THE LOGIC OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

Anthropology, Ecology and Postcoloniality

Vassos Argyrou

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“Argyrou’s compelling argument has important implications for the future of conservation and development…the argument is convincing and covers many of the fundamental aspects involved in the creation of the environmentalist worldview.”  ·  American Anthropologist

“This is…potentially an important book.”  ·  Environmental Politics

Although modernity’s understanding of nature and culture has now been superseded by that of environmentalism, the power to define the meaning of both, and hence the meaning of the world itself, remains in the same (Western) hands. This bold argument is at the center of this provocative book that challenges the widespread assumption that environmentalism reflects a radical departure from modernity. Our perception of nature may have changed, the author maintains, but environmentalism remains a thoroughly modernist project. It reproduces the cultural logic of modernity, a logic that finds meaning in unity and therefore strives to efface difference, and to reconfirm the position of the West as the source of all legitimate signification.

Vassos Argyrou lectures in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull. His research interests include social and cultural theory, poststructuralism and postcolonialism and southern Europe. Publications include Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique (Pluto Press 2002).

Series: Volume 1, Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology

Contents

Prelude
Chapter 1. First Change
‘The Idea of Nature’ 
‘If we have no rivers, we make canals’
‘Europeans are devotees of power’
‘The Leap Across the Centuries’
Chapter 2. Second Change
‘Only One Earth’
‘This Sacred Earth’
‘Our Debt to the Savage’
Chapter 3. The Logic of the Same
The Phenomenology of Change
‘The Age of the World Picture’
Pure Humanity
Chapter 4. ‘Beyond Humanism’: and further to the other side
‘The Religion of Humanity’, the Religion of Gaia and other Homologies
Pure Being
Chapter 5. No Change
On Hegemony
The Double Bind
Bibliography
Index