The essay suggests that what is absent from the scientific discourse on the Anthropocene is a postcolonial perspective that points out the fact that we are not talking about generalizable social, economic, and cultural structures and belief systems, but that instead we are describing very specific political, economic, and discursive regimes of power.
Bengal’s essential character as a fluid landscape was changed during the colonial times through legal interventions that were aimed at creating permanent boundaries between land and water, with land given priority.
This issue of RCC Perspectives offers insights into similarities and differences in the ways people in Asia have tried to master and control the often unpredictable and volatile environments of which they were part
Content
Looks at the changing governance practices towards agro-ecological resources and the political response that it received from the agrarian community in colonial eastern Bengal.
Explores how the relationship of Adivasis to their surroundings was gradually reshaped under colonial rule in Bengal, leading to increased sedentarization of Adivasis through the extension of cultivation.
Over time, the peoples living in Latin America’s diverse landscapes have developed complex and varied ways of understanding the world around them. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the main goal of the sciences was to keep Latin America’s “prodigal” landscapes as productive as possible. Since the mid-twentieth century, a new countercurrent has emerged, which focuses on using science to conserve biological diversity, and to promote sustainability.
This article looks at India’s colonial history and the effect that recent economic and political changes have had on the country’s relationship with wild animals.
This paper explores the concept of “nature” from the perspective of African meanings and practices that were criminalised as poaching during and after the colonial moment.
The urban experience in Latin America is explained less by the opposition between the countryside and the city, than by the image of a continuum—highlighting the integration of cities into rural economies, extractivist communities, and into the Latin American landscape in general.
This article looks at the history of the plant Erythroxylum coca—a natural source of cocaine—which offers one way to trace the interaction between a physiological agent in history and the growth of empires.
