Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture

Fernando Vidal is ICREA Research Professor (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) at the Center for the History of Science of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Nélia Dias is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal.

"There are thousands of endangered species and hundreds of human cultures facing extinction along with the languages they have spoken. This fascinating book takes the reader along to delve into the reasons we are losing diversity and the many kinds of knowledge it could give us. How has politics made endangerment worse, or tried to prevent it? The wise authors of these chapters find examples from around the world and look at ways to preserve and revive what we might otherwise lose. This book raises interesting questions and is a dependable key to understanding." –J. Donald Hughes, University of Denver, USA"In this era of rapidly accelerating climate change, species extinction, and cultural vulnerability, endangerment has come to shape the science, politics, and emotions mobilized to archive and defend the fatally condemned. Endangerment, Biodiversity, and Culture is a timely volume that makes visible the undercurrent of loss animating work across the human and life sciences." –Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA"Fernando Vidal and Nélia Dias discuss, from the perspective of social anthropology and sciences studies, the notion of intrinsic value, which is highly debated in environmental humanities. They show that values emerge out of contested encounters between different relations to the environment, expressed through emotions and engagements." – Somatosphere, Frédéric Keck, Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale and head of the research department of the musée du quai Branly"Scholars will do well to consider the concept of the endangerment sensi-bility, as well as Endangerment, Biodiversity, and Culture, as they examine their own approaches to endangered species, cultural politics and the history of science." - Kevin C. Brown, University of California, Santa Barbara Environment and History, September 2017

• Introduction: The Endangerment Sensibility Part 1: Affects and Values 1. "Languages Die Like Rivers:" Entangled Endangerments in the Colorado Delta 2. Extinction, Diversity, and Endangerment 3. Anthropological Data in Danger, c. 1941-1965Rebecca Lemov Part 2: Situated Politics 4. Conserving the Future: UNESCO Biosphere Reserves as Laboratories for Sustainable Development 5. Indigenous Evanescence and Salvage in the Conquest of Araucanía, 1850-1930 6. Tropical Forests in Brazilian Political Culture: From Economic Hindrance to Ecological Treasure Part 3 Technologies of Preservation 7. Endangered Birds and Epistemic Concerns: The California Condor 8. World Heritage Listing and the Globalization of the Endangerment Sensibility 9. Planning for the Past: Cryopreservation at the Farm, Zoo, and Museum Coda Who is the "We" Endangered by Climate Change?