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Book Review
Environmental studies
SOCIAL NATURE — Resources, Representations and Rule in India: Arun Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan — Editors; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 595.
THE PAPERS in this collection can be considered as the third generation of environmental discourse on South Asia.
So far, the environmental and agrarian literature about the subcontinent has set the intellectual and conceptual tone for similar work elsewhere.
Among the great services this work performs, the most important one is to demonstrate the artificiality of such categories as arable, forest, pasture, etc., as well as categories of livelihoods based on them.
Studies regarding agrarian change in the 40 years since Independence have been preoccupied mainly with the green revolution, new technologies, farm size and the political economy of state intervention in the ecologically and infrastructurally better equipped regions.
This volume argues for a more clear and dialectical relationship between agrarian production and environmental change.
They are located in a rough chronological order. Drawing on a wide-ranging field and archival research, the contributors offer a fresh, inter-disciplinary perspective on the relationship between the two.
They also successfully explain the dynamics of environmental conflicts in terms of mobilisation and organisation, at the same time blurring rigid categorisation of cultural representations.
A thorough examination of how environmental change has articulated agrarian and rural transformation in technological, cultural and political terms over the last two centuries is also made in these chapters.
The articles will be of immense value to researchers and students of development, environment, history, ecology, economics, sociology, and political science, as well as policy makers.
Social workers in the rural communities, who are attempting to bring about social and economic change by manipulating the usage of natural resources, will get fresh insights from this book.
GEORGINA PETER
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