How Nature Works - (School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar) by Sarah Besky & Alex Blanchette (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- Winner of the 2021 Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) Book PrizeWe now live on a planet that is troubled--even overworked--in ways that compel us to reckon with inherited common sense about the relationship between human labor and nonhuman nature.
- Author(s): Sarah Besky & Alex Blanchette
- 272 Pages
- Social Science, Human Geography
- Series Name: School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar
Description
About the Book
The authors of this volume push ethnographic inquiry beyond the anthropocentric documentation of human work on nature in order to develop a language for thinking about how all labor is a collective ecological act.Book Synopsis
Winner of the 2021 Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) Book Prize
We now live on a planet that is troubled--even overworked--in ways that compel us to reckon with inherited common sense about the relationship between human labor and nonhuman nature. In Paraguay, fast-growing soy plants are displacing both prior crops and people. In Malaysia, dispossessed farmers are training captive orangutans to earn their own meals. In India, a prized dairy cow suddenly refuses to give more milk. Built from these sorts of scenes and sites, where the ultimate subjects and agents of work are ambiguous, How Nature Works develops an anthropology of labor that is sharply attuned to the irreversible effects of climate change, extinction, and deforestation. The authors of this volume push ethnographic inquiry beyond the anthropocentric documentation of human work on nature in order to develop a language for thinking about how all labor is a collective ecological act.
Review Quotes
"This volume will interest graduate students and professors in anthropology, geography, and sociology whose work deals with post-humanism, labor, industrialization, and research on plantations and monocultures."--J. Asselin, Choice