Aletta Biersack – författare

Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific focuses on the plasticity and contingent nature of Pacific Island masculinities over the course of colonial and postcolonial histories. The several case histories concern the use of sports to recuperate but also refashion past masculinities in the name of contemporary masculine pride; the effects of market participation on younger males; how urbanisation and migration set the stage for experimenting with male gender and sexuality; the impacts of military and labour histories on local masculinities; masculinity and violence in war and gender violence; and structural violence and disruptions in male gender identity. Depicting contemporary Pacific Island societies as a space of gender invention and pluralism as indigenous gender regimes respond to the stimulations of transnational flows, the book asks a key historical question: Do emergent masculinities signal a rupture, or some continuity with, past masculinities? This book was originally published as a special double issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Emergent Masculinities in the Pacific focuses on the plasticity and contingent nature of Pacific Island masculinities over the course of colonial and postcolonial histories. The several case histories concern the use of sports to recuperate but also refashion past masculinities in the name of contemporary masculine pride; the effects of market participation on younger males; how urbanisation and migration set the stage for experimenting with male gender and sexuality; the impacts of military and labour histories on local masculinities; masculinity and violence in war and gender violence; and structural violence and disruptions in male gender identity. Depicting contemporary Pacific Island societies as a space of gender invention and pluralism as indigenous gender regimes respond to the stimulations of transnational flows, the book asks a key historical question: Do emergent masculinities signal a rupture, or some continuity with, past masculinities? This book was originally published as a special double issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Reimagining Political Ecology is a state-of-the-art collection of ethnographies grounded in political ecology. When political ecology first emerged as a distinct field in the early 1970s, it was rooted in the neo-Marxism of world system theory. This collection showcases second-generation political ecology, which retains the Marxist interest in capitalism as a global structure but which is also heavily influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, practice theory, and cultural studies. As these essays illustrate, contemporary political ecology moves beyond binary thinking, focusing instead on the interchanges between nature and culture, the symbolic and the material, and the local and the global.Aletta Biersack’s introduction takes stock of where political ecology has been, assesses the field’s strengths, and sets forth a bold research agenda for the future. Two essays offer wide-ranging critiques of modernist ecology, with its artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, faith in the scientific management of nature, and related tendency to dismiss local knowledge. The remaining eight essays are case studies of particular constructions and appropriations of nature and the complex politics that come into play regionally, nationally, and internationally when nature is brought within the human sphere. Written by some of the leading thinkers in environmental anthropology, these rich ethnographies are based in locales around the world: in Belize, Papua New Guinea, the Gulf of California, Iceland, Finland, the Peruvian Amazon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Collectively, they demonstrate that political ecology speaks to concerns shared by geographers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and anthropologists alike. And they model the kind of work that this volume identifies as the future of political ecology: place-based “ethnographies of nature” keenly attuned to the conjunctural effects of globalization.Contributors. Eeva Berglund, Aletta Biersack, J. Peter Brosius, Michael R. Dove, James B. Greenberg, SØren Hvalkof, J. Stephen Lansing, GÍsli PÁlsson, Joel Robbins, Vernon L. Scarborough, John W. Schoenfelder, Richard Wilk