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Abstract

Lawsuits are representational arenas, as well as legal events. They serve as integrative spaces for power relations, symbolic orders, and moral economies. This article focuses on the ‘social lives’ of two lawsuits brought by indigenous communities to litigate issues arising from oil extraction on their territories: the Texaco lawsuit in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Beaver Lake Cree Nation lawsuit in Alberta, Canada. I analyze the narratives of indigeneity and modernity that they challenge, as well as their potential to order and disorder social fabrics beyond the legal sphere. I argue that lawsuits are ethnographic dramas that make visible how various social actors ‘order’ the world into categories, such as ‘value’, ‘modernity’, ‘commons’, and ‘sovereignty’, and in the process render legible the constructed nature of symbolic life.

Ecotourism is primarily perceived and studied as an alternative to resource extraction, even though increasingly the two coexist side by side in a nexus. This article investigates how such instances of copresence are marginalized in literatures about ecotourism and extraction, constituting a “blind spot“ in academic literature. An extensive literature review focuses on the existing knowledge trends and paradigms in the production of knowledge about ecotourism and extraction, and analyzes whether they contribute to the “blind spot“ or can be mobilized by the nexus perspective. Finally, the article briefly outlines two methodological approaches for studying ecotourism and extraction as a nexus.

Abstract

This literature review of biomimicry and related models of treating nature as a meta-resource on a mega-scale integrates concepts of resources and abundance. Biomimicry, which lies at the intersection of biosciences and industrial design, is a praxis for drawing on designs and processes found in nature and using them as inspirational sources for technologies. Environmental anthropology often focuses on processes such as extraction and commodification that position nature as governed by an economy of scarcity with its existential state characterized by attenuation. The paradigm of biomimicry, on the other hand, construes nature as an infinitely renewable and generative mega-resource and meta-resource, one that is governable by an economy of abundance rather than scarcity. This literature review analyzes intellectual and epistemological trends and frameworks that have served as precursors to and have emerged around biomimicry across disciplines that treat the paradigm of biomimicry as a highly variable epistemological object.

DOVE, Michael R., Percy E. SAJISE, and Amity A. DOOLITTLE, eds., Beyond the Sacred Forest: Complicating Conservation in Southeast Asia

FIENUP-RIORDAN, Ann, and Alice REARDEN, Ellavut/Our Yup’ik World & Weather: Continuity and Change on the Bering Sea Coast

INGOLD, Tim, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

KINCHY, Abby, Seeds, Science, and Struggle: The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops

KNUDSEN, Stale, Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey: The Management of Natural Resources, Knowledge and Identity on the Eastern Black Sea Coast

LATTA, Alex, and Hannah WITTMAN, eds., Environment and Citizenship in Latin America: Natures, Subjects and Struggles

MCKINNON, Katharine, Development Professionals in Northern Thailand: Hope, Politics, and Practice

MORI, Akihisa, ed., Democratization, Decentralization and Environmental Governance in Asia, DURAIAPPAH, Anatha Kumar, Koji NAKAMURA, Kazuhiko TAKEUCHI, Masataka WATANABE, and Maiko NISHI, eds., Satoyama-Satoumi Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Socio-Ecological Production Landscapes of Japan

NAVARO-YASHIN, Yael, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity

NIXON, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

OGDEN, Laura A., Swamplife: People, Gators and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades

ROBINS, Nicholas A., Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes

SCHAAN, Denise P., Sacred Geographies of Ancient Amazonia: Historical Ecology of Social Complexity

SCOTT, Rebecca R., Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields

SHAH, Bindi, Laotian Daughters: Working toward Community, Belonging, and Environmental Justice

STEFANOVIC, Ingrid Leman, and Stephen Bede SCHARPER, eds., The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment

WALSH, Andrew, Made in Madagascar: Sapphires, Ecotourism, and the Global Bazaar

WILLOW, Anna J., Strong Hearts, Native Lands: The Cultural and Political Landscape of Anishinaabe Anti-Clearcutting Activism

Popular Nonfiction

DIAMOND, Jared, The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

PABICH, Wendy J., Taking On Water: How One Water Expert Challenged Her Inner Hypocrite, Reduced Her Water Footprint (without Sacrificing a Toasty Shower) and Found Nirvana