Environmentalism Ethical Trade And Commodification

This book explores the global connections between Chilean landscapes and Northern consumers embodied by the Forest Stewardship Council logo, the green seal of approval for certified sustainably-produced "good wood." How do we decide what makes good forestry? What knowledges and values are expressed or silenced when "good" is defined with a market mechanism like certification? Henne's ethnographic study documents the new forms of labor and the new expectations about sustainability and responsibility that certification generates, in the context of the competing ideas about how to manage a forest – or even what a forest is – that constitute forest certification in Chile. A critical analysis of certification’s practices helps understand the role of ethical trade initiatives in creating sustainable, survivable global futures.

After the Crisis: Anthropological Thought, Neoliberalism and the Aftermath offers a thought-provoking examination of the state of contemporary anthropology, identifying key issues that have confronted the discipline in recent years and linking them to neoliberalism, and suggesting how we might do things differently in the future. The first part of the volume considers how anthropology has come to resemble, as a result of the rise of postmodern and poststructural approaches in the field, key elements of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics by rejecting the idea of system in favour of individuals. It also investigates the effect of the economic crisis on funding and support for higher education and addresses the sense that anthropology has ‘lost its way’, with uncertainty over the purpose and future of the discipline. The second part of the book explores how the discipline can overcome its difficulties and place itself on a firmer foundation, suggesting ways that we can productively combine the debates of the late twentieth century with a renewed sense that people live their lives not as individuals, but as enmeshed in webs of relationship and obligation.

This volume explores how mechanisms of postindustrial capitalism affect places and people in peripheral regions and de-industrializing cities. While studies of globalization tend to emphasize localities newly connected to global systems, this collection, in contrast, analyzes the disconnection of communities away from the market, presenting a range of ethnographic case studies that scrutinize the framework of this transformative process, analyzing new social formations that are emerging in the voids left behind by the de-industrialization, and introducing a discussion on the potential impacts of the current economic and ecological crises on the hyper-mobile model that has characterized this recent phase of global capitalism and spatially uneven development.

Debt is often thought of as a mere economic variable governed by a simplistic mechanical logic, ignoring its other facets. Whose debt, and debt of what exactly? This volume analyzes debt as a political and social construct, with a multiplicity of purposes and agents. All of these are vectors of meanings that are highly diverse, and of subtle distinctions; they show that debt is a transverse phenomenon, cutting across spaces that are not merely economic but also domestic, social and political. Each contributor takes a fresh view of the subject, dealing with debt at a different time, in a different society, on a different scale of observation. By adopting a determinedly interdisciplinary approach, the authors reveal in the phenomenon of debt a diversity of social and gendered determinants that amount in some cases to domination, allegiance or slavery, and in others to solidarity and emancipation. Debt is at one and the same time shared, imposed, political and gendered.

The book is about exciting ethnographic happenings in the vibrant and growing global interface which includes Australia, New Zealand, and some of the Asian geographical regions, as well as - more broadly - the global South. It explores ethnographic writing as culture(s) (re)produced, positionalities of authors, tensions between authors and others, multi-faceted groups, and as co-productions of these works. The contributors describe and discuss a variety of topical areas of interest, from Facebook to memory work, from children's sexuality to urban racism, from meanings of Indigenous knowledge to how communities can come together to retain what is valuable to themselves. The authors also manage to locate themselves and others (positionings) in the research hierarchies (tensions). This is a valuable guide to the effects of 21st-century ethnography on the qualitative research project.

Cancer is a transnational condition involving the unprecedented flow of health information, technologies, and people across national borders. Such movement raises questions about the nature of therapeutic citizenship, how and where structurally vulnerable populations obtain care, and the political geography of blame associated with this disease. This volume brings together cutting-edge anthropological research carried out across North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia, representing low-, middle- and high-resource countries with a diversity of national health care systems. Contributors ethnographically map the varied nature of cancer experiences and articulate the multiplicity of meanings that survivorship, risk, charity and care entail. They explore institutional frameworks shaping local responses to cancer and underlying political forces and structural variables. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138776937_oachapter3.pdf

This collection is dedicated to the diagnostic moment and its unrivaled influence on encompassment and exclusion in health care. Diagnosis is seen as both an expression and a vehicle of biomedical hegemony, yet it is also a necessary and speculative tool for the identification of and response to suffering in any healing system. Social scientific studies of medicalization and the production of medical knowledge have revealed tremendous controversy within, and factitiousness at the outer parameters of, diagnosable conditions. Yet the ethnographically rich and theoretically complex history of such studies has not yet congealed into a coherent structural critique of the process and broader implications of diagnosis. This volume meets that challenge, directing attention to three distinctive realms of diagnostic conflict: in the role of diagnosis to grant access to care, in processes of medicalization and resistance, and in the transforming and transformative position of diagnosis for 21st-century global health. Smith-Morris’s framework repositions diagnosis as central to critical global health inquiry. The collected authors question specific diagnoses (e.g., Lyme disease, Parkinson's, andropause, psychosis) as well as the structural and epistemological factors behind a disease’s naming and experience.

This book explores the making of robots in labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It examines the cultural ideas that go into the making of robots, and the role of fiction in co-constructing the technological practices of the robotic scientists. The book engages with debates in anthropological theorizing regarding the way that robots are reimagined as intelligent, autonomous and social and weaved into lived social realities. Richardson charts the move away from the “worker” robot of the 1920s to the “social” one of the 2000s, as robots are reimagined as companions, friends and therapeutic agents.