Academic literature on the topic 'Ethno-Environmentalism'

Much has been written in recent years about the environmental degradation in China's ethnic minority regions and the impact that this degradation and the policies that have been implemented to combat it have had on minority populations. To date, however, the research has focused mainly on the livelihood and lifestyle of minority herders and farmers. This article shifts the focus to the more symbolic realm of discourse and identity and to the minority educated urban elite, for whom this environmental degradation is linked primarily to ethnic politics. Based on an analysis of popular songs by famous Mongolian, Uyghur, and Tibetan musicians, along with interviews with the musicians who created them and other minority intellectuals, this article proposes that China's minority intellectuals have appropriated the global discourse of environmentalism to construct minority environmental discourses that they use to assert their ethnic identities, express ethnic concerns and aspirations, and make ethno-nationalist claims.

AbstractThis paper, focusing on a Botswanan case of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), illustrates how globalized norms in seeming competition nonetheless reveal a potential middle ground. In Botswana there have been conflicts between regimes of environmentalism and indigenous cultural rights. Environmental protectionism has been based on a concept of “pristine nature” which does not allow for human interaction. Thus, the more protected areas are designated, the more indigenous peoples' lands are claimed as nature reserves. This forces local peoples to abandon cultural practices such as hunting animals and gathering wild plants. In contrast, impelled by the ascention of human rights issues, advocacy groups for the unorganized fourth world and indigenous communities have been struggling to protect indigenous people's cultural rights, thereby giving prominence to human rights issues. NGO advocates for indigenous peoples as well as professionals involved with indigenous groups have found that indigenous people's practices are in fact not harmful to the ecosystem. Rather, their ethno-biological knowledge and customary activities contribute to balancing the local ecosystem. This means that conflicting guidelines can be harmonized in “buffer zones” around protected areas, and the buffering program that has resulted, that by CBNRM, has been widely accepted in Botswana and is likely applicable to other countries in which we find similar value competition.

In 2010 the New York Times reported that ‘[t]ribes of Amazon Find an Ally Out of “Avatar”’, James Cameron. The alliance was against the building of Belo Monte, a hydroelectricdam in the Xingu River in Brazil. Cameron made a documentary about Belo Monte, A Message from Pandora. Here he states that Avatar becomes real in the struggle against the dam. This appears to confirm U. K. Heise’s observation that the ‘Amazon rainforest has long functioned as a complex symbol of exotic natural abundance, global ecological connectedness, and environmental crisis’. This construal, however, downplays the ‘symbols’ cultural components. In this article I show that the image of an ecological ‘rainforest Indian’ and a particular kind of culture constitutes a crucial part of the Amazon as ‘a complex’ cross-disciplinary ‘symbol’. Firstly, I examine how an Amazonian topology (closeness to nature, natural cultures) is both a product of an interdisciplinary history, and a place to speak from for ethno-political activist. Next I analyze how Amazonian cultures have been turned into ‘ethnological isolates’ representing a set of grand theoretical problems in anthropology, not least concerning the nature/culture-distinction, and how environmentalism has deployed the same topology. Finally I examine how Avatar and one of its cinematic intertexts, John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest, is used as a model to understand the struggle over the Belo Monte. In a paradoxical way the symbolic power of indigenous people in ecological matters here appears to be dependent upon a non-relation, and a reestablishment of clear cut cultural boundaries, where ‘the tribal’ is also associated with the human past. Disturbingly such symbolic exportation of solutions is consonant with current exportations of the solution of ecological problems to ‘other places’.

Abstract Local conservative knowledge cut across small-scale ecological natural resource management practices, whilst scientific innovations generates extensive solutions using key principles of empirical study. Assessing tribal peoples’ lifestyles, disposition and the preservation of the rich cultural endowments and vegetation fertility, shows linkages of strict enforcement of customary environmentalism to secure livelihood sources. This qualitative study uses descriptive comparison of cross-cultural conservation practices to underscore the reconciliation of cultural knowledge, natural ecology sustainability. Data and case studies from cultural behaviours, perceptions and attitudes of certain tribal groups were processed and presented as strategies and solutions for inclusive propositions. Theories and dataset from previous journals, reports, books and conference communique from multilateral agencies, non-political actors, research institutes were resourceful in arriving at conclusions that will provide a common path that accentuates cultural ecological practices to broaden the campaign for sustainability.

This paper argues that by portraying minority concerns primarily as cultural concerns and by discussing minority existence independently of capitalism, neoliberalism, feminism, environmentalism, globalization, and the distinction between the Right and the Left, the dominant discourse on ethno-cultural minorities, namely multiculturalism, may lead to the reduction of minority communities to cultural entities in the collective consciousness of the dominant majority. Such reductionism endangers minority existence by identifying the question of minorities with the question of culture to the point that minorities voicing their non-cultural political concerns increasingly appear unintelligible, presumptuous, or even destructive to wider society. Against this background, the paper discusses why and how ethno-cultural minorities may find their collective identity in different, not necessarily ethno-cultural, political formations in the age of neoliberal globalism, such as anti-neoliberal, anti-globalist, cosmopolitan, environmentalist, anti-capitalist, feminist, radical democratic, republican, and anti-imperialist. This discussion is based on Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of hegemony and social antagonism.

Comment repenser les processus de politisation des forêts dans des territoires qualifiés comme « déforestés », et néanmoins marqués par un repositionnement de la lutte contre la déforestation dans l’agenda politique ? A partir de ces situations contrastées, cette thèse explore les relations entre les processus de territorialisation des forêts et la construction étatique, à la croisée de la sociologie politique de l’action publique et de la géographie politique. Elle a pour objet les forêts classées de Côte d’Ivoire, qui sont des espaces sociaux contestés, de par leur appartenance à l’État depuis la période coloniale. Depuis 2018, des politiques forestières visent à maintenir et regagner du couvert forestier dans ces forêts classées, notamment en les requalifiant en aires protégées ou en agro-forêts classées. D’une part, à partir d’une analyse socio-historique, cette thèse démontre que les requalifications contemporaines des forêts classées s’inscrivent dans des processus continus de construction étatique et de reterritorialisation des forêts, dans un contexte post-crise, par différents réseaux d’action publique. Ces requalifications montrent la pluralité des forêts politiques, davantage caractérisées par leur appartenance à l’État. D’autre part, cette thèse propose une discussion de l’intermédiation sociale entre les acteurs étatiques et non-étatiques (agences de développement, entreprises privées, ONG environnementales). Si les élites administratives négocient la souveraineté étatique par des processus d’hybridation et d’intermédiation sociale avec ces acteurs non-étatiques internationaux et nationaux, ces derniers mobilisent également l’appareil étatique et les élites administratives pour déployer leurs narratifs et leurs ingénieries socio-écologiques, avec des ressources différenciées. Enfin, cette thèse conceptualise l’ethno-environnementalisme, en étudiant sa sociogenèse et ses mobilisations sociales. Celui-ci se caractérise par un recadrage politique de la déforestation autour des migrations paysannes, une redéfinition de luttes sociales anciennes pour le foncier autour de la lutte contre la déforestation, et la mobilisation de l’autochtonie, en tant qu’identité politique, dans un contexte ethno-nationaliste. L’ethno-environnementalisme contribue à une redistribution de ressources sociales, politiques et symboliques entre groupes sociaux, définis par leur autochtonie ou leur appartenance à la catégorie sociale de l’« étranger »
How to reconsider forest politics in territories described as “deforested”, yet characterized by a repositioning of the fight against deforestation on the political agenda? Based on these contrasting situations, this research explores the relationships between forest territorialization processes and state construction, at the crossroads of political sociology and political geography. The research studies the gazetted forests in Côte d'Ivoire, as contested social spaces, due to their belonging to the state since the colonial period. Since 2018, forestry policies have aimed to maintain and regain forest cover in these gazetted forests, by reclassifying them as protected areas or gazetted agro-forests. On the one hand, based on a socio-historical analysis, this research demonstrates that these reclassifications are part of ongoing processes of state construction and forest reterritorialization, in a post-crisis context, by different networks of public governance. These reclassifications show the plurality of political forests, more characterized by their belonging to the state. On the other hand, this research discusses the social intermediations between state and non-state actors (development agencies, private companies, environmental NGOs). While administrative elites negotiate state sovereignty through processes of hybridization and social intermediation with these international and national non-state actors, the latter also mobilize the state apparatus and administrative elites to deploy their narratives and socio-ecological engineering, with differentiated resources. Finally, this thesis conceptualizes ethno-environmentalism and studies its sociogenesis and social mobilizations. Ethno-environmentalism is characterized by a political reframing of deforestation around peasant migrations, a redefinition of long-standing social struggles over land tenure around the fight against deforestation, and the mobilization of autochthony, as a political identity, in an ethno-nationalist context. Ethno-environmentalism contributes to a redistribution of social, political and symbolic resources between social groups, defined by their autochthony or their belonging to the social category of the “foreigner”

Situated within the jurisdiction of the Municipality of Tulum and within the Sian Ka'an Biosphere gives the village of Punta Allen a distinctive agency in determining their role in the on-going development of tourism in the region that is not given to other communities in the state. This unique circumstance facilitates a dialogue between the reserve, the municipality, and the business cooperatives of Punta Allen that produce a negotiated living. Through the negotiations with the reserve and Tulum, the lobster fishing and tourism cooperatives are given the opportunity to have a relatively significant role in determining the future of Punta Allen in regards to tourism.