Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power

As environmental use and abuse becomes even more fiercely contested around the world, we need fresh perspectives to understand issues such as resource extraction and social conflict; community identities and environmental claims; and technology, risk, and environmental governance. Cultural politics offers a novel approach that expands and enriches political-economic analysis to explain the changing relations between states, markets and social groups and their bio-physical environment.In this volume, nine eminent scholars apply the theory and practice of a cultural politics of natural resources to spatial and temporal sites that range from petroleum fields in Nigeria to palm-oil plantations in Indonesia; from irrigation engineering in British India to contemporary environmental decision-making in the United Kingdom; from global climate change to water scarcity in Gujarat.The volume is organized around a set of keywords: waste, scarcity, security, territory, sovereignty, frontier, conflict, expertise and community. These are significant, indicative terms whose changing meanings trace shifts in a vocabulary of cultural practices and institutions. Taken together, these words map a distinctive world of meanings and chart out the terrain of the cultural politics of natural resources.The path-breaking essays in this volume stimulate and inform environmental debates in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, history and geography–as well as in the world at large.