Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas

Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas
Author: Dan Smyer Yü
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2021-06-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000397580
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Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas: Symbiotic Indigeneity, Commoning, Sustainability showcases how the eco-geological creativity of the earth is integrally woven into the landforms, cultures, and cosmovisions of modern Himalayan communities. Unique in scope, this book features case studies from Bhutan, Assam, Sikkim, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sino-Indian borderlands, many of which are documented by authors from indigenous Himalayan communities. It explores three environmental characteristics of modern Himalayas: the anthropogenic, the indigenous, and the animist. Focusing on the sentient relations of human-, animal-, and spirit-worlds with the earth in different parts of the Himalayas, the authors present the complex meanings of indigeneity, commoning and sustainability in the Anthropocene. In doing so, they show the vital role that indigenous stories and perspectives play in building new regional and planetary environmental ethics for a sustainable future. Drawing on a wide range of expert contributions from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanist disciplines, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental humanities, religion and ecology, indigenous knowledge and sustainable development more broadly.

Environmental Humanities in India

Environmental Humanities in India
Author: Debajyoti Biswas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-11-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9789819739325
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This open access book offers an introduction to the field of the environmental humanities in India. The environmental humanities, often referred to as ‘EH’, are a multifaceted, relatively new, and swiftly evolving field of scholarship that integrates the theories and approaches of various disciplines - from anthropology, art, communications, cultural studies, philosophy and ecology to history, literature, media, music, performance, politics, sociology, theology and theater. Practitioners of this considerably integrative and widely ranging field aim to address and, in certain cases, confront today's urgent ecological and cultural challenges, namely climate change, urban sustainability, biodiversity conservation, species decline, energy policy, the exigencies of the Anthropocene, environmental activism, and Indigenous peoples' justice. Although the environmental humanities have been relatively slow to gain traction in South Asia, an increasing momentum towards transdisciplinary approaches to ecology and sustainability is palpable in India. Comprising fourteen chapters, this contributed volume is the first major publication to call attention to current work in the environmental humanities in India. The volume foregrounds particular ecohumanist theories and methodologies evolving from Indian biocultural contexts. Towards this aim, the book consists of four thematic sections: Indigenous Perspectives: Conservation, Spirituality, and Language; Theoretical Grounding: Education, Law, and Ethics; Literary Formulations: Memoir, Parable, and Storyworlds; and Popular Narratives: Myth, Travel, and Music. The volume is of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, early career scholars, and more established researchers in the environmental humanities and the allied fields of ecopoetics, ecocriticism, ecomusicology, environmental art, cultural ecology, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies. This is an open access book.

The Environmental Humanities

The Environmental Humanities
Author: Robert S. Emmett
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2017-10-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262342308
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A concise overview of this multidisciplinary field, presenting key concepts, central issues, and current research, along with concrete examples and case studies. The emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline early in the twenty-first century reflects the growing conviction that environmental problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. This book offers a concise overview of this new multidisciplinary field, presenting concepts, issues, current research, concrete examples, and case studies. Robert Emmett and David Nye show how humanists, by offering constructive knowledge as well as negative critique, can improve our understanding of such environmental problems as global warming, species extinction, and over-consumption of the earth's resources. They trace the genealogy of environmental humanities from European, Australian, and American initiatives, also showing its cross-pollination by postcolonial and feminist theories. Emmett and Nye consider a concept of place not synonymous with localism, the risks of ecotourism, and the cultivation of wild areas. They discuss the decoupling of energy use and progress, and point to OECD countries for examples of sustainable development. They explain the potential for science to do both good and harm, examine dark visions of planetary collapse, and describe more positive possibilities—alternative practices, including localization and degrowth. Finally, they examine the theoretical impact of new materialism, feminism, postcolonial criticism, animal studies, and queer ecology on the environmental humanities.

Climate Change and the Humanities

Climate Change and the Humanities
Author: Alexander Elliott
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1137551240
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This volume of essays fills a lacunae in the current climate change debate by bringing new perspectives on the role of humanities scholars within this debate. The humanities have historically played an important role in the various debates on environment, climate and society. The past two decades especially have seen a resurfacing of these environmental concerns across humanities disciplines in the wake of what has been termed climate change. This book argues that these disciplines should be more confident and vocal in responding to climate change while questioning the way in which the climate change debate is currently being conducted in academic, political and social arenas. Addressing climate change through the varied approaches of the humanities means re-thinking and re-evaluating its fundamental assumptions and responses to perceived crisis through the lens of history, philosophy and literature. The volume aims thus to be a catalyst for emerging scholarship in this field and to appeal to an academic and popular readership.

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities
Author: Ursula K. Heise
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1051
Release: 2017-01-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317660188
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The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to the field, offering a broad overview of its founding principles while providing insight into exciting new directions for future scholarship. Articulating the significance of humanistic perspectives for our collective social engagement with ecological crises, the volume explores the potential of the environmental humanities for organizing humanistic research, opening up new forms of interdisciplinarity, and shaping public debate and policies on environmental issues. Sections cover: The Anthropocene and the Domestication of Earth Posthumanism and Multispecies Communities Inequality and Environmental Justice Decline and Resilience: Environmental Narratives, History, and Memory Environmental Arts, Media, and Technologies The State of the Environmental Humanities The first of its kind, this companion covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines within the humanities and with the social and natural sciences. Exploring how the environmental humanities contribute to policy and action concerning some of the key intellectual, social, and environmental challenges of our times, the chapters offer an ideal guide to this rapidly developing field.

Critical Humanities from India

Critical Humanities from India
Author: D. Venkat Rao
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2018-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351234927
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The field of humanities generates a discourse that traditionally addressed the questions of what is proper to man, rights of man, crimes against humanity, human creativity and action, human reflection and performance, human utterance and artefact. The university as a philosophical-political institution transmits this humanist account. This European humanistic legacy, which is little more than Christian anthropology, barely received any questioning from cultures that faced colonialism. In such a context, this volume attempts to unravel the ‘barely secularized heritage’ of Europe (Derrida’s phrase) and its fatal consequences in other cultures. The task of Critical Humanities is to explore the ways in which the question of being human (along with non-human others) today from heterogeneous cultural ‘backgrounds’ can be undertaken. The future of the humanities teaching and research is contingent upon the risky task of configuring cultural difference from non-European locations. Such a task is inescapable and urgently needed when tectonic cultural upheavals have begun to show devastating effect on planetary coexistence today. It is precisely in such a context that this collection of essays on critical humanities affirms, ‘without alibi’, the urgency of collective reflection and innovative research across the traditional disciplinary and institutional borders and communication systems on the one hand and Asian, African and European cultural formations on the other. Critical Humanities are at one level little more than communities on the verge (critical) but whose centuries long survival and resilient creations of cultural (and /as natural) habitats are of deeply enduring significance to affirm the biocultural diversities of living that compose the planet. Topical and timely, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and teachers of cultural theory, literary studies, philosophy, cultural geography, legal studies, sociology, history, performance studies, environmental studies, caste and communalism studies, postcolonial theory, India studies, and education.

Nature in Indian Philosophy and Cultural Traditions

Nature in Indian Philosophy and Cultural Traditions
Author: Meera Baindur
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2015-05-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 8132223586
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Working within a framework of environmental philosophy and environmental ethics, this book describes and postulates alternative understandings of nature in Indian traditions of thought, particularly philosophy. The interest in alternative conceptualizations of nature has gained significance after many thinkers pointed out that attitudes to the environment are determined to a large extent by our presuppositions of nature. This book is particularly timely from that perspective. It begins with a brief description of the concept of nature and a history of the idea of nature in Western thought. This provides readers with a context to the issues around the concept of nature in environmental philosophy, setting a foundation for further discussion about alternate conceptualizations of nature and their significance. In particular, the work covers a wide array of textual and non-textual sources to link and understand nature from classical Indian philosophical perspectives as well as popular understandings in Indian literary texts and cultural practices. Popular issues in environmental philosophy are discussed in detail, such as: What is ‘nature’ in Indian philosophy? How do people perceive nature through landscape and mythological and cultural narratives? In what ways is nature sacred in India? To make the discussion relevant to contemporary readers, the book includes a section on the ecological and ethical implications of some philosophical concepts and critical perspectives on alternate conceptualizations of nature.

An Environmental History of India

An Environmental History of India
Author: Michael H. Fisher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-10-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107111625
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This longue durée survey of the Indian subcontinent's environmental history reveals the complex interactions among its people and the natural world.

Ecological Indian

Ecological Indian
Author: Shepard Krech
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780393321005
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Krech (anthropology, Brown U.) treats such provocative issues as whether the Eden in which Native Americans are viewed as living prior to European contact was a feature of native environmentalism or simply low population density; indigenous use of fire; and the Indian role in near-extinctions of buffalo, deer, and beaver. He concludes that early Indians' culturally-mediated closeness with nature was not always congruent with modern conservation ideas, with implications for views of, and by, contemporary Indians. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities

Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities
Author: Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2015-04-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317574303
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This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation of environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term and catastrophic environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification of nature. The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives on: the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.