Download or read book Rainforest Capitalism written by Thomas Hendriks and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.
Download or read book A Death in the Rainforest written by Don Kulick and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Perhaps the finest and most profound account of ethnographic fieldwork and discovery that has ever entered the anthropological literature.” —The Wall Street Journal “If you want to experience a profoundly different culture without the exhausting travel (to say nothing of the cost), this is an excellent choice.” —The Washington Post As a young anthropologist, Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can’t study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely, and he found himself inexorably drawn into their world, and implicated in their destiny. Kulick wanted to tell the story of Gapuners—one that went beyond the particulars and uses of their language—that took full stock of their vanishing culture. This book takes us inside the village as he came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a tropical rainforest. But A Death in the Rainforest is also an illuminating look at the impact of Western culture on the farthest reaches of the globe and the story of why this anthropologist realized finally that he had to give up his study of this language and this village. An engaging, deeply perceptive, and brilliant interrogation of what it means to study a culture, A Death in the Rainforest takes readers into a world that endures in the face of massive changes, one that is on the verge of disappearing forever.
Download or read book The Nature of Spectacle written by Jim Igoe and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A thoughtful treatise on how popular representations of nature, through entertainment and tourism, shape how we imagine environmental problems and their solutions"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Breakfast of Biodiversity written by John H. Vandermeer and published by Food First Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on international commerce as the greatest threat to the world's rain forests. Argues that no single industry or activity is to blame for deforestation, but that the ways in which consumers around the world spend and invest comprises a web of interests that lead to the depletion of natural resources and the destruction of habitats. Advocates consumer behavior meant to curtail the destruction.
Download or read book The Brazilian Amazon Rainforest written by Luiz C. Barbosa and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2000 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbosa (sociology, San Francisco State University) provides a global, world-systemic analysis of the problem of deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. He shows how changes in global ecopolitics demanding sustainable development, coupled with the onset of democracy in Brazil, substantially altered the battle over the future of Amazonia. He describes deforestation in the region in the context of an expanding frontier of global capitalism, and compares Amazon experiences with those of Costa Rica, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Download or read book Biotraffic written by Christopher Keller Morris and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Biotraffic delves into the complex world of biological resource trade, taking readers inside the contemporary Ciskei region of South Africa, a once-notorious apartheid 'homeland' turned extractive hub for wild medicinal plants. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Christopher Morris examines the region's trade in Pelargonium sidoides, revealing the plant's transformation from a contested tuberculosis treatment in early twentieth-century Europe to a modern-day remedy for the common cold. Linking past and present, the story of the pelargonium trade encapsulates a larger tale about colonial legacies and the fraught effects of global environmental governance ambitions. It also teems with a diverse cast of actors, from plant harvesters and pharmaceutical companies to activist NGOs, government officials, and chiefs who have become business partners with multinational drug firms. The book's analysis extends beyond the mere extraction and commercialization of plant resources, offering a critical examination of how demand for these therapeutics intertwines with broader struggles over land and political power in South Africa. In doing so, Biotraffic illuminates the multilayered dynamics of a global trade that not only exploits but also reconfigures the sociopolitical fabric of a region grappling with the afterlives of apartheid and the contemporary challenges of environmental and economic justice"--
Download or read book Critical Education Against Global Capitalism written by Paula Allman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-04-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today's vernacular, Marx outed capitalism well over a century ago, but his explanation has been both ignored and misinterpreted by not only his detractors but also by many socialists and even a considerable number of Marxists as well. Today we are experiencing the full impact and suffering the repercussions of capitalism's inherent need to become, more than ever before, a fully internationalized and integrated system of socio-economic control and domination--the global system that many commentators have suddenly remembered Marx and Engels (1848) presciently forecasted in the Communist Manifesto. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy was triumphantly proclaimed. The Cold War was over, and we were promised a lasting peace. But as we enter the third millennium, we are facing escalating social divisions, injustice, and oppression, with an environment in varying stages of ecological decay. Daily we are bombarded by the schizoid media images of capitalism's extremes on television news: the ravaged faces and wasted bodies of some of the thousands suffering famine, or the millions living in the world's slums, and then the gleaming, yet vacuous smile and sumptuously adorned figure of some extravagant, wealthy individual who is one of the select members of the global upper-class. Are we becoming conditioned to accept such contrasts and regard them as normal and inevitable at a time when we have the potential to eliminate scarcity and eradicate human deprivation? The author argues that critical education is needed to form a movement capable of challenging and then transforming capitalism. She also offers an accessible account of Marx's dialectical critique and exposé of capitalism, clearly demonstrating the real enemy that should be the focus of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization struggles. This is an account that explains why our main focus should not be on greedy, individual capitalists or particular multinational corporations, or even their handmaiden institutions, such as, the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc. but instead the global network of capitalist social relations and consequent habituated human practices in which we are all involved. These together with the historically specific form of capitalist wealth are the real enemy--the essence of capitalism--that must be abolished in order for humanity to have any hope of social and economic justice in the future.
Download or read book Guardians of the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest Environmental Organizations and Development written by Luiz C. Barbosa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Amazon region is the focus of intense conflict between conservationists concerned with deforestation and advocates of agro-industrial development. This book focuses on the contributions of environmental organizations to the preservation of Brazilian Amazonia. It reveals how environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and others have fought fiercely to stop deforestation in the region. It documents how the history of frontier expansion and environmental struggle in the region is linked to Brazil’s position in an evolving capitalist world-economy. It is shown how Brazil’s effort to become a developed country has led successive Brazilian governments to devise development projects for Amazonia. The author analyses how globalization has led to the expansion of international commodity chains in the region, particularly for mineral ores, soybeans and beef. He shows how environmental organizations have politicized these commodity chains as weapons of conservation, through boycotting certain products, while other pro-development groups within Brazil claim that such organizations threaten Brazil's sovereignty over its own resources.
Download or read book The Work of Repair written by Thomas Cousins and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the timber plantations in northeastern South Africa, laborers work long hours among tall, swaying lines of eucalypts, on land once theirs. In 2008, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, timber corporations distributed hot cooked meals as a nutrition intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But life and sustenance are about much more than calories and machinic bodies. What is at stake is the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life—physical, relational, cosmological—in the form of amandla. An Nguni word meaning power, strength or capacity, amandla organizes ordinary concerns with one’s abilities to earn a wage, to strengthen one’s body, and to take care of others; it describes the potency of medicines and sexual vitality; and it captures a history of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle for freedom. The ordinary actions coordinated by and directed at amandla do not obscure the wounding effects of plantation labor or the long history of racial oppression, but rather form the basis of what the Algerian artist Kader Attia calls repair. In this captivating ethnography, Cousins examines how amandla, as the primary material of the work of repair, anchors ordinary scenes of living and working in and around the plantations. As a space of exploitation that enables the global paper and packaging industry to extract labor power, the plantation depends on the availability of creative action in ordinary life to capitalize on bodily capacity. The Work of Repair is a fine-grained exploration of the relationships between laborers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, and the historical decompositions and reinventions of the milieu of those livelihoods and lives. Offering a fresh approach to the existential, ethical and political stakes of ethnography from and of late liberal South Africa, the book attends to urgent questions of postapartheid life: the fate of employment; the role of the state in providing welfare and access to treatment; the regulation of popular curatives; the queering of kinship; and the future of custom and its territories. Through detailed descriptions, Cousins explicates the important and fragile techniques that constitute the work of repair: the effort to augment one’s capacity in a way that draws on, acknowledges, and reimagines the wounds of history, keeping open the possibility of a future through and with others.
Download or read book Capitalism written by Peter Saunders and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the collapse of socialism, capitalism is now poised to become a truly global system. Three major questions arise from this success: Can capitalism revolutionize the living standards of the poor nations in the way it has done in the West? Can the global ecosystem survive such a massive expansion of industrial output? And if capitalism prevails, will human beings be any happier as a result? After explaining how the capitalist system works, Peter Saunders draws on the latest evidence from around the world to provide a "social audit" of contemporary capitalism. He concludes with a review of capitalism's status in the countries where it originated.
Download or read book Archaeology and Capitalism written by Yannis Hamilakis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume focus on the inherent political nature of archaeology and its relationship to power, and explore how archaeologists can become more overtly agents of social change for individuals and communities.
Download or read book Ecological Imperialism Development and the Capitalist World System written by Mariko Lin Frame and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-13 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two major trends are currently challenging the sustainability of human civilization: extreme inequality and the ecological crisis. This book argues that these are intrinsically linked by further exploring the complex relationships between global ecological crises, neoliberal globalization, orthodox development policies, and imperialism. Drawn from extensive theoretical, historical, policy, and empirical research, as well as fieldwork in Africa and Asia, this book examines the crucial characteristics of the capitalist world-system and how it enables and drives ecological imperialism. Neoliberal globalization has allowed for capital’s unfettered access to and exploitation of Nature across the planet, and neoliberal development policies have reinforced a contemporary form of ecological imperialism where the environments of the Global South are enclosed and exploited, and local communities are dispossessed of their land and livelihoods. Simultaneously, resources from the Global South are funneled to the Global North in the form of consumer goods and ecologically unequal exchange, while the profits from those resources are siphoned away to transnational corporations, financiers, and government elites. This work traces the historical development of free market policies, while also paying special attention to the role of Northern international financial institutions, emerging economies (the semi-periphery), and the often-hidden role of international finance in ecological imperialism. This volume will be of keen interest to scholars and students of political economy, critical development studies, environmental sociology, and political ecology.
Download or read book Colonial Impotence written by Benoît Henriet and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-06-21 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Colonial Impotence, Benoît Henriet studies the violent contradictions of colonial rule from the standpoint of the Leverville concession, Belgian Congo’s largest palm oil exploitation. Leverville was imagined as a benevolent tropical utopia, whose Congolese workers would be "civilized" through a paternalist machinery. However, the concession was marred by inefficiency, endemic corruption and intrinsic brutality. Colonial agents in the field could be seen as impotent, for they were both unable and unwilling to perform as expected. This book offers a new take on the joint experience of colonialism and capitalism in Southwest Congo, and sheds light on their impact on local environments, bodies, societies and cosmogonies.
Download or read book Simplex Society written by Koen Stroeken and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book provides thought-provoking anthropology grounded in comparative ethnography. The theory captures the current historical moment, the long-term trends that led us here, and the prospects for a humane future. The experience of complexity characterizing a globalized information society triggers simplexes. These unidimensional responses instrumental in bringing about a predictable effect are altering our ways of communicating and the technologies we design. In Part I, a ‘speciated’ history, injected with the anthropology of Bateson and Gluckman, describes the semantic and experiential impoverishment of the lifeworld. After going through the affects of distrust (the neolithic lifeway), of futility (industrial lifeway) and disconnection (post-knowledge), the human species today depends for its survival on installing a new lifeway, which manages to wed (eco-social) inclusion to the already difficult first pair of the French Revolution. The species needs to rehumanize. Part II illustrates the remedies currently developed: to reframe, re-sphere and re-source. What do critical street art, international football matches, presidential elections, hip-hop dissing performances, charismatic church services, intuition stimulation, and ‘pre-ceptive’ experiences of consciousness have in common? They are moments of the real. Rooted in ‘life sensing’, they are tensors organizing frameshift. As multiplex measures tackling the simplex, these tensors overcome the cultural relativism of the postmodern matrix.
Download or read book Material Insurgency written by Andrew M. Rose and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Material Insurgency, Andrew M. Rose examines emerging new materialist and posthuman conceptions of subjectivity and agency and explores their increasing significance for contemporary climate change environmentalism. Working at the intersection of material ecocriticism, posthuman theory, and environmental political theory, Rose critically focuses on the ways social movement organizing might effectively operate within the context of distributed agency. This concept undoes the privileging of rational human actors to suggest agency is better understood as a complex mixture of human and nonhuman forces. Rose explores various representations of distributed agency, from the pipeline politics of the Keystone XL campaign to the speculative literary fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko and Kim Stanley Robinson. Each of these cultural and literary texts provides a window into the possible constitution of a (distributed) environmental politics that does not yet exist and operates as a resource for envisioning environmental actors we cannot necessarily study empirically, because they are still only a prospect, or potential, of our imagination.
Download or read book The Tropical Timber Trade Regime written by F. Gale and published by Springer. This book was released on 1998-09-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gale explains why international negotiations have not produced a sustainable solution to tropical rainforest degradation. Using an innovative, critical approach to international regimes, the author analyzes the structure and operation of the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO). He shows how the timber industry and producing- and consuming-country governments created a blocking alliance that favoured developmentalist interests and ideas. The ITTO bolstered this alliance by permitting environmentalists merely to voice, but not to negotiate, their concerns.
Download or read book F Ailing Capitalism and the Challenge of COVID 19 written by Noel Chellan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In F/Ailing Capitalism and the Challenge of COVID-19, Noel Chellan argues that citizens needlessly died in capitalist countries. He contends that COVID-19 has exposed the harsh workings of capitalism, contrary to the ideologies upheld by mainstream economists. Some of the questions he asks are: Why were Chinese lives more important than American lives? Why were Vietnamese lives more important than British lives? Why were Cuban lives more important than South African lives? Why was the value of the grandparent that died in the US lower than the value of the grandparent that was saved in China? Why was the value of the healthcare worker that died in the UK lower than the value of the healthcare worker that was saved in China?
