Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects

This unusual study describes and investigates the transformation of popular attitudes toward environmental protection in the north Indian Himalayas. Villagers in Kumaon who set their forests on fire to protest British regulations to project the environment in the 1920s, themselves began to conserve the same forests by the 1990s. ‘Environmentality’ accounts for this radical change in an ‘original and subtle analysis of modernity and nature’. this innovative historical and political study explains and emergence of environmental identities and changes in state-locality relations and how the two are related. It demonstrates that scholarship on common property, political ecology, and feminist environmentalism can be combined-an approach Agrawal calls environmentality-to better understand environmental change and conservation. Such an understanding is relevant beyond Kumaon-for all environmentally fragile regions. Agrawal’s work focuses on the relationships among power, knowledge, institutions and subjectivities. In so doing, it establishes that theories of environmental politics as enriched by attention to the interconnections among these central concepts in the social sciences. Drawing on extensive fieldwork an archival research, this book brings environment and development studies new institutional economics, and Foucauldian theories of power and subjectivity to bear on its ethnographic and historical research. It will interest scholars across the social sciences and the humanities particularly those interested in environmental and development studies, institutional economics, and ethnographic and historical research, in addition to activists and policy planners concerned about the environment and its fate.