In this article for a special section on Green Wars, Jared D. Margulies considers Louis Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) for advancing political ecology scholarship on the functioning of the state in violent environments. He uses the example of conservation as ideology in Wayanad, Kerala.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Celia Lowe and Ursula Münster present three open-ended stories of elephant care in times of death and loss: at places of confinement and elephant suffering like the zoos in Seattle and Zürich as well as in the conflict-ridden landscapes of South India, where the country’s last free-ranging elephants live. They call attention to the Asian elephant, a species that is currently facing extinction through the elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus.
Daniel Münster takes us to the troubled history of improving dairy production in India, from the crossbreeding and high-cost industrialized care of delicate hybrids to the equally complex implications of a native-cow revival.
This article engages with such questions by focusing on the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary of Kerala in southern India, arguing that a reconceptualization of both “culture” and “nature” will be necessary in order to prevent the concept of biocultural diversity from appearing as just another form of “green neocolonization” or “eco-imperialism.”
This article argues that in contemporary Wayanad in Kerala, southern India, human-animal relations are embedded in a history of ecological modernity composed of three modes of encounter between agrarian change (capitalist settler agriculture) and forest conservation (state-led and globalizing). It suggests that the notions of “frontier,” “fortress,” and (precarious) “conviviality” best capture the historical and emerging environmental relations in this environment of crisis.
