Download Free Ecological Nostalgias Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Ecological Nostalgias and write the review.

Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.
Proposing a series of innovative steps towards better understanding human lives at the interstices of water and land, this volume includes eight ethnographies from deltas around the world. The book presents ‘delta life’ with intimate descriptions of the predicaments, imaginations and activities of delta inhabitants. Conceptually, the collection develops ‘delta life’ as a metaphor for approaching continual and intersecting sociocultural, economic and material transformations more widely. The book revolves around questions of hydrosociality, volatility, rhythms and scale. It thereby yields insights into people’s lives that conventional, hydrological approaches to deltas cannot provide.
Providing a holistic understanding of extensive oil extraction in rural Mexico, this book focuses on a campesino community, where oil extraction is deeply inscribed into the daily lives of the community members. The book shows how oil shapes the space where it is extracted in every aspect and produces multiple uncertainties. The community members express these uncertainties using the metaphor of the time bomb. The book shows how they find ways to "live off the time bomb" by using mechanisms of short-term coping and long-term adaptation and thus, developing the capability to determine their lives despite the ever-changing challenges.
Eco-disasters such as coal-mining accidents, oil spills, and food-borne diseases appear regularly in the news, making them seem nearly commonplace. These ecological crises highlight the continual tensions between human needs and the environmental impact these needs produce. Contemporary documentaries and feature films explore environmental-human conflicts by depicting the consequences of our overconsumption and dependence on nonrenewable energy. Film and Everyday Eco-disasters examines changing perspectives toward everyday eco-disasters as reflected in the work of filmmakers from the silent era forward, with an emphasis on recent films such as Dead Ahead, an HBO dramatization of the Exxon Valdez disaster; Total Recall, a science fiction action film highlighting oxygen as a commodity; The Devil Wears Prada, a comment on the fashion industry; and Food, Inc., a documentary interrogation of the food industry. The authors evaluate not only the success of these films as rhetorical arguments but also their rhetorical strategies. This interdisciplinary approach to film studies fuses cultural, economic, and literary critiques in articulating an approach to ecology that points to sustainable development as an alternative to resource exploitations and their associated everyday eco-disasters.
Humans and figs form hybrid communities within the context of anthropogenic landscapes, supported by biocultural mutualisms driven by traits of Ficus species and people’s imagination and practices, and where humans also positively influence Ficus species ecology. Fig Trees and Humans examines the interactions between the biology and ecology of the genus Ficus and how humans use and think of Ficus species across the tropics and in the Mediterranean region. It demonstrates a high level of convergence of material and symbolic uses of human-fig interactions that affect various aspects of human culture, as well as the ecology of wild or cultivated Ficus species.
Galvanizing Nostalgia? explores critical questions for the survival of Russia in its nominally federal form. Will Russia fall apart along the lines of its internal republics, as did the Soviet Union? Based on cultural anthropology field and historical research in major republics of Eastern Siberia—Sakha (Yakutia), Buryatia, and Tyva (Tuva)—this book highlights Indigenous concerns about self-determination. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer suggests that a fragile and disorganized dynamic of nested sovereignties has developed within Russia. Ecology activism has grown, given new threats to the environment and accelerating climate challenges, especially in the Arctic. Focus on strategically chosen republics enables comparing and contrasting interethnic relations, language politics, and the salience of gender, demography, resource competition, environmental degradation, and increased spirituality. Republics vary in their neocolonial relationships to Moscow authorities. Some local leaders, such as a politicized shaman, use nostalgia for cultural achievements to galvanize citizens. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, cultural and political revitalization have been relatively more viable, although still difficult, in areas where Siberians have their own republics.
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of “nostalgia studies” more broadly. Nostalgia is an area of intense interest across several disciplines as well as within society and culture more generally. This handbook brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers to survey the current landscape and identify common trends, achievements, and gaps in existing literature. Comprising 45 chapters, the volume covers the following topics: Disciplinary perspectives of nostalgias including philosophy, history, literature, and psychology. Conceptual aspects of nostalgia including homesickness, temporality, affectivity, and memory. Historical and political dimensions such as afro-nostalgia, populism, feminism, and queer nostalgia. Spatial and material aspects of nostalgia including ruins, regionalism, and objects. Media-related nostalgia such as analogue and digital nostalgia, reboots, revivals, gaming, and graphic novels. Essential reading for students and researchers working in nostalgia studies, this book will also be beneficial to related disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, history, and literature; cultural, media, heritage, museum, and film studies courses; and more generally for readers interested in how the past is represented and used in the present.
Nostalgia is intimately connected to the history of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, though finely grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still scarce. Today, anthropologists have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating object of study for exploring contemporary issues of the formation of identity in politics and history. Contributors to this volume consider the fabric of nostalgia in the fields of heritage and tourism, exile and diasporas, postcolonialism and postsocialism, business and economic exchange, social, ecological and religious movements, and nation building. They contribute to a better understanding of how individuals and groups commemorate their pasts, and how nostalgia plays a role in the process of remembering.
Primarily on the basis of ethnographic case-studies from around the world, this volume links investigations of work to questions of personal and professional identity and social relations. In the era of digitalized neoliberalism, particular attention is paid to notions of freedom, both collective (in social relations) and individual (in subjective experiences). These cannot be investigated separately. Rather than juxtapose economy with ethics (or the profitable with the good), the authors uncover complex entanglements between the drudgery experienced by most people in the course of making a living and ideals of emancipated personhood.
Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day presents an interdisciplinary approach to an important aspect of Gothic texts, films, and music: that of rewriting. From the eighteenth-century Gothic novel to present-day vampire films and Goth music, the genre is characterised by its nostalgic reflection on past worlds, narratives, and identities. Gothic nostalgia is often accompanied by a transgressive drive, resulting in perversions of the rewritten past—the modern vampire is no longer embodied evil but an attractive dandy, while Goth subcultures reflect on Victorian aesthetics but pervert them by adding fetishist elements. Gothic nostalgia transforms the past, turning it upside down, foregrounding its background, and corrupting its order. In this volume an international group of philosophy, literature, film, and music scholars investigates the instrumental role of nostalgia and perversion in the Gothic’s rewriting of the past. If elements of both nostalgia and perversion are operative in Gothic rewriting, how are they connected? How do they play out in differing media? How do they change audiences’ views on the relationships between binaries such as past and present, other and self, and norm and deviation? Nostalgia or Perversion brings together the early Gothic novel, present-day female and black Gothic literature, Goth subculture and music, and the imagery of horror films and comic books, thus broadening the definition of ‘Gothic’ from a literary genre to a gesture of pervasive cultural criticism. The interdisciplinary analysis of nostalgia and perversion in Gothic rewriting uncovers wholly new insights into the artistic and social functions of the Gothic, making the volume useful to both scholars and students. As the essays reflect on academic as well as popular texts and media, it is also accessible to general readers. "Nostalgia or Perversion provides a sophisticated analysis of how the Gothic radically rewrites the past, not as nostalgia but as a calculated act of transgression. The past and how its reconstructions break down the boundaries between real and unreal, and normal and abnormal, is examined across a range of different media, including novels, films, comic books, television and music. The essays in this collection also address how this issue shapes Gothic formulations of race, sexuality, and gender. Both ambitious in scope and focused and rigorous in its analysis, this book provides a critically important re-evaluation of the Gothic tradition." —Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan (UK).