Ecological Nationalisms

The works presented in this collection take environmental scholarship in South Asia into novel territory by exploring how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and India. The essays provide insight into the motivations of colonial and national governments in controlling or managing nature, and bring into fresh perspective the different kinds of regional political conflicts that invoke nationalist sentiment through claims on nature. In doing all this, the volume also offers new ways to think about nationalism and, more specifically, nationalism in South Asia from the vantage point of interdisciplinary environmental studies. The contributors to this innovative volume show that manifestations of nationalism have long and complex histories in South Asia. Terrestrial entities, imagined in terms of dense ecological networks of relationships, have often been the space or reference point for national aspirations, as shared memories of Mother Nature or appropriated economic, political, and religious geographies. In recent times, different groups in South Asia have claimed and appropriated ancient landscapes and territories for the purpose of locating and justifying a specific and utopian version of nation by linking its origin to their nature-mediated attachments to these landscapes. The topics covered include forests, agriculture, marine fisheries, parks, sacred landscapes, property rights, trade, and economic development.

ISBN 0295985313   Pages 376 ISBN13 9780295985312 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher University of Washington Press   Weight (grammes) 712 Imprint University of Washington Press   Published in Washington Format Hardback   Series title Culture, Place, and Nature: Studies in Anthropology and Environment S. Publication date 16 May 2006   Height (mm) 233 Library of Congress 2005014154   Width (mm) 161 DEWEY 306.2   Spine width (mm) 30 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

1		Introduction : ecological nationalisms : claiming nature for making history by K. Sivaramakrishnan and Gunnel Cederlof		1
2		Environmental history, the spice trade, and the state in South India by Kathleen D. Morrison		43
3		The Toda tiger : debates on custom, utility, and rights in nature, South India 1820-1843 by Gunnel Cederlof		65
4		Contested forests in North-West Pakistan : the bureaucracy between the "ecological," the "national," and the realities of a nation's frontier by Urs Geiser		90
5		Indigenous forests : rights, discourses, and resistance in Chotanagpur, 1860-2002 by Vinita Damodaran		115
6		Nature and politics : the case of Uttarakhand, North India by Antje Linkenbach		151
7		Indigenous natures : forest and community dynamics in Meghalaya, North-East India by Bengt G. Karlsson		170
8		Sacred forests of Kodagu : ecological value and social role by Claude A. Garcia and J.-P. Pascal		199
9		Knowledge against the state : local perceptions of government interventions in the fishery (Kerala, India) by Gotz Hoeppe		233
10		Shifting cultivation, images, and development in the Chittagong Hill tracts of Bangladesh by Wolfgang Mey		255
11		Forest management in a Pukhtun community : the constructions of identities by Sarah Southwold-Llewellyn		274
12		"There is no life without wildlife" : national parks and national identity in Bardia National Park, Western Nepal by Nina Bhatt		297

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