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

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.

Storying Multipolar Climes of the Himalaya, Andes and Arctic

Storying Multipolar Climes of the Himalaya, Andes and Arctic
Author: Dan Smyer Yü
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2023-03-23
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 100086880X

This book initiates multipolar climate/clime studies of the world’s altitudinal and latitudinal highlands with terrestrial, experiential, and affective approaches. Framed in the environmental humanities, it is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the mutually-embodied relations of climate, nature, culture, and place in the Himalaya, Andes, and Arctic. Innovation-driven, the book offers multipolar clime case studies through the contributors’ historical findings, ethnographic documentations, and diverse conceptualizations and applications of clime, an overlooked but returning notion of place embodied with climate history, pattern, and changes. The multipolar clime case studies in the book are geared toward deeper, lively explorations and demonstrations of the translatability, interchangeability, and complementarity between the notions of clime and climate. "Multipolar" or "multipolarity" in this book connotes not only the two polar regions and the tectonically shaped highlands of the earth but also diversely debated perspectives of climate studies in the broadest sense. Contributors across the twelve chapters come from diverse fields of social and natural sciences and humanities, and geographically specialize, respectively, in the Himalayan, Andean, and Arctic regions. The first comparative study of climate change in altitudinal and latitudinal highlands, this will be an important read for students, academics, and researchers in environmental humanities, anthropology, climate science, indigenous studies, and ecology.

Himalayan Climes and Multispecies Encounters

Himalayan Climes and Multispecies Encounters
Author: Jelle J.P. Wouters
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2024-07-17
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1040090532

Woven together as a text of humanities-based environmental research outcomes, Himalayan Climes and Multispecies Encounters hosts a collection of historical and fieldwork-based case studies and conceptual discussions of climate change in the greater Himalayan region. The collective endeavour of the book is expressed in what the editors characterize as the clime studies of the Himalayan multispecies worlds. Synonymous with place embodied with weather patterns and environmental history, clime is understood as both a recipient of and a contributor to climate change over time. Supported by empirical and historical findings, the chapters showcase climate change as clime change that concurrently entails multispecies encounters, multifaceted cultural processes, and ecologically specific environmental changes in the more-than-human worlds of the Himalayas. As the case studies complement, enrich, and converse with natural scientific understandings of Himalayan climate change, this book offers students, academics, and the interested public fresh approaches to the interdisciplinary field of climate studies and policy debates on climate change and sustainable development.

Grounding Religion

Grounding Religion
Author: Whitney A. Bauman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2023-09-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1000953173

Now in its third edition, Grounding Religion explores relationships between the environment and religious beliefs and practices. Established scholars introduce students to the ways religion shapes and is shaped by human–earth relations, surveying a series of key issues and questions, with particular attention to issues of environmental degradation, social justice, ritual practices, and religious worldviews. Case studies, discussion questions, and further readings enrich students’ experience. This third edition features updated content, including revisions of every chapter and new material on religion and the environmental humanities, sexuality and queer studies, class, ability, privilege and power, environmental justice, extinction, biodiversity, and politics. An excellent text for undergraduates and graduates alike, it offers an expansive overview of the academic field of religion and ecology as it has emerged in the past fifty years and continues to develop today.

Entangled Lives

Entangled Lives
Author: Joy L. K. Pachuau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2022-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009215477

Entangled Lives is a case study in environmental history, multispecies history, more-than-human history, posthumanism, and environmental humanities. Its main objective is to foreground that history is co-created, but that its contours are locally specific.

Capital and Ecology

Capital and Ecology
Author: Rakhee Bhattacharya
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2023-08-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000923312

This volume studies the intersection of capital and ecology primarily in one of the most sensitive geographies of the world, the Eastern Himalayan region. It looks at how the region has become a melting ground of neoliberal developmentalism and ecological subjectivities with the penetrating forces of global and state capitalism, economic projects, and complex power relations. The essays in the volume argue that specific focus on energy infrastructure and energy production has pushed technology and capital towards asset building which has had an adverse effect on the environment, labour relations, indigenous knowledge systems, and traditional livelihood practices in the area. They look at assets like mega dams, electricity transmission networks, natural gas grids, infrastructural and developmental projects, and other alternative ventures which require interventions in the natural world and its resource deposits. Interdisciplinary in approach, the volume adopts a variety of lenses — developmentalism, state strategy, indigenous voices, geopolitics, and environmentalism — to provide a unique and alternative narrative on the various dimensions of the ecological risks and livelihood threats. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, development studies, indigenous studies, and Asian studies.

The Geopolitics of Melting Mountains

The Geopolitics of Melting Mountains
Author: Alexander E. Davis
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2023-05-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 981991681X

The book addresses the urgent need for rethinking the geopolitics and ecology in the Himalaya, by emphasising the entanglements between these two factors. Most international relations analyses of the Himalaya emphasize the central role of the region’s states and their great power struggles. By reducing the region to its state actors, however, we miss the intense more-than-human diversity of the region, and the crucial role that the mountains play in the global environment. In doing so, the book makes a major contribution to international relations theory by drawing on insights from international political ecology. It first theorises international political ecology and examines the Himalaya as a global region, before moving looking at the international aspects of political ecology in the Himalaya through key areas of the mountains where international politics and ecology are deeply, inextricably linked. It presents three detailed case studies of different environmental and political issues in the Himalaya: icecaps (the India-China-Pakistan boundary dispute in the western Himalaya), foothills and forests (the Nepal-Bhutan-Sikkim borderlands), and rivers (the India-China Bangladesh dispute over the Brahmaputra River basin). Each case study draws on a mix of source materials including fieldwork, government sources, foreign policy discourse, Himalayan ethnographies, and environmental and ecological sciences scholarship.

Peter Goin and the Photography of Environmental Change

Peter Goin and the Photography of Environmental Change
Author: Cheryll Glotfelty
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1000509702

Peter Goin and the Photography of Environmental Change narrates the forty-year quest of award-winning and internationally exhibited contemporary photographer Peter Goin to document human-altered landscapes across America and beyond. It is a collaborative work between an artist and a literary critic, a retrospective of an accomplished environmental photographer, and an innovative education in visual reading. Enduring howling wind, pounding rain, and blistering sun, Goin bears witness to radioactive landscapes, abandoned mines, simulated swamps, rechanneled rivers, controlled burns, overgrown ruins, industrialized agriculture, shrinking reservoirs, feral spaces in the city, architected wilderness, sacred wastelands, contested borderlands, and more. Based on more than seventy hours of taped interviews with the artist spanning over a decade, trailblazing ecocritic Cheryll Glotfelty narrates the arc of Goin's career, sharing excerpts from their conversations that reveal his brilliant mind and piquant personality while situating his work within the broader context of environmental thinkers. This beautifully illustrated volume, with 200 images in color and black-and-white showcasing Goin’s work, will be a fascinating and insightful read for upper-level students, academics, and researchers in photography, environmental history and culture, landscape studies, and environmental humanities.

Yunnan–Burma–Bengal Corridor Geographies

Yunnan–Burma–Bengal Corridor Geographies
Author: Dan Smyer Yü
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000458423

This book explores the historical interconnections between Bengal, Burma, and Yunnan (China), and views the corridor as a transregion that exhibits mobility, connectivity and diversity as well as place-based ecogeological uniqueness. With a focus on the concept of corridor geographies that have shared human and environmental histories beyond sharply demarcated territorial sovereignties of modern individual nation-states, it presents the variety and complexity of premodern and modern pathways, corridors, borders, and networks of livelihood-making, local political alliances, trade and commerce, religions, political systems, and colonial encounters. The book discusses crucial themes including environmental edgings of human-nonhuman habitats, transregional migratory routes and habitats of megafauna, elephant corridors in Yunnan–Myanmar–Bengal landscape, framing spaces between India and China, Tibetan–Myanmar corridors, transboundary river systems, narratives of a Rohingya jade trader, cross-border flow of De’ang’s fermented tea, householding in upland Laos, cultural identities, and trans-border livelihoods. Comprehensive and topical, with its wide-ranging case studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of history, routes and border studies, sociology and social anthropology, South East Asian history, South Asian history, Chinese studies, environmental history, human geography, international relations, ecology, and cultural studies.

Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia

Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia
Author: Jelle J.P. Wouters
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2022-08-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000598586

The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context. The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general.