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Parrots and snakes, wild cats and monkeys---exotic pets can now be found everywhere from skyscraper apartments and fenced suburban backyards to roadside petting zoos. In Animal Traffic Rosemary-Claire Collard investigates the multibillion-dollar global exotic pet trade and the largely hidden processes through which exotic pets are produced and traded as lively capital. Tracking the capture of animals in biosphere reserves in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize; their exchange at exotic animal auctions in the United States; and the attempted rehabilitation of former exotic pets at a wildlife center in Guatemala, Collard shows how exotic pets are fetishized both as commodities and as objects. Their capture and sale sever their ties to complex socio-ecological networks in ways that make them appear as if they do not have lives of their own. Collard demonstrates that the enclosure of animals in the exotic pet trade is part of a bioeconomic trend in which life is increasingly commodified and objectified under capitalism. Ultimately, she calls for a “wild life” politics in which animals are no longer enclosed, retain their autonomy, and can live for the sake of themselves.
Critical Animal Geographies provides new geographical perspectives on critical animal studies, exploring the spatial, political, and ethical dimensions of animals’ lived experience and human-animal encounter. It works toward a more radical politics and theory directed at the shifting boundary between human and animal. Chapters draw together feminist, political-economic, post-humanist, anarchist, post-colonial, and critical race literatures with original case studies in order to see how efforts by some humans to control and order life – human and not – violate, constrain, and impinge upon others. Central to all chapters is a commitment to grappling with the stakes – violence, death, life, autonomy – of human-animal encounters. Equally, the work in the collection addresses head-on the dominant forces shaping and dependent on these encounters: capitalism, racism, colonialism, and so on. In doing so, the book pushes readers to confront how human-animal relations are mixed up with overlapping axes of power and exploitation, including gender, race, class, and species.
Comprehensive overview of key theoretical approaches and issues in the field.
A new approach to writing culture has arrived: multispecies ethnography. Plants, animals, fungi, and microbes appear alongside humans in this singular book about natural and cultural history. Anthropologists have collaborated with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Contributions from influential writers and scholars, such as Dorion Sagan, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, are featured along with essays by emergent artists and cultural anthropologists. Delectable mushrooms flourishing in the aftermath of ecological disaster, microbial cultures enlivening the politics and value o...
Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century. In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars' willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology (the science of animal behavior), and by attempts to affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals. Ga...
With global wildlife populations and biodiversity riches in peril, it is obvious that innovative methods of addressing our planet's environmental problems are needed. But is “the market” the answer? Nature™ Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations.
The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology presents a comprehensive and authoritative examination of the rapidly growing field of political ecology. Located at the intersection of geography, anthropology, sociology, and environmental history, political ecology is one of the most vibrant and conceptually diverse fields of inquiry into nature-society relations within the social sciences. The Handbook serves as an essential guide to this rapidly evolving intellectual landscape. With contributions from over 50 leading authors, the Handbook presents a systematic overview of political ecology’s origins, practices and core concerns, and aims to advance both ongoing and emerging debates. While th...
Neoliberalism is easily one of the most powerful discourses toemerge within the social sciences in the last two decades, and the number of scholars who write about this dynamic and unfolding process of socio-spatial transformation is astonishing. Even more surprising though is that there has, until now, not been an attempt to provide a wide-ranging volume that engages with the multiple registers in which neoliberalism has evolved. The Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of neoliberalism by examining the range of ways that it has been theorized, promoted, critiqued, and put into practice in a variety of geographical locations and insti...
The first book to present the latest discoveries on the behaviour, ecology and evolutionary biology of lorises and pottos.
Introduction -- Geographical politics and the politics of geography -- Latin America and the production of the global economy -- From passive revolution to silent revolution: the politics of state, space, and class formation in modern Mexico -- The changing state of resistance: defending place and producing space in Oaxaca -- The clash of spatializations: class power and the production of Chiapas -- Conclusion