Chao, Sophie, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey, eds. 2022. The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 284 pp. ISBN 978-1478018896.

In the humanities and social sciences, the horizontal forms of human and nonhuman allegiances are increasingly explored in a paradigm shift that signals a strong move away from humancentric approaches. This creates possibilities for studying the interspecies relations that exist in the overlooked parts of the world or, as described by Anna Tsing, in the “unruly edge of capitalism.” Building on insights from indigenous peoples, gardeners, anti-racist activists, as well as the rural and urban poor from different geopolitical contexts, The Promise of Multispecies Justice outgrows the humancentric definitions of justice and extends the concept's scope to point at its various scales and sites.

Avoiding modernist conceptualizations of justice, the contributors treat the concept as a situated knowledge that is always partial, constantly excluding certain worlds while having meaning and purpose in others. The authors contextualize justice in political struggles that are therefore always situated and identify possibilities for reimagining ecological assemblages as well as political positions that challenge dominant androcentric paradigms. This approach to justice as a situated knowledge appears as a principal theme that bridges the chapters, and it provokes ways of reimagining what the authors call “the multiple species of justice.” To this end, the glossary presented after the introduction summarizes the contributors’ discussions of various justice accounts, including transitional, multiworld, small, and spectral justice, among others.

This emphasis on the situatedness of justice presented by the editors in their introduction is convincingly illustrated and developed further in Radhika Govindrajan's chapter that builds on her fieldwork in the Kumaon region in Uttarakhand, India. It starts with a description of an encounter; Govindrajan and her interlocutors spot a dead animal on the side of the road that, Bina chachi, an interlocutor, thinks used to be their bull before they paid someone to take him. As the chapter reveals, giving away the livestock, or abandoning them in the forest when no buyer is available, is a common practice in Uttarakhand where caring for the animals becomes intensive labor for the women who can no longer carry out that physical task. Yet the state continues to rely on women's labor and invest in the rural livestock economy because it is seen as a source of rural development. This gives rise to violence against livestock as well as intensified women's labor. In navigating the dilemmas that occur in this context, chachi experiences guilt and sorrow, believing that she committed a crime that led to the bull's death. The animal, chachi believes, is looking for justice as it haunts her in her dreams. It is a spectral justice that is a matter of repairing relationships between humans and animals, as well as gods and ghosts who “refuse to be buried and insist on mattering” (39). To this end, chachi's acknowledgment of the bull as a subject that can claim justice provides a generative case for rethinking the possibilities for multispecies justice.

Acknowledging the more-than-human sub- jects of justice, however, is a challenging en- deavor well-known to anthropologists because of the risk of ventriloquism—the problem of attempting to speak of or for others. Acknowledging this risk, chapters in this volume invite the reader to consider the well-being, social relationships, and ecological interdependen- cies of other beings (e.g., “sympathetic imagining” practices) (5). This consideration is delivered the most strongly in Zsuzsanna Ihar's account, which discusses multispecies justice while avoiding to give its full attention to humans. The chapter starts with Ihar's description of the territorial and violent behavior of a stray dog whom she encounters during her field research in Baku, Azerbaijan. Situated in the context of urban politics in Baku's post-extraction zones, the (canine) encounters, Ihar argues, provide “speculative spaces” for reimagining the scope of justice, leading to the questions of who it is for and who gets to deliver it (207). These cosmopolitical possibilities, Ihar suggests using a term that draws from Isabelle Strengers, appear in small justices of mundane multispecies encounters. Jia Hui Lee similarly discusses such generative possibilities, in the context of the human-rodent relations in Morogoro, Tanzania. The account portrays the rodent traps through the perspective of a local trap designer whose use of innovation and technology opens up ways of reimagining life with rodents as he seeks the “just possible”—the condition of striving to improve community life with “just enough resources” while actively considering the well- being of nonhuman Others (163).

Rather than calling for pluralist discourse that treats nonhuman Others as kin, the con- tributors, however, also recognize the exclusionary ethics that can be a part of the multispecies justice frameworks. Alyssa Paredes's chapter on the discourses of an environmental campaign against the aerial spraying of chemical cocktails in banana plantations in Mindanao, Philippines, is illustrative of this point. Claiming their ontological differences from the pests and bananas through slogans, such as I am not a banana! and We are not pests!, campaigners in this context draw attention to the violent, extractive practices of multinational companies. These practices treat the bodies of campaigners as disposable, manifesting a colonial, capitalist legacy that renders them nonhuman. Building on the literature on the animalization of humans as a racist practice (e.g., “the eroticization and exoticization of Black bodies as food”) (91), Paredes draws attention to activists’ desire to claim their bodily and ontological human boundaries—an “ethics of exclusion” that Paredes observes becomes necessary for those who are still living through colonial legacies (92). The chapter thus convincingly avoids a pluralist discourse treating nonhuman Others as kin and pushes back against the flattening of the ontological differences.

The Promise of Multispecies Justice brings together diverse ethnographic accounts on jus- tice and attentively combines them with philosophical accounts and poetry to provoke germane questions as to what establishes the edge of (in)justice, how it is determined, and who benefits from it. The book is a convincing attempt to defetishize justice discourses informed by colonial legacies, and it appears promising for diverse interdisciplinary fields including environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and critical animal studies.

Çağla Ay

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Ranganathan, Malini, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi. 2023. Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-1501768750.

Corruption is commonly seen as a fixed set of predetermined or aberrant practices under theories of neoclassical economics and liberalism. However, Corruption Plots challenges this fixing of corruption as a monolithic category and draws attention to the ways that different publics and their counter-publics frame it. The book uses the analytic of “plots” to show the simultaneous spatial and metaphorical marking of land and real estate that are shaped by narratives of legal, economic, social, and political rights across social inequalities. Situating this work as a collaboration across critical geography, urban studies, and comparative literature, Ranganathan, Pike and Doshi combine ethnographic fieldwork in Bengaluru and Mumbai with literary and media analysis from cities across the global South and the global North. The authors define corruption plots “not as an objective set of deviances but as an opportunistic storytelling practice about the abuse of entrusted power in late capitalism” (2). Thus, they draw attention to the everyday partnerships, patterns, and processes that situate corruption in urban spaces amid “blurred divisions between legal and illegal, state and nonstate, and ethical and unethical” (9).

This work innovates methodologically by joining ethnographic analysis with literary and media criticism to present a “humanistic, spatial and nonreductive methodological framework for the study of corruption” (15). Admittedly, the challenge of finding a shared vocabulary across geography, ethnography, literary analysis, and urban studies is not easy, but the authors wonderfully enfold the discussion across different mediums and methods. The book is divided into six chapters, scaffolded by an introduction and a conclusion. Each chapter draws upon an urban topos, such as the slum, multistory building, periphery, swampland, infrastructure, and world-class city. These topos act as a socio-spatial category to highlight different publics and counter-publics and their interplay with critiques and allegations of land and real-estate corruption.

Chapter 1 analyzes corruption plots in slums where the urban poor and real estate elites vie for legal and political recognition in postcolonial cities that have emerged from colonial legacies of racialization and criminalization of slums. Focusing on the spectacles necessary to make ethically dubious land grabbing practices visible, the chapter draws on the “spectral public” (52) in the form of activists highlighting deviant practices of real estate mafia groups and turning attention toward the “real encroachers” (42).

Chapter 2 further builds on the resistance to liberal registers of urban development by exploring the heterogeneous claims and critiques against corruption offered by the “middle-class publics” (63). The authors juxtapose fictional accounts, such as Alaa Al Aswany's classic work The Youcabian Building and Kleber Mendoça Filho's Aquarius, to real-life stories of middle-class activists, such as Shanbhag in Mumbai, to show the nuanced ways middle-class respectability politics comes to be tampered with in retaining or disavowing the system. As an interlocutor recounts the tension of choosing between “peace and justice” (83) in a property sale conflict, her encounters with the system and other middle-class publics also reflect upon patriarchal norms and caste hierarchies that relegate the body of a single, childless woman as “corruption” (84) against societal systems. This example couples a humanistic analysis of corruption in the female body, as organic matter that is out of place with social norms, with a discursive reading of the situation, where what the body demands will taint the social system.

In chapter 3, the contradictory praxis of grabbing versus encroachment plays out, not just in the city's core but also in the peripheries. While urban peripheries appear to embody a spatial and political “unmapping” (Roy 2003) that imagine them through the same informality of land ownership and re- source provision as slums, the authors argue that these peripheral settlements are necessarily urban in their representation and relation to the state's legal frameworks and regulation.

In chapter 4, middle-class publics become “ecological publics” when equipped with a discourse of liberal environmentalism and resilience in the city. Taking a cue from the affective and figurative worlds of swamplands, the chapter highlights how colonial registering of swamps as unproductive wasteland sets precedents for the neoliberal state to develop the land as “profitable” real estate. Tracing schemes and conflicts around converting wet- lands into built-up urban land, from Mumbai's historical “Black Bay reclamation” to Bengaluru's contemporary Bellandur Lake, the authors poignantly show the dissonance between state action, judicial decisions, and economic interests. More importantly, the authors caution against the corruption rhetoric of the ecological public in its mimicry of “bourgeoise environmentalism” (Baviskar 2020) that obscures and dehumanizes poor, indigenous, and marginalized populations living along and with the water bodies. While the chapter addresses the politics of racializing people and places, the cross-disciplinary analysis could also benefit from situating the politics of animals and other more-than-human presences that animate urban ecologies.

Chapter 5 contends that infrastructural projects are not simply opportunities or sites for corruption but, instead, infrastructure and corruption mutually constitute the other (146). Examples of corporate fraud, provision of water and sanitation infrastructures and the precarity of life and labor show the entanglement of a “biopolitical public” (143) with the aspirations and imaginaries of a “world-class city.” However, instead of centering on the effects or excesses of corruptive actions, we are again reminded that corruption plots “simultaneously voice incompatible ‘truths’ that somehow coexist in one imagined public” (169). This imagined public flirts with liberal desires of a democratic utopia where the city works for everyone and against social inequalities. Yet, when actors shift their ethical perimeters in identifying and narrating accounts of corruption, multiple narratives are produced that reveal the blurred boundaries of corruption plots (chapter 6). Given the scale and frequency surrounding the discourse of corruption in recent years, the book makes a key intervention to show that corruption plots are a politically latent practice that pervade urban spaces across different geographies. While not exclusive or endemic to the global South, attention to corruption plots in the rapidly urbanizing cities of the global South informs understandings of cities as not just centers of power and money but also sites for circulation of capital and justice.

Tayeba Batool

University of Pennsylvania

Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 196 pp. ISBN: 978-1478014133.

In Pollution Is Colonialism, author Max Liboiron (Metis) presents a framework for understanding research methods as protocols. Protocols are not only methods; they relate to the manner in which a researcher approaches each and every activity and relationship with and within nature. Such protocols guide day-to-day life, values, and virtues as shown through the work of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a “land-based, feminist, and anticolonial environmental science lab” (116). The lab monitors plastic pollution in marine animals through community-based and citizen science that speaks to food and land sovereignty (149). As the founder of CLEAR, Liboiron uses the lab's work as the leitmotif, a model of anticolonial scientific practice that can be aligned with indigenous concepts of land, ethics, and human-nature relations.

This book is a case study on plastic pollution and an investigation of what it means to undertake science that is relational, rather than hierarchical; that respects human and more-than-human life; and that accredits communities involved in research. In defiant response to flawed notions of universality and uniformity in Western science, CLEAR protocols are place-based and context specific. Since histories of colonial relations vary (151–155), sites of resistance also change with geography and specific diverse characteristics of community-nature relations. However, there are common characteristics of extractive relationships of colonial settlers to land that can form the basis for creating sites of resistance, among them: place-based research founded on values of humility, accountability, and anticolonial research relations.

The Introduction of the book asserts that pollution is not a symptom or an outcome of modern living but part of the process of violent colonial land relations. According to Liboiron, “Colonialism is a mode of domination where settlers and colonial forces have access to land for their goals, including the conduct of environmental research using Western science methods” (139). Dominant science-based definitions of pollution separate researchers from the social, political, and economic implications of pollution (11, 13, 16–19). This separation relies on the distinction between land and Land, which is a key aspect, and, in my view, the most unique part of this book. The general term “land” refers to physical landscapes that includes earth, rocks, water; whereas, in the context of this book, “Land” refers to specific relations. Land is a unique entity comprised of plants, animals, air, water, humans, histories, and events that connect indigenous peoples with past, present, and future. Land is a spiritual and cultural space. Anticolonial practice and resistance, as observed through this book, is based on Land relations. Chapter 1, “Land, Nature, Resource, Property,” introduces readers to the threshold theory of pollution. According to this theory, the environment has an assimilative capacity; that is, it can handle a specific amount of contamination before harm occurs in the environment (40). This theory distinguishes between contamination (only the presence of a pollutant) and pollution (the observable presence of pollutants that demonstrates harm caused to the environment—water, land, air, etc). Modern environmental pollution was invented in the lab based on this theory, and modified according to the interests of the colonial settlers (42–45). This understanding unshackles us from the Western science-approach to pollution control, which treats Land as abstract and universal, separating nature from its relationship with communities.

In Chapter 2, “Scale, Harm, Violence, Land,” Liboiron argues that pollution is a violent form of colonial relations that deprives people of the right to live in a healthy environment (88–89). In order to probe the origins of violence, we should ask “how was the violence created, and why was it produced?” instead of asking “how harmful is the impact of violence?” This type of questioning foregrounds mismatches between the problems that beset us and understandings arrived through dominant science. For example, scientists working in Newfoundland found that silver hake species of fish had 0 percent plastic ingestion for 134 guts checked (84). This is an alarming finding, as it is expected that fish ingest dissolved bioavailable plastics. The finding was conflated or scaled up to imply that plastics do not cause any harm at all to fish and thus violence of the pollution system persists. This scalar mismatch makes us believe that problems that occur at a much larger scale in the real world can be understood and solved through dominant science.

Chapter 3, “An Anticolonial Pollution Science,” draws from experiences of CLEAR to propose a framework for doing anticolonial science. Liboiron describes ways to ethically maneuver the uneven power relations of dominant anticolonial science (119–126). In the case of CLEAR, an anticolonial approach to research (and site of resisting colonial structures) requires a protocol ceremony that includes steps like not wearing earbuds while processing fish animal since you need to be associated with the animal and respect it as you inspect it. Take a moment and think where the sample came from, the Land and your relationship with that Land. Similarly, sharing the work with the local community of fishers for peer review is another form of resistance (141–142). Judgmental sampling method is used as it is place specific and speaks to food sovereignty of the community.

Resistance and rejection of Western- dominant science comes through a process of synthesizing, synergizing, and accepting anticolonial methods in the given structure. Dr. Liboiron's experience of doing and being in research by connecting the theory with praxis, of identifying and knowing forms of resistance within colonial scientific contexts offers one way of doing decolonial science. The book raises questions with arguments to show the ill-outcomes of doing colonial science that treats pollution science as a lab solution, and why that is detrimental in the larger context of resource extraction, treating Land only as a resource for settlers. There could be other ways of doing anticolonial science, and, as Liboiron stresses, both decolonization (and anticolonization) requires unique theories and activism that are history specific, context specific, and place specific.

Arita Chakrabarty

Department of Social Sciences

Michigan Technological University

Hoag, Colin. 2022. The Fluvial Imagination on Lesotho's Water-Export Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520386358 ebook.

Lesotho, the small southern African nation surrounded by South Africa, has altered its economy to export its waters to the industrial heartland of Johannesburg and Gauteng. Colin Hoag documents how as South Africa has reduced its use of Lesotho's supply of labor to its mines and Lesotho has since transitioned from a successful wool and mohair exporting economy to the first nation dependent upon the sale of its waters. In return, Lesotho was to obtain electricity and revenues from the sale of its waters.¹ Hoag's book builds upon and updates the anthropological classic by James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (1994). In that book, Ferguson used a 1975 World Bank analysis of Lesotho as a foil to engage in an ethnographically rich and theoretically so- phisticated analysis of its economy, which was dominated by labor migration.

Two dams have been completed (the Katse and the Mohale), a third is under construction (the Polihali), and two more are proposed. From the South African perspective, Lesotho was simply wasting its rain by not storing its waters (Adams 1992). Hoag's analysis focuses on the multiple changes required to protect Lesotho's highland waters and dams. Reminiscent of Piers Blaikie's account of deforestation and erosion in Nepal, whose main causes lie outside the affected areas (Blaikie 1985), Hoag details the dynamics of herding, erosion, plant life, soil structure, the economic strategies of herders, and the bureaucratic responses to reduce or end erosion. The book is well-organized in eight chapters including the introduction and conclusion. It is a masterful account linking social and ecological changes over time whose longer-term causes lie outside the Lesotho highlands.

The first three chapters concern water production and soil issues. The focus for Hoag is more upon soils than the bureaucracy managing the dam reservoirs. A new bureaucracy was formed within the Lesotho government on how to protect the dams from premature filling due to soil erosion. The new conservation bureaucracy also wants, if secondarily, to protect highland ecology for herders to successfully manage livestock (sheep, goats, and cattle). In chapter 4, following an account of soil erosion, Hoag narrates how a large bureaucracy is now devoted to having successful water production and livestock production. Hoag observes that the political issue of who should govern and manage the grazing lands is contested. I do not have the space here to describe the dual systems of the government and the chieftaincy, which compete and cooperate in rangeland management. In this chapter, Hoag presents some projects from a bureaucratic individual perspective including the Savory Rotational Grazing Method (also called holistic resource management) where management experts have to decide on the causes of rangeland degradation—management practices or changes in rainfall. There appears to be important differences among the actors in how they understand the causes of soil erosion.

In chapter 5, entitled “Livestock Production,” Hoag's gaze turns toward how hundreds of livestock are sold each month, legally and illegally. In his work, Ferguson analyzed the place of cattle in Lesotho's economy, the relation of money and cattle, and how development experts sought to commercialize cattle. In a parallel fashion, Hoag comments on how keeping livestock jeopardizes the health and life of its new dams due to how grazing affects water's interaction with soils, grasses and other landscape features. Hoag undertakes to understand how sheep and goat herders and livestock owners manage their animals and comprehend their landscape. He notes the differences from Ferguson's account of the difficulties in commodifying cattle² in contrast to the commodification of sheep and goats. Chapter 5 concentrates on livestock production, its history and the strategies of stock owners who now balance the sale of sheep for meat in Phuthaditjhaba, the former capital of the former homeland Qwa-Qwa, and the legal sale of wool and mohair to international buyers. According to Hoag, it is precisely the success of sheep and goats that threaten the water exports. Hoag also endeavored to ascertain the understandings and perspectives of conservation bureaucrats. There is a detailed and sympathetic account of Tau who worked for the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority in chapter 3. It seems that there are few women, if any, among the conservation bureaucrats. A more systematic analysis of gender would have been welcome since it is only men who serve as herders, but women certainly can own goats and sheep. More attention could have been paid as to who makes up the water and conservation bureaucracy and how gender might play an important role in the interactions of bureaucracy and livestock owners and herders.

Titled “Negative Ecology,” chapter 6 underlines the relationship between South Africa's water needs and Lesotho's ecological requirements and developmental needs. Hoag suggests that the inability by South Africans (in this case) to account and be responsible for what happens to Lesotho represents the division between the natural sciences and humanities. He recounts Piers Blaikie's emphasis on “non-place-based-factors” in shaping land conditions (125). In sum, he locates environmental degradation mainly upon sheep and their promotion by the British. He accepts that shrub erosion, degraded wetlands and denuded hillslopes are the by-products of the system of livestock production in Lesotho (139) and one that herders (and owners who are less analyzed) are a part of. In the entanglement of soils, waters, and animals, protecting water leads to new political institutions to manage grazing. What is hard to manage is the forage preferences of sheep combined with the ideas and practices of herders. Hoag seems to be pessimistic that they will be changed on this point.

In the conclusion, he asks the question: how could a multi-billion-dollar dam project be located in a country marked by heavy soil erosion? Why was so little done to understand the threat to potential dams by sedimentation? The answer rests on hidden power, who benefits, and the narratives underlying the remaking of “nature” or, as Hoag says, “human niche construction.” The efforts to reduce erosion, paying rural people to engage in that work, creates an incentive for both the workers (peasantariat) and the bureaucracy who are getting paid to organize the work of rangeland management. At the root of Lesotho's environmental dilemmas is the conclusion that its mountain rangelands have been converted into a “natural infrastructure” for South African industry.

Hoag's book is well-organized and written with great care and attention to meaningful details. He is modest in terms of the difficulties of fieldwork, the trust needed to carry out the interviews and balancing the knowledges of multiple actors, and the depth of ecological knowledge required. The book should be of great interest for those interested in broad concerns around the consequences of dams, economies in contemporary Africa, and of how to integrate environment, development, and history in a unified account of Lesotho's dams. It is an invaluable addition to the already significant literature on the Lesotho Water Highlands Project.

However, one caveat: Hoag writes that “Water production is fundamentally a racial project even as it masquerades as economic exchange” (145). This was true but it is problematic to argue that it continues to be. Modernist views of “wasted rains” and the demands of a mining and industrial economy are no longer “white.” In this reviewer's opinion, it has become almost universal. Even if South Africa remains, for now, under “white” controlled corporations that is changing since the end of apartheid and will continue to do so.

Bill Derman

Norwegian University of the Life Sciences

King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 284 pp. ISBN 978-1478005681.

In The Black Shoals, Tiffany King draws from a rich history in Black diasporic thinking that theorizes “Black politics, movement, and thought in relation to an expanding notion of itself connected to others” (xii). King incisively shows how scholarly focus on the Middle Passage within Black Studies has produced metaphors of fluidity, flexibility, churning, and depth based on water imageries and oceanic symbolisms. King's project, however, turns to questioning “what becomes of Black metaphors of flux when their waves hit the shore?” (207). King's conception of the “shore” is not the “static time and space” (10) often relegated to depictions of Indigeneity or Nativity, but a dynamic landscape that challenges settler colonial definitions of land as “disaggregated spaces” of “accumulation” (10). Thus, King departs from intellectual predecessors focused solely on the “totalizing metaphor” of “liquidity . . . for Blackness” via theorization of the “shoal,” where land and water meet: a “combination or meeting of at least two distinct ecological zones” (3), somewhere “liminal, indeterminate, and hard to map” (3).

From the shoal, King offers three groundbreaking provocations. First, the shoal dis- rupts tired binaries between Black and Indi- genous history, where indigeneity is defined by land and Blackness by water; instead, the shoal is a space of Black and Indigenous encounter that shapes experimental horizons of becoming outside White settler logics. Second, the shoal engenders and queers a relationality between Black and Native peoples that extends beyond coalition, such that both intimacies and conflicts in Black and Native histories draw together to “remake life in all its expansiveness on new terms” (209). Third, the shoal is a multiscalar time-space that considers Black and Indigenous lives across individual phenomenologies, communal em- bodied and affective experiences, relational dynamics, and geographies of excess.

In Chapter 1, King tracks Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Frank Wilderson's competing and intersecting ideas of Black possibilities to “demand that Man give an account of its violence” (209) in “that White humanity [liberal humanism] and its self actualization require Black and Native death as its condition of possibility” (20). King theorizes the defacement of public statues and social media movements as rituals that allow Black and Native actors to imagine “liberation,” “freedom,” and “passage” (54) without the “discursive displacement of violence” (67), such as the “colonial unknowing” epitomized through the “disavowal of the violence of Christopher Columbus” (44). In chapter 2, King analyzes how Black movement and Indigenous resistance, theorized through the terms “fungibility” and “fugitivity,” generate White anxiety and defy cartographic boundaries of containment. In chapter 3, King continues to investigate the porosity of bodies between physical space, geographical boundaries, plant materials, labor, and plantation landscapes. The author achieves this through a detailed analysis of the indigo dying process, as depicted in Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust (1991), which stains slaves’ hands blue and “bleed[s] into cuticles and pores” (131) reproducing “Black bodies as hybrid plant bodies” (132). In chapter 4, King conducts a close reading of Julie Dash's novel Daughters of the Dust: A Novel (1999) and Tiya Miles's The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Garden and Ghosts (2015) to excavate how “Black and Indigenous people have resisted and adapted to . . . [‘porosity'] . . . in order to produce new modes of life” (173). Here, King is interested in the “liminal . . . erotic connection[s]” (171) between characters to further understand how queer, gender-bending “decolonial aesthetic practices sculpt new epistemologies and sensibilities that shape the contours of humanness in more expansive ways” (28). In chapter 5, King ends with a discussion of Charmaine Lurch's wire sculpture Revisiting Sycorax (2015), which “uses a nonmodernist form that provides a new grammar” (183) for Black and Indigenous encounters. The wires—copper and black—remain open and malleable (even in exhibition), akin to Sylvia Wynter's conception of ceremony as a “continual disruption of the formation of the structural opposition that creates an us and a them” (204).

King is not concerned with finding and extolling archival and/or historical evidence of the overlap between Black and Indigenous lives, whether through marriage, political alliance, conflict, or collaboration. This project would reify Black and Indigenous peoples as “isolated, bounded, and discrete communities” (28). Rather, King excavates how Black and Indigenous lives are “co-constituted” and are co-imagining possibilities for a decolonial future. Expertly weaving together art and literary criticism, oral history, archival research, and media studies, King challenges the reader to think beyond epistemological frameworks of “otherness” and instead turn to “contend[ing] with the ways that Black people and Indigenous people . . . remain shaped by one another's presence” (189).

King expands Black and Native categories across “hemispheric” geographies, at times borrowing from scholarly traditions in Pacific Island Studies to articulate waterways as spaces of connection and movement rather than techniques of isolation. However, Black and Native identities shift drastically across geopolitical contexts, such as in the Pacific where the question of “who” is Native is violently policed via ethnonationalist politics. While it is not King's intellectual project to question “who” is allowed to be Black and/or Indigenous in contemporary paradigms of cultural ex/inclusion and how these claims are adjudicated, (re)produced, and (re)articulated, one question remains for this reader: how do the tensions between expansive formulations of Black and Native possibility and vestigial settler colonial logics inhabit everyday mundanities?

The Black Shoals is a pleasure to read because of its accessible writing style that provides frequent grounding in contemporary examples such as the Black Lives Matter movement and Indigenous women's social media movements like #MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women). Simultaneously, the work is deeply challenging, encouraging its audience to think outside disciplinary boundaries and attend to multiple coalescing epistemological and intellectual histories. Themes of interest include: settler colonialism, sovereignty, land, ocean, labor, diaspora, ritual, Black lives, indigeneity, plantation history, embodiment, gender and sexuality, and environmental imagination. Interdisciplinary scholars will find this book highly provocative, especially those interested in probing how to build putative “coalitions” between marginalized actors that do not neglect local differences or further cement binary racial logics of White settler colonialism. This work offers landmark theoretical and methodological interventions in bridging Black and Native studies.

Ipsita Dey

Princeton University

Ameli, Katharina. 2022. Multispecies Ethnography: Methodology of a Holistic Research Approach of Humans, Animals, Nature and Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 149 pp. ISBN 978-1666911923.

Social scientists have recently engaged multispecies ethnography as a new interdisciplinary research framework that attends to the dynamic relations among people and non- human actors that share more-than-human worlds. In Multispecies Ethnography: Methodology of a Holistic Research Approach of Humans, Animals, Nature and Culture, Katharina Ameli aims to provide a practical outline for conducting multispecies ethnographic research projects, while highlighting the limitations and potentialities of this approach. The central problem motivating the text is that a holistic and interdisciplinary methodology for conducting multispecies ethnographic research has yet to be fully realized, despite the recent proliferation of interest in this novel framework.

The book begins with a brief overview of scholarship in fields of sociology, psychology, and education that has explored human- animal studies. Ameli situates this literature within broader work on “human-nature relationships” that disrupts nature-culture dual- isms through cross-boundary research that recognizes nonhumans as social actors. Rather than a comprehensive engagement with the theory of multispecies ethnography, the author clarifies that the present text should be viewed as a “guide” for stimulating future interdisciplinary and ethnographic research projects that consider multispecies actors such as animals, plants, and materials alongside humans. While this disclaimer explains the author's selective review of the literature, stronger engagement with contributions from anthropology, geography, and the environmental humanities would enrich the theoretical discussions in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 2 outlines research in sociology, education, the natural sciences, and veterinary medicine; describes the theoretical trajectory of each field; and discusses how they have differently engaged with topics of animals and nature. The author emphasizes the educational, psychological, and therapeutic value of new pedagogies that incorporate nature- animal interactions. She considers cen- tral debates on the human-animal and nature- culture dichotomy, highlighting how many disciplines deconstructed binary ideas of nature through a focus on multispecies connections and relationships. Ameli notes that the natural science research model poses ontological and epistemological constraints that limit the application of a holistic, multispecies ethnographic approach in biology and zoology. However, she stresses the fu- ture contributions that these fields stand to make toward interdisciplinary multispecies research that synthesizes ethological methods and scientific understandings of animals with critical insights from constructivist and posthumanist theories about animals and nature.

Chapter 3 offers “HumansAnimalsNatures Cultures” (41) as a pluralistic concept that synthesizes Bruno Latour's theory of “NatureCultures” with the transdisciplinary field of human-animal studies to describe the complex suite of research interests that multispecies ethnography can address. Ameli argues that this holistic concept can bridge disciplines, lifeforms, and scales of inquiry through an inclusive framework that attends specifically to the interdependencies among beings. Rather than collapsing disciplinary differences, HumansAnimalsNaturesCultures offers a “meta-disciplinary field” (45) that draws on diverse theoretical and methodological ele- ments to foster collaborative empirical re- search. While the concept effectively points to the convergence of topical interests in multispecies ethnography, its theoretical contributions are less clear.

Questions of anthropomorphism, scientific objectivity, and nonhuman agency are central to chapter 4’s discussion of the methodological implementation of a multispecies ethnographic approach. The chapter begins with a review of ethnography as a key research method in the social sciences before outlining some key theoretical areas relevant to multispecies ethnography: “symbolic interactionism,” “actor-network theory (ANT),” and “Indigenous theories.” The brief discussion of “post-ANT” would benefit from deeper engagement with more recent constructs such as entanglements, rhizomes, and assemblages that have been used to theorize multispecies connectivity (see Haraway 2016 and Tsing 2015). Moreover, the section on “Indigenous theories” is limited to a discussion of how Indigenous knowledges may be used, instrumentally, to strengthen “scientific worldviews” (64). While referencing sociological studies of various Indigenous peoples, the work lacks engagement with Indigenous scholars themselves or the critiques of multispecies ethnography that emphasize its appropriation of Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. The chapter concludes with an outline of different approaches to multispecies research including autoethnography, sensory ethnography, and the use of art, media, and visual tools.

Chapters 5 and 6 make the strongest contribution to the stated purpose of the text. Ameli introduces a multispecies ethnographic research project that analyzes teaching-learning processes in an experiential, nature-based educational program for students of educational science. Using this project as a model, chapter 5 then walks readers through the phases of designing a multispecies ethnographic research project from conceptualizing a research question, selecting a sample population that includes human and nonhuman participants, collecting and documenting qualitative data through observation, and analyzing data using a grounded-theory approach. Chapter 6 attends to how multispecies ethnographers ensure the quality and validity of their results, referencing general guidelines for qualitative and ethnographic data analysis and emphasizing the intersubjective and flexible character of such research. One key shortcoming: the central question of how to use ethnographic methods to attend to nonhuman actors is not fully addressed. The author provides a single example of an interaction between a person and a dog to highlight how ethnographers can focus on the animal point of view in their writing, though she does not describe how these methods were employed in the model study that orients the chapter.

Overall, the book makes an important contribution in highlighting the theoretical and applied significance of multispecies ethnography, outlining its transformative potential for interdisciplinary collaboration, and stressing the need for greater transparency in research design and implementation. Using an established multispecies ethnographic study as a model for exploring these dynamics is an effective strategy that could be foregrounded to organize the text more clearly and realize its overarching goal. Readers in fields of sociology, education, and veterinary science who are interested in multispecies ethnography will appreciate the text as a primer for exploring the theoretical debates, topical interests, and methodological questions that inform this emergent research framework.

Alexandra Holdbrook

University of Texas at San Antonio

Zee, Jerry C. 2021. Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System. Oakland, California: University of California Press. 311 pp. ISBN 9780520384088.

Swirling on wind streams across continents and oceans is a meteorological manifestation of territorial China, a particulate politics made up of aerosolized land. Annually, loosened Gobi Desert sands from Inner Mongolia are blown upward by Siberian wind currents where they join coal soot and industrial emissions to form a cloud of dust circulating in the skies above Northern China. After a series of dust storms severely impacted air quality in Beijing in 2001, the Chinese government implemented a novel meteorological experiment, one in which ex-herders from Inner Mongolia were recruited as citizen foresters and government officials and state scientists terraformed sand dunes in the hopes of altering national and global weather patterns. In Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System, Jerry C. Zee examines how Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and environmental degradation in Inner Mongolian pasturelands converged to produce strange weather in the Sinocene, the author's portmanteau for a planetary future tethered to the development and longevity of the Chinese Communist Party (206).

Ethnographically, Zee navigates Sincocene weather through the provocative question: “What if the rise of China were to be ap- proached literally, through the rise of China into the air?” (9). To answer this question, Zee tracks social relations created by dust, taking his reader from the desert shores of Inner Mongolia and purified air chambers of metropolitan Beijing to the sentinel mountains of US airspace in Northern California. Zee's ethnographic endeavor is buoyed by the concept of fengsha, what aeolian physicists translate as blown sand or, more poetically, wind-sand. As wind-sand morphs through phases of desert, dust, and storm, Zee calls attention to the forces of meteorology and geology entangled in the changing political winds of contemporary China. Continent in Dust is an ethnography that serves as both a thick description of environment-society relations in the Anthropocene (or more aptly, Sinocene) and a powerful exposition of Chinese eco-political philosophy and practice.

Part 1, Wind-Sand, showcases Zee's talent for noticing small moments and movements—grass roots clinging to sand, the surreptitious wanderings of goats and camels—while allowing Zee to roam ethnographically across the sciences of meteorology, geology, and forestry. Chapter 1, “Machine Sky,” highlights environmental and social engineering projects touching down in China's northeast interior. Here Zee pays attention to logics and practices that cast people, places, and animals upwind from Beijing as responsible for downwind weather. His chapter focuses on dual efforts by officials and foresters to influence Inner Mongolian herders to abandon herding and instead stabilize sand dunes. Together, these projects generate a geophysical machine geared to transform national, and by extension global, weather from dust storms to calm skies.

Chapter 2 “Groundwork,” investigates the process of terraforming sand dunes. Zee examines how two species—the dune shrub suosuo and its commoditized parasite rou congrong—feature in forestry programs that seek to provide sand control and economic development in ex-herder areas. In this chapter, bioengineering and the security of a state-protected market economy for rou congrong are interlinked kinds of groundwork practiced by foresters, who conceptualize their intervention in the properties of Earth and markets as necessary steps to prepare stable land and livelihoods in China's interior. The integration of environmental and economic transformation in regional forestry practices reflect the global machine of weather-making Zee argues is underway in the Sinocene.

Part 1 concludes by spotlighting the arrived future of desertification in the dried wetland of Qintu Lake in Gansu Province. “Holding Patterns: Earthly and Political Time at China's Desert Shores” accounts for chronopolitics—the manipulation, acceleration, and slowing of time (114)—undertaken by scientists desperate to prevent the burial of Minqin County by sand uncovered in the drying of Qintu Lake. Scientists working in sand control programs in Minqin County engage sand as it billows, piles into dunes, or blows over the land, understanding that wind-sand never stops; it merely rests in phase shifts. Minqin is experienced as a geophysical haunting of what happens as desertification swallows (tunshi) landscapes, with scientists operating under the maxim that “a slowed landscape equals a future deferred” (125). Techniques of sand control aim to slow the speed of the land's movement, creating a landscape quilted with windbreaks constructed from farm waste and nylon (bioengineering, Zee explains, is not allowed in this region due to low water availability).

Part 2 shifts to the microscopic phase of wind-sand to analyze how particulates becomes objects of filtration, containment, and play in Beijing. Chapter 4, “Particulate Exposures,” is a meditation on the act of breathing and what it means to live as a community of breathers in a Beijing that is susceptible to dangerous air pollution. The chapter's lingering soundtrack is the staccato of urban coughing, an announcement of the body's autonomic permeability to particulate exposure. Earlier sections build analysis of political breath and air dispossession through Zee's reading of fiction and embassy tweets. The final section centers on the body, more accurately the lung. Zee compares automaticity and agency to query how the act of not acting, in the case of breathing, inspires a different kind of political collectivity than that mobilized by environmental protest or civil society.

“City of Chambers” interrogates how people in Beijing modify their exposure to particulates by constructing pockets—and in more lighthearted moments, cans—of breathable air. Airspacing is Zee's term for practices, technologies, art, and designs through which Beijing residents manipulate voluble air to transform the city into a network of sealed, exclusive, breathing chambers. These chambers remind Zee of the walled compounds of the danwei socialist work unit—the mini cities within Beijing spatializing socialist productive power. However, airspacing contrastingly demarcates social distinctions in Beijing, which artists play up in their public art.

Part 3’s chapter “Downwinds” follows dust's journey from China to North America where atmospheric scientists encounter Chinese aerosols as “inbound landmasses” (209). Zee describes how scientists in California analyze the geo-chemical signatures of incoming dust to identify its national origins, subtracting dust determined to originate from China to create a purified “US-in-US” air dataset for use in air quality monitoring and environmental policy. Through these practices, scientists construe China as a stratum in American meteorology, merging geology and meteorology and reifying China as a floating continent in dust. Zee explores how the condition of “downwindedness” (216) in countries like South Korea and the United States operates as a political meteorology through which surveillance and manipulation of airborne dust modulates anxieties about international relations. The chapter is a powerful synthesis of the book's most ambitious arguments for a political anthropology of Sincocene weather.

The geo-meteorology at the heart of Continent in Dust provides a novel perspective for viewing the production of planetary politics in a way that remains grounded—literally and materially—in place and its more-than-human concerns. It is a testament to Zee's storytelling that the sands of Inner Mongolia remain imprinted on the reader's mind throughout the ethnography's global travels, turning dust into place and place into planetary relations. This book will be a must-read for anthropologists and graduate students interested in the Environmental and Political Anthropology of the Anthropocene, as well as the Anthropology of China. It would be a challenging read for undergraduates and the public, not because of Zee's ideas but because of the book's style and structure. For a book about dust, the prose is dense, at times obfuscating the author's arguments. However, in the end, Continent in Dust is a rewarding ethnography that offers up new ways of sensing the Anthropocene in breath, in dust, and in the arrival of suspended continents carried on the winds of strange weather.

Amy Leigh Johnson

Georgia College and State University

Ferdinand, Malcolm. 2021. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-509-54624-4.

In Decolonial Ecology, Malcolm Ferdinand argues that facing the “modern tempest” necessitates that we pay attention to the “double fracture,” which should be “positioned as a central problem of the ecological crisis” (3). Put simply, though developed extensively throughout the book's prologue, epilogue, and 17 chapters, this is the “fracture [that] separates the colonial history of the world from its environmental history” (3), enabling a situation where mainstream environmental praxis does not recognize the colonial histories that launched our current moment, and, concurrently, anticolonial and anti-racist efforts forget the conjoined fates of humans and nonhumans, pursuing, thus, abolitions “without ecology.”

To understand the events that started and continue to contribute to both the “crisis” and its attendant “fracture,” the author takes readers on a journey through a number of ships: slave ships, Noah's Ark, and the world-ship. The former is a key metaphor in this book primarily because of the histories that congregate(d) in the “hold of slave ships” and that produced what is known today as the Caribbean. Furthermore, the slave ship is also used as a signifier to emphasize a global “hold politics” (50) that, the author argues, still endures. Noah's Ark, here, is used to reference an exclusive “imaginary of environmental discourse” (7) that effaces worlds by requiring that, in the face of disaster, we “board” a politics that produces an ahistorical homogeneous “we.”

Therefore, to think from the Caribbean as we face our current “ecological tempest,” and through the lives of those locked in the hold of slave ships, allows for a “political genealogy [that is] in opposition to the classical, apolitical, asocial, and ahistorical genealogy of modern environmentalism” (179). For Ferdinand: as the “eye of modernity's hurricane, the Caribbean is that center where the sunny lull was wrongly confused for paradise, the fixed point of a global acceleration sucking up African villages, Amerindian societies, and European sails” (12). Certainly, in conjoining these histories that both ruptured and brought together multiple bodies and landscapes through what he calls “colonial inhabitations,” the Caribbean is a necessary “scene of ecological thinking” (12).

Colonial inhabitations, past and present, index unequal spatial relationships whose features are land grabs, exploitation and “othercides” (27). In the book, we see the imprimatur of colonial habitation in the pollution of rivers and human wombs, flowing from banana plantations in Martinique, and in the nuclear-filled US military annexations of land in Puerto Rico. Undoubtedly, these, among the plethora of examples offered, viscerally illustrate, too, the undersides of mainstream environmental discourse: its immanent coloniality that, in practicing Noah's Ark–like strategies, seeks to choose what bodies, histories and worlds can (and cannot) board the environmentalist train.

Against the ecological storm exacerbated by the fracture, neither the “abstract gaze” of the Anthropocene nor an anticolonial politics without nonhumans will singlehandedly get us out of the present crisis. Sure, there are the defiant examples of marronage across the Caribbean and Americas, and even those by Henry David Thoreau, but they are not, in Ferdinand's view, a “frontal challenge to their [our] off-world placement” (56).

But, by seeking to repair the lands and grounds created and perpetually marginalized by the slave ship—a “colonial political arrangement that symbolizes a particular encounter between Europe, Africa, and the Americas” (141)—and Noah's Ark technologies, we can emerge a world-ship. This is a marine vehicle that does not refuse histories or nonhumans. Instead, it seeks to reverse modernity's double fracture in an intentional politics of encounter directed towards creating a bridge of justice—the real ship platform for a decolonial ecology. Ultimately, “to hold antislavery, anticolonialism, and environmentalism together . . . that is the task of a decolonial ecology” (128), and is the rallying cry of this book that brings together an impressive plurality of literary, philosophical, artistic, and indigenous interventions; from the poems of Cesaire to the praxis of environmental justice struggles; from the conch sounds of the maroon to the ponds of Thoreau. Above all, Ferdinand's powerful contribution demonstrates a deep commitment to the survival and liberation of all those, humans and nonhumans, forced to live in “modernity's hold.”

In asserting the imperative of a decolonial ecology, a politics of encounter that requires a co-making of the world together—not living with but living together, this book, as well as the author, must be commended for putting forward “another genealogy, other concepts” to “rise up from the hold.”

Yet, he concedes, this is not an easy task: “for those to whom the world was refused, those who were expelled from Noah's Ark, those who were confined in the slave ship's hold, how do they ground a self that is capable of opening up an encounter and maintaining the relationship with those who once abandoned and abused them?” (200). Here, the fraught nature of pursuing such a world-ship, creating a bridge between this divide, is not understated.

Even with the many struggles to face the ecological crisis, to target the “eye of the storm,” the double fracture remains stubborn, like tempestuous waves. This separation is nurtured by “the colonial ecology of racial ontologies that always links the racialized and the colonized to those psychic, physical, and socio-political spaces that are the world's hold” (11). Still, though multiply poisoned by the “masters’ chemistry” (105), Ferdinand's deep historical mapping of hold bodies and non-bodies across centuries shows that the “Negro”—here used to refer to all humans and nonhumans living in the hold of the modern world—“does not die” (61). Giving us hope that there is a chance for the world-ship after all.

Wangui Kimari

University of Cape Town

Ogden, Laura. 2021. Loss and Wonder at the World's End. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 200 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1456-0.

At the 2015 AAA Annual Meeting, I attended a session for which Laura Ogden was the discussant. Before she delivered her comments, she started a video on the screen behind her. The video showed two people in very homemade-looking beaver costumes dancing on a small wooden boardwalk in the forest. She only mentioned it briefly to say that she found it helpful to think about ferality, and then she continued on with her comments as the beavers danced away in silence behind her. I do not have the slightest recollection of what her comments were that day, because I was completely captivated by the bizarre performance. After reading Loss and Wonder at the World's End, I am somewhat comforted by the knowledge that my initial reaction to the video was similar to her own.

In her book, Ogden archives what she calls a vernacular of loss and wonder in the Fuegian Archipelago of southern Argentina and Chile. Loss, she writes, is all around us, as capitalism metastasizes across the globe, destroying landscapes and rupturing the human-nonhuman relations of which they are composed. But this loss happens in different ways in different places and with different temporalities. The Fuegian Archipelago, where settler colonialism saturates the webs of relations that make life with loss and wonder, serves as the backdrop against which she seeks to construct her archive.

In presenting her book as an archive, Og- den lays the theoretical foundation for uniting seemingly disparate chapters that span epistemological traditions. Keenly aware that archives are contingent on structural logics that determine what gets included and excluded, she expands “what counts as evidence” in writing her archive of the present. In doing so, she describes how her research method and thinking fall under an experimental approach that she calls “speculative wonder,” which is specifically attuned to questions of how to engage and represent other assemblages of life. “In other words,” she describes, “I use what I know best (my own subjectivity) to engage the affective worlds of other species” (13). This approach leads to thought experiments, such as reframing invasive species as “animal diasporas,” and to experiments with interdisciplinarity, bringing together ethnography, colonial archives, performance studies, and natural history.

The book is organized into five main chapters. In chapter 1, she outlines several in- scription practices, or assertions of territorial claims, that make Earth itself an archive of loss and wonder. These inscription practices include landscape features named after Charles Darwin that have replaced local histories and names with one that portended the coming genocide; dermatogplyphs, or the hand and footprints of Yagán and Selk'nam people, made by American explorer and amateur anthropologist Charles W. Furlong over a century ago, that bring memories of those lost into the present; and a ciexaus, or ceremonial domed structure, that acts as a forceful reminder of who is still there. Chapter 2 is a brief outline of alternative archives of the present, where Ogden describes how things as different as dogs, museums, letters, and her cousin's pantry can serve as evidence of loss and wonder. Chapter 3 details Ogden's own efforts to understand how an animal becomes killable, investigating introduced beavers as a diaspora. This chapter outlines long histories of environmentalism and sheep grazing in the forests and Patagonian steppe (pampas) that shaped how beavers remade assemblages, leading Ogden to support their killing in forests but not in pampas. Chapter 4 turns the focus to Charles W. Furlong, who had been a recurring figure throughout, to show the colonial context that supported, yet was largely invisible from, his famous photographs and expeditions in the region. Chapter 5 closes the book by detailing Ogden's collaborations with feminist artists and filmmakers Christy Gast and Camila Marambio. They designed and performed the beaver costumes I encountered at the AAA meeting as a way to dislodge preconceptions and provoke curiosity about other worlds and futures. I can attest that they were successful.

Interspersed throughout these five chapters, in lieu of a traditional literature review, are ten “portraits of figures” whose ideas have been influential to Ogden, which she describes as “playing cards” (14) inserted into the pages of her book. These range from people, such as Arturo Escobar and Anne Chapman, to ideas, refrains, and nonhumans, such as the World's End, the explorer, and lichens.

Along with the unique structure of the book, Ogden's clear, honest writing makes for an engaging read. Additionally, I found her occasional, brief, but incisive declarations of political commitment to be particularly thought-provoking. One anthropological re- sponse to loss has been what is called “salvage anthropology,” an approach beset with settler savior fantasies of documenting vanishing cultures. In contrast, Ogden clearly writes that “the culture and history of Fuegian peoples is not my story to tell,” and she makes no attempt to do so (87). However, this stance does not prevent her from appreciating the contributions of past anthropologists, such as Anne Chapman, whose work has been rightly labeled salvage but whose recordings of Selk'nam people helped them revitalize their language generations later. Similarly, Ogden is refreshingly open about a conversation she had with a Yagán collaborator and director of the anthropology museum, Alberto Serrano, about whether using Furlong's archival materials in collaboration with community members was a way of “decolonizing the archives.” He replied no, and Ogden then rightly points out that decolonization requires much more than writing books and sifting through archives (42–43). That said, given the subject matter of loss and ecological destruction, Ogden does not shy away from taking political stances rarely seen in ethnographic writing. Her arrival at the conclusion that beavers inhabiting forests should be killed is a refreshingly honest move beyond what she labels “absolution through critique” (85), which is too often present in many other ethnographies, multispecies and otherwise.

In all, this is a well-written and theoretically unique book that will be valuable to all those interested in ethnographic writing, multispecies ethnography, feminist interdisciplinarity, and people dancing in beaver costumes.

Daniel J. Read

World Wildlife Fund, US

Hathaway, Michael J. 2022. What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 270 pp. ISBN 978-0691225883.

Yes. Fungi are good to think with. This is what I learned by reading Michael Hathaway's book What a Mushroom Lives For. While I did not learn what a mushroom lives for, not in any great detail, I did learn this.

Fungi are good to think beyond the animal centricity of social sciences. Even when social sciences try to escape anthropomorphism, the vision of life generally does not expand beyond the animal kingdom. Fungi are an important part of human lifeworlds; thus, it is important that an expanded social scientific worldview gives them their due.

Like humans, monkeys, dogs and dolphins, fungi also learn. But what does learning mean for fungi? Terms developed for understanding human actions, like “learning,” if carelessly extended to other species can anthropomorphize them, interpreting their actions in exclusively human terms. On the other hand, if we make the case that no other species other than humans can learn, explanations end up being anthropocentric. This is not very useful in understanding other lifeforms, like fungi, and the ways in which our own very human lives are entangled with them.

To illustrate: There was a time when fungi did not know how to break down the woody material of trees called “lignin.” Dead trees piled up for millions of years, and later converted into coal and mineral oil through geological action. According to one theory, the carbon age ended when fungi learned how to digest lignin—one of the more important ways fungi have shaped the world.

The lives of fungi and plants have been entangled for a very long time. Fungi have been critical actors in the territorial colonization of the earth by plants. Fungi helped plants leave the oceans and colonize the continents. They also helped plants, by creating symbiotic relationships with them, and by making the atmosphere and the soil as we know them now. By disintegrating and decomposing rocks, creating soil, and helping plants grow, they have been crucial players in making continents inhabitable and green. Through symbiotic relationships with plants and trees, and by making vital minerals available to them, fungi have been central in the creation of many ecosystems such as forests. By working as super decomposers, they also help break down the woody mass of trees into recyclable biomaterial.

Thus, like other lifeforms such as humans, fungi also shape the world. Hathaway uses the concept, “world making,” to walk the razor's edge between anthropocentrism and anthropomorphizing. Nowhere is the usefulness of this concept more evident than in understanding fungi as agents. Yes. Fungi are good to think with about agency. When humans try to understand organisms like fungi, whose actions (such as, movement and eating other living beings) may be invisible to us, we do not necessarily see them as active agents shaping the world. In this context, Hathaway deploys the concept of “world making” to understand the way fungi, as agentic beings, live their lives and make the world.

Instead of looking at the action of a single, individual fungus, Hathaway sees the work of fungi as modes of “collective agency” that made (and still make) the world as we know it now. Thus, “fungi are also good to think with” about how we understand natural processes like evolution. If we think beyond animal centricity—with its focus on individuals and discrete species, that thrive or perish, in a “struggle for survival”—and focus on fungi, we can grasp how close, mutually sustaining relationships and thus cooperation (e.g., between fungi and plants) have been integral parts of the process.

Hathaway unpacks these questions and debates within the context of a specific species of mushroom, matsutake, that are an important part of the culinary culture of Japan. The demand for these mushrooms is now being met primarily through imports, especially from the Yunnan Province of China. Matsutake mushrooms have resisted being cultivated by humans. Hence, they must be picked where they bloom in the wild. Hathaway explores how starting in the 1980s, the matsutake have shaped and transformed two different communities in the province, the Yi and the Tibetans.

Yi are an ethnic minority group, a majority of whom live in the Yunnan Province, especially in its mountainous areas. Yi have used the newly gathered wealth from the matsutake harvests (no matter how modest by national or international standards) to finance assertions of cultural autonomy involving usage of Yi language, holding Yi music and dance festivals, and running restaurants serving Yi cuisine.

Tibetan communities inhabit the highlands of the province, that are, in fact, the lowlands of the Tibetan universe. A lifeworld built with barley and yaks, as central beings over millennia, has now changed with the matsutake as the driver. Tibetans are building neo-traditional houses and buying trucks with the matsutake money, thus reclaiming their heritage as traders in the trans-Himalayan region of Southern China.

The fact that the matsutake degenerate fast, and the Japanese desire them fresh, has determined a large number of the changes in the lifeworlds of these communities, which includes the building of roads and other communication channels in the region. Thus, fungi are good to think with, about the changing dynamics of human lifeworlds as well.

When we (along with Hathaway) think with fungi, we also meet scientists like Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll, who help us understand how all kinds of organisms (and not just animals) experience and create worlds, and scholars such as Mendel Skulski, Paul Stamets, and Willoughby Arevalo, who bring a much-needed focus on fungi.

If you want to know more about how critical fungi are to life, what matsutake mushrooms can tell us about changing social dynamics of human communities, and how to think creatively about some intractable and difficult questions in the human sciences surrounding agency and action, then you could, perhaps, do nothing better than read What a Mushroom Lives For.

Sailen Routray

Independent Researcher

Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2019. From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Federal and state environmental agencies in the United States have, by and large, failed to enact policies to address the unequal ex- posure to environmental hazards facing racialized, Indigenous, and working-class communities, leaving deep racial and class inequalities in incidents of illness and death. One might assume that this is because of a lack of substantive policies, staffing, or legislation. In- deed, those are all factors, at least to some extent, as Jill Harrison's book details. Harri- son, however, wants scholars and activists to consider bureaucrats themselves as powerful players in this story, this important text joining a lineage of scholarship that documents the independence and importance of seemingly benign technical agents. Harrison contends that federal and state agencies have the capacity to do much more about environmental inequalities. Despite agencies formally adopting many environmental justice (EJ) policies and hiring EJ staff in response to now decades old calls from an EJ movement, relatively few substantive changes have taken place.

Through scores of interviews with EPA staff and staff at environmental protection agencies across a dozen states, Harrison makes a carefully researched and compelling argument that environmental agency staff bear responsibility for the lack of equitable health and environmental outcomes, despite much talk about hands being tied. Through an in-depth study of the power of regulatory agency staff to craft and affect outcomes, Harrison argues that the failure of environmental agencies to effectively enact EJ efforts is due to a regulatory workplace culture.

The book does not dwell too long on theorizing this “culture,” which works in the text's favor, pushing the reader forward to consider the responses and reactions of agency staff, people Harrison has spent hundreds of hours with. The book follows the narratives that staff offer about EJ reforms and staff practices that undermine EJ reform. Through this analysis, Harrison investigates why bureaucrats resist EJ reform and identifies that which agencies define as EJ increasingly deviates from the long-standing priorities of the EJ movement. The author points principally to ideological factors as the cause of this shift.

Harrison first details what she, after hearing the same arguments made in so many contexts in various states and agencies, terms the “standard narrative” of why agencies do not address environmental conditions in overburdened communities. She finds that across the many agencies, staff members present the issue as “out of their hands” for three main reasons: lack of agency resources, lack of proper regulation, and a lack of technical tools with which to inform decision-making. Harrison goes through each of these narratives and challenges them. Limited resources might be a problem, but, Harrison finds, other agency staff detail how EJ work is avoided because of the perception that it takes too much time, and agency staff prefer to work on other more attainable objectives. Similarly, Harrison de- tails how the narrative about a lack of technical analysis fails to account for the many existing analytic tools that agencies have and do not use. Finally, on the question of regulatory authority, Harrison succinctly points out that “existing law does authorize many EJ reforms that are rarely implemented” (68).

In the subsequent two chapters, the book traverses some of the reasons for the maintenance of this standard narrative and the reluctance to implement EJ reforms. Harri- son identifies a similar cultural resistance at nearly every agency where she conducts in- terviews. Staff members consistently consider EJ reform and proposals to be counter to the identity and mission of the agency. Additionally, Harrison finds that bureaucrats’ everyday practices undermine EJ staff efforts to implement reforms, as their fellow staff regularly ignore EJ reform policies, only nominally attempt to implement slated measures, or even sideline, bully, and stonewall EJ staff persons in agency offices. These findings are striking as EJ staff people that Harrison interviews are often people of color, indicating a trend of racialized resistance to integrating both EJ reform measures and staff people.

The book spends the final two chapters before the conclusion explaining why and how agency staff resist EJ reforms. Perhaps the richest part of the book in a theoretical sense, scholars of political theory and environmental policy alike will get much out of these two chapters. Harrison presents that agency pushback to EJ reforms originates in an ideological opposition to EJ reform, de- fining ideology here as “popular claims that legitimize the status quo” (145). Carefully going through interview data, Harrison de- tails how many of the reasons staff members drag their feet or reject EJ policy outright has much to do, among several key findings, with a color-blind racial ideology. Staff believe that their agency is beholden to, as Harrison puts it, “abstract forms of liberal neutrality” (153), and that race conscious EJ reforms violate the staff's commitment to impartiality. In short, Harrison masterfully documents the troubling trend that environmental agency staff ideologically disagree with the racial justice premise of EJ reforms and, therefore, quietly refuse to implement them.

Following this concerning trend, in reviewing various programs at state and federal levels, Harrison identifies that EJ programs increasingly deviate from long-standing EJ movement priorities of state-guaranteed pro- tections from environmental hazards and hazard reduction for disproportionately affected communities. Instead, most programs support amenity projects, such as community gardens, parks, and trails in affected communities. Harrison argues that this definition of EJ stems from a new “common sense” about what agencies should do, one that “naturalizes the neoliberal shift in activism” (186). The book shows dramatic and important evidence of a move away from adversarial policy and advocacy that might restrain polluting industry, favoring policies that promote collaboration with industry. These results are striking, and the implications of these findings are vitally important data points for scholars of environmental politics, environmental justice activists, and government agency staff alike. Finally, in the conclusion, Harrison provides a thoughtful set of recommendations for what could be done to bolster EJ reforms in regulatory agencies, ones that EJ-aligned policymakers and government staff can benefit from.

From the Inside Out is a careful study of how staff members at regulatory agencies play an important part in allowing environmental inequities to persist and a scathing account of why EJ reform policy remains largely unimplemented. The book provides a thorough analysis of the largely unseen power of bureaucrats through its meticulous research and methodology. While some readers may not care for the lengthy review of a wealth of interview data in early chapters, they should press on. This book deserves to be read by geographers, anthropologists, or any other scholars that pay attention to environmental justice and public policy. Doubly so, the book should be required reading at environmental agencies across the United States. Harrison has done a commendable job presenting imminently important and timely research on what must be done to implement EJ policy within state and federal entities.

Gabe Schwartzman

University of Tennessee

Stoetzer, Bettina. 2022. Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Nature in Berlin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 328 pp. ISBN 9781478018605.

What can we learn from the rubble that piles up along the edges of a war-torn city? A lot, it turns out. In Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin, Bettina Stoetzer invites readers to look closely at a variety of “ruderal” spaces in and around the German capital. The word “ruderal” comes from rudus, Latin for rubble, and has long been used by urban ecologists to describe biotic communities in “disturbed” environments, such as along roads, around vacant buildings, and in garbage dumps. But rather than simply borrowing the term, Stoetzer uses it to rethink the city as a ruderal space, where social exclusion is a more-than-human story and ecological assemblages reflect histories of nationalism, capitalism, and their ruination. Notably, Stoetzer's method is also ruderal in that she looks to a disparate set of marginalized (peri)urban spaces where “unlikely neighbors” are forced together and at times able to create “sites of endurance, care, and alliance against harm” (25). What results is a fascinating collection of “fragmentary, patchy ethnographic accounts that . . . follow the lead of interlocutors rather than privileging narrative thickness or a holistic picture” (27).

Ruderal City is complex and enthralling—the kind of book that yields different insights when (re)read in different settings and moods. My first read-through coincided with the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. If you asked me then to describe the book's greatest contribution, I would have replied that it shows how histories of nationalism, migration, and racism are materialized in the ruderal ecologies of greater Berlin. The second time, however, was during the flush of spring, when I was transfixed by the ruderal plant life that appears on practically every page. More so than in any other urban ethnography I have read, plants themselves are important actors in Ruderal City. There are Mediterranean weeds thriving in bombed-out buildings, bumper crops of cabbage growing in immigrants’ gardens, and forests of “the uncanny” populating abandoned military bases. Across these spaces, Stoetzer reveals how the quiet capacities of vegetal life permeate the more strident forces of concrete and steel. Yet she also challenges the “deeply gendered and racialized binary distinction . . . between active technology and passive ‘matter’” (10) that persists in many vitalist accounts of urban infrastructure. As in the work of Amita Baviskar, Alex Nading, Anne Rademacher, and AbdouMaliq Simone, we have here a more-than-human approach to urban life that successfully resists reproducing modernist, Euro-centric visions of the city as a place where human civilization works athwart the forces of nature. Instead, we learn to see racialized assemblages of humans, plants, and animals as co-constitutive of Berlin's post- imperial, post-fascist, ruderal landscape.

Chapter 1, for example, traces how West Germans encountered novel ecologies in the rubble of their demolished, walled-off city. Imported garden plants like sticky goosefoot and tree-of-heaven spread prolifically, representing an ecological triumph of sorts over Nazi visions of biological purity. These ecologies, in turn, inspired novel ways of understanding the city as a dynamic, ruderal landscape and as an ecological microcosm for a cosmopolitan, post-fascist nation in an age of climatic heating. In their ruderal surroundings, Stoetzer argues, West Germans found alternatives both to imperial displays of manicured exotica and to the Nazis’ purge of “foreign” lifeforms.

Gardens, too, have fostered the emergence of ruderal life in Berlin. In chapter 2, we learn that successive German regimes have promoted “allotment gardens” as tools of national integration. Postwar governments have been no exception, turning some allotments into “multicultural gardens” that purport to “integrate” immigrants from the Middle East and Africa while enhancing the city's biological diversity. Meanwhile, immigrants have created their own fugitive gardens in green spaces considered too “dangerous” for white Berliners and in the courtyards of public housing, where such unruly practices can be grounds for eviction. All these gardens reflect in different ways the city's racialized landscape, yet Stoetzer's perceptive ethnography reveals them as something more—as spaces where ruderal, more-than-human communities form and take on lives of their own.

The same is true of Berlin's parks, some of which have become important gathering places for racialized immigrants and their descendants. Chapters 3 and 4 respectively examine how the city's well-established Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern communities have used park space to build transgressive, ruderal socialities. Everyday activities like selling picnic foods and hosting barbecues have triggered racist debates about cultural differences and civic responsibility. Yet these practices thrive because they address needs and desires otherwise unmet amid the realities of racial exclusion, fiscal austerity, and spatial fragmentation. When immigrants inhabit the city's green space in edgy ways, they simultaneously activate and unsettle white Berliners’ post-war fascination with ruderal life. Such “edge effects,” Stoetzer suggests, enable precarious forms of belonging and hospitality in an increasingly inhospitable world.

Lonelier, but no less precarious, migrant camps in the forests of Berlin's eastern outskirts sit not only at the urban-rural edge, but also at the edges of pivotal historical forces. Now part of a nature reserve, this swath of the countryside was once a commercially managed forest and home to East German military-industrial facilities. After reunification, the area was partially abandoned and is today a “Wild East” for adventure-seeking tourists, a node of neofascist activity, and a place to warehouse asylum-seeking migrants displaced by conflict in the Middle East and Africa. In chapters 5 and 6, Stoetzer presents a range of contrasting scenes from this ruderal zone—from migrants’ “uncanny” encounters with their other-than-human neighbors to Safari Tours, failed attempts at “rewilding,” and refugees’ strategies for survival in the “German bush.” Together these scenes poignantly illustrate the precarity, endurance, and possibility of ruderal life amid the “afterlives of colonial violence” (238).

Ruderal City is a must-read for scholars in urban studies, political ecology, migration, and European society. It is already informing my own research, and I am eager to engage it with colleagues and students. Readers who struggle with the book's conceptual density might instead focus on the abundance of memorable narratives. Stoetzer's evocative storytelling is enough on its own to inspire meaningful discussion at any level. This is a consequential book and a pleasure to read.

Noah Theriault

Carnegie Mellon University

Turner, James Morton, 2022. Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 234 pp. ISBN 9780295750248.

Historians’ decades-long project to pry open the “black box” of electricity infrastructures—to uncover the technical mechanisms, material footprints, and social histories of the “grid”—has gained new momentum in recent years as sweeping electrification efforts become an increasingly central component of decarbonization plans. Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future by James Morton Turner contributes a largely untold piece of this history, detailing the design and proliferation of three major battery storage technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first century: lead-acid, lithium- ion, and disposable batteries. Turner leverages this history to help inform contemporary climate debates, where batteries have emerged as a central protagonist—characterized by some as the clunky “Achilles’ heel” of the en- ergy transition and by others as a promising technology on the cusp of a game-changing breakthrough.

Attending to batteries, Turner argues, contributes three insights to energy history and policy. First, batteries, which make electricity supplies reliable and consistent, reveal the importance of energy's quality, not just its quantity. Second, because they require replacement, maintenance, and charging, they have persistently made electricity visible, complicating the idea that modernity is characterized by “the abstraction of energy consumption” (9). Third, if the ever-increasing mobility of people and things is partially to blame for climate change, so too is the growing mobility of information, which has often been achieved via battery-powered devices.

The text weaves together a diffuse and technical set of sources, including scientific journals, patents, and shareholder reports, to illuminate the imbrications between materiality and politics. Turner demonstrates how successive changes in battery chemistry rever- berated within communities, as mines and refineries were alternately opened or shuttered. In turn, the shifting availability and palatability of various raw materials continuously reshaped both batteries’ technical capacities and their socioeconomic potentials.

Chapter 1 examines lead-acid batteries, the omnipresent rechargeable batteries used to start most gas-powered car engines (and power the rare electric model) in the twentieth century. Even as manufacturers wielded increasing control over batteries’ chemical composition, they consistently failed to control the seepage of toxic ingredients such as lead within mines and manufacturing plants, with devastating impacts on frontline communities and factory workers. Though these batteries are now recycled at rates of nearly 100 percent, small, informal recycling operations have similarly failed to adequately limit contamination, complicating commonsense arguments about the sustainability of recycling—though larger plants have had more success. Most recently, activist efforts to crack down on recycling risks have contributed to the industry's mass offshoring to the Global South.

Chapter 2 examines the history of single- use batteries, which powered telephones, ra- dios, and cars in the early twentieth century before being replaced by other power sources. After decades of being mostly used in flashlights, in the 1980s, the disposable battery was repurposed for consumer electronics like the Sony Walkman. Turner suggests that disposable batteries, which since the 1940s have been subject to increasingly rigid federal standards, are a kind of infrastructure: they formed the largely invisible foundation that enabled the explosive rise of contemporary consumer technology. These batteries’ accessibility, he argues, was in turn made possible by a raw materials supply chain that was increasingly complex, opaque, and far-reaching. As metals refining technology improved, materials could be sourced from lower-grade ores, expanding potential mining sites. Improvements in refining technology also allowed for higher chemical purity, which improved battery performance but also required greater energy inputs, a counterintuitive relationship that Turner terms the “paradox of purity” (93). The benefits of recycling here, too, are not clear-cut, because recycling disposable batteries is more energy-intensive than simply throwing them away.

Chapters 3 and 4 tackle the history of lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries, the storage ve- hicles now at the center of energy transition plans. Turner tracks their adoption in medical devices in the 1970s, wireless electronics in the 1990s, and electric vehicles in the first decade of the twenty-first century. While US policymakers have done little to shore up access to the raw materials and manufacturing facilities needed to produce these batteries, countries in East Asia, particularly China, have made systematic investments in the li-ion supply chain. As a result, Turner argues, the United States has lost geopolitical leverage—and US companies and consum- ers have little leverage to improve the often- damaging conditions under which materials like lithium and cobalt are extracted.

Ultimately, Turner argues, mitigating climate change will require environmentalists to give up their traditionally purist anti-materialism and instead grapple with how to equitably source the raw materials needed for the energy transition. Given that recycling alone cannot, in Turner's estimation, generate the mass of metals that renewable energy infrastructures will require, the most effective policies will expand oversight over global supply chains while also investing in domestic mining and manufacturing initiatives.

Turner further argues that gaining control over the renewable energy supply chain will help the United States maintain geopolitical power by reducing its reliance on China. Here he could have done more to historicize and, perhaps, denaturalize the contemporary alignment between national security and climate change mitigation. I would have been interested to learn more about how the history of the battery's emergence in climate change agendas overlapped with, or diverged from, the history of its emplacement within national security discourses.

Ultimately, though, this book demonstrates both the central role of batteries to contemporary climatic and geopolitical situations and the instrumental value of history in informing policy. Turner's prose is accessible and engaging, and the book would be appropriate for an undergraduate class in environmental studies, history, or political science. It will also be illuminating to scholars researching the social dimensions of energy, commodities, and mobility in contemporary or historical contexts. Given the book's timeliness, it should also find an audience among practitioners, policymakers, and activists engaged in the energy transition.

Caroline White-Nockleby

Massachusetts Institute of Technology