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.

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Yes, you can access School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series by Sarah Besky, Alex Blanchette, Sarah Besky,Alex Blanchette in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher

University of New Mexico Press Published in Association with School for Advanced Research Press

Year

2019

ISBN

9780826360861

Topic

Social Sciences

Subtopic

Cultural & Social Anthropology

Index

Social Sciences

Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Table of Contents
Foreword by Thomas G. Andrews
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Fragility of Work by Sarah Besky and Alex Blanchette
Part 1. The Ends of Work
Chapter 1. Exhaustion and Endurance in Sick Landscapes: Cheap Tea and the Work of Monoculture in the Dooars, India by Sarah Besky
Chapter 2. The Concentration of Killing: Soy, Labor, and the Long Green Revolution by Kregg Hetherington
Chapter 3. Making Monotony: Bedsores and Other Signs of an Overworked Hog by Alex Blanchette
Part 2. Labor Struggles
Chapter 4. The Job of Finding Food Is a Joke: Orangutan Rehabilitation, Work, Subsistence, and Social Relations by Juno Salazar Parreñas
Chapter 5. The Heat of Work: Dissipation, Solidarity, and Kidney Disease in Nicaragua by Alex Nading
Chapter 6. Metabolic Relations: Korean Red Ginseng and the Ecologies of Modern Life by Eleana Kim
Chapter 7. How Guinea Pigs Work: Figurations and Gastro-Politics in Peru by María Elena García
Chapter 8. Industrial Materials: Labor, Landscapes, and the Industrial Honeybee by Jake Kosek
Part 3. Futures of Work
Chapter 9. Cultural Analysis of Microbial Worlds by John Hartigan Jr.
Chapter 10. Rhapsody in the Forest: Wild Mushrooms and the Multispecies Multitude by Shiho Satsuka
Chapter 11. Kamadhenu’s Last Stand: On Animal Refusal to Work by Naisargi N. Dave
References
List of Contributors
Index