Author: Arun Agrawal
K Sivaramakrishnan/
Editor: Arun Agrawal and K Sivaramakrishnan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 326
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195654609
Description
This book is a timely study on the dichotomies that have shaped the analysis of environmental processes in India. Drawing on wide-ranging field and archival research, the contributors to this volume.
1.Offer a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the relationship between agrarian transformation and environmental change
2.Explain the dynamics of environmental conflicts in terms of mobilization and organization while blurring rigid categorizations of cultural representations
3.Examine how environmental change has articulated agrarian and rural transformation in technological, cultural and political terms over the last two centuries
4.Combine conceptual analyses and specific case studies to understand why competing powers emphasize particular land use patterns and social relations.
The essays in this volume will be of immense value to researchers and students of development, environment, history, ecology, economics, sociology, and political science, as well as policy-makers.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
With a deft combination of rich empirical material and conceptual sophistication, this volume treats nature, climate, forests, pasture, irrigation, cultivation, political movements, and state policies as aspects of a single reality, and shows that their separation is not just a scholarly misconception but an artifice of colonial and post-colonial history. Our understanding of the politics of Indian environment and the academic field of environmental studies will never be the same.
-Gyan Prakash, Princeton University
… a volume of historically and empirically informed essays that represents a new generation of scholarship that promises to reshape the fields of agrarian and environmental studies. By confronting some of the received wisdom that have separated the study of agriculture from that of the environment, this book opens up a whole range of new and refreshing questions that will be of relevance to scholars and policy-makers in all parts of the world.
-Akhil Gupta