A nuanced look at how nature has been culturally constructed in South and Southeast Asia, "Nature in the Global South" is a major contribution to understandings of the politics and ideologies of environmentalism and development in a postcolonial epoch. Among the many significant paradigms for understanding both the preservation and use of nature in these regions are biological classification, state forest management, tropical ecology, imperial water control, public health, and community-based conservation. Focusing on these and other ways that nature has been shaped and defined, this path-breaking collection of essays describes projects of exploitation, administration, science, and community protest. With contributors based in anthropology, ecology, sociology, history, and environmental and policy studies, "Nature in the Global South" features some of the most innovative and influential work being done in the social studies of nature. A number of essays look at how social and natural landscapes are created, maintained, and transformed by scientists, government administrators, monks, and farmers. Some essays analyze campaigns to eradicate smallpox and save forests, waterways, and animal habitats. In case studies centered in the Philippines, India, Thailand, Indonesia, and in South and Southeast Asia as a whole, contributors examine how the tropics, the jungle, tribes, and peasants are understood and transformed, how shifts in colonial ideas about the landscape led to extremely deleterious changes in rural well-being, and how uneasy environmental compromises are forged in the present among rural, urban, and global allies.

Paul Greenough is Professor in the Departments of History and Community and Behavioral Health at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–1944 and the editor of “Global Immunization and Culture: Compliance and Resistance in Large-Scale Public Health Campaigns,” a special issue of Social Science and Medicine.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place and coeditor of Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture.