual, and embodied literacy of the ocean. As the source from which Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) draw their essence and identity, the sea is foundational to Kanaka epistemology and ontology. Analyzing oral histories, ch...

The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representi...