Power in Conservation

Carol Carpenter is Senior Lecturer in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, US. She is co-editor of Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader (2007).

"Power in Conservation is that wide-ranging and accessible, but cutting-edge introduction to contemporary conservation, social science and theory for which students, researchers. and practitioners alike have been searching. Carpenter provides to the curious reader a deep analytic exploration, one that will repay reading with useful tools and unexpected insights in every chapter of this brilliant book." — Arun Agrawal, Professor, School for Environent and Sustainability, University of Michigan, USA"In this bold, workmanlike and approachable overview of the anthropological literature, Carol Carpenter engages with the theoreticians and significant ethnographic studies that underpin our emerging understanding of a new Anthropocene-shaped world. It is Foucault and his interpreters who dominate this new synthesis, and nuanced ethnographic accounts that show us the links between power and knowledge, sovereignty and governmentality, and which take us beyond the paradigm of 'political ecology'. A magnificent synthesis." — Roy Ellen, Centre of Biocultural Diversity, University of Kent, UK"Carol Carpenter provides a clear and usable – but not simplified - theoretical tool kit for understanding power in conservation, and explains why a fine-grained, ethnographic attention to the workings of power is essential for effective conservation practice. Her rigor is impressive, and the implications of her analysis are profound. A masterful contribution." — Tania Li, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Canada

• 1. Introduction 2. Discourses and their Power in Foucault 3. Seminal Works on the Power of Discourses 4. Discourses of Conservation 5. The Triangle in Foucault 6. Sovereignty, Discipline, and Governmentality in Ethnographies 7. States and Centers, Simplifying and Calculating 8. Articulations between Knowledges in Ethnographies 9. Subject Formation in Foucault 10. Subject Formation in Ethnographies 11. Capitalism and Neoliberal Governmentality in Foucault 12. Cultivating Neoliberal Subjects in Ethnographies 13. The Economy in Ethnographies 14. The Invisibility of Implementation and Governmentality 15. Practices of Assemblage and Assemblages of Effects 16. Universals, Collaborations, and Global Agreements 17. World-Making in the Anthropocene 18. Conclusion