Suchergebnisse

"Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities-human and nonhuman-that make up the material politics of city making. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how these actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways"--

"Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities-human and nonhuman-that make up the material politics of city making. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how these actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways"--

AbstractThrough an ethnography of parakeets and other denizens in London, this article expounds the concept of the feral and foregrounds its purchase for an anthropological inquiry into urban life. Ecological, cultural, and political connotations of ferality impinge upon evaluations of what counts and is allowed to flourish as metropolitan nature. Ferality is constructed through nativist and racial taxonomies which promote a biopolitics of eradicating parakeets. At the same time, parakeets trigger new 'recombinant' ecological associations when they enter into relations with other avian life. They also foster affective alignments with people that create possibilities for a more just politics of dwelling. The feral recasts London's metropolitan nature as postcolonial and opens up novel ways of doing urban anthropology.

Political ecology has had a long connection with materials, going back to some of its canonical concerns. Yet materials are rendered inert with no capacity to mobilize political action. Further, the influence of matter in wider ecologies of human–animal cohabitation is poorly acknowledged. This paper examines the role of materials in mediating people's relationships with elephants in rural northeast India. Drawing upon ethnographic research and ethological studies of elephants, the paper shows that human–elephant conflict is not simply a linear outcome of interactions between elephants and people. Materials, in this case alcohol, play a vital role. Alcohol binds people and elephants in unforeseen ways. The sociopolitical outcomes alcohol generates have deep impacts on the livelihoods of the rural poor and the well-being of elephants. This examination of social and political life through concerted interactions between humans, animals, and materials ecologizes politics, making it more attuned to the more-than-human collectivities within which material lives are lived. The paper strives towards a political ecology that is symmetrical and challenges the discipline's humanist focus. It concludes with a discussion of the future implications and potential of this approach.