Political ecologies of wood and wax: sandalwood and beeswax as symbols and shapers of customary authority in the Oecusse enclave, Timor

The enclave of Oecusse-Ambeno, Timor Leste, was formed in part through struggles over controlling trade in sandalwood and beeswax, two forest products that continue to influence political and ritual allegiances, and the political history of Oecusse. These products are interwoven with the region's contacts with outsiders, influencing local political hierarchies and roles of kings, village heads, and ritual authorities. While wood and wax are recognized to be of Timorese origin, local myths posit that their use and value was unrecognized before the arrival of Chinese traders and Portuguese missionaries. Several narratives of the origins of trade in sandalwood, and the kings' annual beeswax candle tributes, illustrate the enduring connections among local authorities, forest resource control, religious symbolism, and ritual obligations surrounding harvests of sandalwood and beeswax. Customary practices contribute to forest conservation through local protection of beeswax-producing forests, and by circumscribing the harvest. While both beehives and sandalwood impede intensive agricultural land uses, farmers welcome beeswax as a profitable product that supports ritual. But they resent sandalwood's growth in their fields since it involves more regulation and increased labor requirements. The two products' different ecologies of disturbance and incidence contributed over time to distinct ownership norms and forms of control by customary authorities. This is the "political ecology of wood and wax" in Oecusse.Key words: Oecusse, Timor Leste/East Timor, sandalwood, beeswax, customary authority, colonialism.

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The limits of power: the political ecology of the Spanish Empire in the Greater Southwest

Antiquity ◽

10.1017/s0003598x00081163 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 66 (250) ◽

pp. 153-171 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Thomas E. Sheridan

Keyword(s):

Native American ◽

Native Americans ◽

Political Ecology ◽

Land Tenure ◽

New World ◽

Spanish Empire ◽

The Political ◽

Epidemic Disease ◽

Spanish Conquest ◽

History Of

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most dramatic cultural and biological transformations in the history of the world. Small groups of conquistadores toppled enormous empires. Millions of Native Americans died from epidemic disease. Old World animals and plants revolutionized Native American societies, while New World crops fundamentally altered the diet and land-tenure of peasants across Europe. In the words of historian Alfred Crosby (1972: 3),The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day [I1 October 14921 to become alike.

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The Political Ecology of Cereal Seed Development in Africa: A History of Selection

IDS Bulletin ◽

10.1111/j.1759-5436.2011.00233.x ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 42 (4) ◽

pp. 24-35 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

James C. McCann

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Seed Development ◽

The Political ◽

History Of ◽

Cereal Seed

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Origins, Benefits and the Political Basis of Agroecology

Agroecology Now! ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-61315-0_2 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 11-28

Author(s):

Colin Ray Anderson ◽

Janneke Bruil ◽

M. Jahi Chappell ◽

Csilla Kiss ◽

Michel Patrick Pimbert

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Political Ecology ◽

Social Relations ◽

The Political ◽

Traditional Practice ◽

The World ◽

History Of ◽

Human Systems

AbstractIn this chapter, we introduce the origins and history of agroecology, outlining its emergence as a science and its longstanding history as a traditional practice throughout the world. We provide a brief review of the evidence of the benefits of agroecology in relation to productivity, livelihoods, biodiversity, nutrition, climate change and enhancing social relations. We then outline our approach to agroecology which is rooted in the tradition of political ecology that posits power and governance have always been the decisive factors in shaping agricultural and other ‘human’ systems.

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Political ecologies of biopower: diversity, debates, and new frontiers of inquiry

Journal of Political Ecology ◽

10.2458/v25i1.23047 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 25 (1) ◽

pp. 402 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Connor J Cavanagh

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Environmental Change ◽

Political Ecology ◽

Environmental History ◽

Recent Literature ◽

The Political ◽

Multiple Modes ◽

Research Questions ◽

Political Ecologies ◽

Change Mitigation

This article reviews recent literature on the political ecologies of conservation and environmental change mitigation, highlighting the biopolitical stakes of many writings in this field. Although a large and apparently growing number of political ecologists engage the concept of biopower directly – in its Foucauldian, Agambenian, and various other formulations – recent writings across the humanities and social sciences by scholars utilizing an explicitly biopolitical lens provide us with an array of concepts and research questions that may further enrich writings within political ecology. Seeking to extend dialogue between scholars of biopolitics, of political ecology, and of both, then, this article surveys both new and shifting contours of the various ways in which contemporary political ecologies increasingly compel us to bring the very lives of various human and nonhuman populations, as Foucault once put it, "into the realm of explicit calculations." In doing so, 'new frontiers' of biopolitical inquiry are examined related to: i) species, varieties, or 'multiple modes' of governmentality and biopower; ii) critical (ecosystem) infrastructure, risk, and 'reflexive' biopolitics; iii) environmental history, colonialism, and the genealogies of biopower, and iv) the proliferation of related neologisms, such as ontopower and geontopower.

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Power, Nature, and the City. The Conquest of Water and the Political Ecology of Urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880–1990

Environment and Planning A Economy and Space ◽

10.1068/a290311 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 29 (2) ◽

pp. 311-332 ◽

Cited By ~ 169

Author(s):

E Swyngedouw

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Social Power ◽

The Political ◽

Water Control ◽

Urbanization Process ◽

Supply Condition ◽

History Of ◽

Political Economic ◽

Relations Of Power ◽

The City

In this paper, I seek to explore how the circulation of water is embedded in the political ecology of power, through which the urbanization process unfolds. I attempt to reconstruct the urbanization process as simultaneously a political-economic and ecological process. This will be discussed through the exploration of the history of the urbanization of water in Guayaquil, Ecuador. As approximately 36% of its two million inhabitants has no access to piped potable water, water becomes subject to an intense social struggle for control and/or access. Mechanisms of exclusion from and access to water, particularly in cities which have a problematic water-supply condition, lay bare how both the transformation of nature and the urbanization process are organized in and through mechanisms of social power. In order to unravel the relations of power that are inscribed in the way the urbanization of nature unfolded I document and analyze the historical geography of water control in the context of the political ecology of Guayaquil's urbanization. In short, Guayaquil's urbanization process is written from the perspective of the drive to urbanize and domesticate nature's water and the parallel necessity to push the ecological frontier outward as the city expands. I show how this political ecology of urbanization takes place through deeply exclusive and marginalizing processes that structure relations of access to and exclusion from access to nature's water.

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Tracing narratives and perceptions in the political ecologies of health and disease

Journal of Political Ecology ◽

10.2458/v24i1.20778 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 24 (1) ◽

pp. 1 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Creighton Connolly ◽

Panagiota Kotsila ◽

Giacomo D'Alisa

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Special Section ◽

Local Environment ◽

Health Perceptions ◽

The Political ◽

Cultural Aspects ◽

Health And Disease ◽

Political Ecologies ◽

Political Ecology Of Health

Abstract Political ecology has, in the past decade, emerged as an increasingly accepted framework for studying issues of health and disease and has thus given rise to a distinct sub-field: the political ecologies of health and disease (PEHD). More recently, scholars have suggested more specific avenues through which the sub-field can be further developed and focused. Building on recent work, we suggest that the role of health perceptions and health discourses is one area that could benefit from examination through the lens of political ecology. The papers in this special section thus intend to further contribute to the empirical richness of this area of study, through an emphasis on anthropological and cultural aspects of health injustices. We emphasize the role of health perceptions, in particular, as a way of exploring how people's experiences of the local environment often differ from dominant discourses related to un/healthy environments, and the effects stemming from this disjuncture. Keywords: Political ecology of health, disease, perceptions, discourse, ethnography, environmental justice

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Territory, sustainability, and beyond: Latin American urbanization through a political ecology

Environment and Planning E Nature and Space ◽

10.1177/2514848619887933 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (3) ◽

pp. 786-809

Author(s):

Germán A Quimbayo Ruiz

Keyword(s):

Latin America ◽

Political Ecology ◽

Empirical Analysis ◽

Latin American ◽

Research Agenda ◽

The Political ◽

Urban Theory ◽

Political Ecologies ◽

Latin America Region

In this article, I identify how territory is a useful concept to explore the political ecologies of urbanization. In the Latin America region, territory is a key concept to explore urban and rural connections between (neo)extractivism, violence, and dispossession, with socio-ecological transformations in the configuration of urban spatialities. Following recent calls to re-locate both urban theory and political ecology beyond the Anglophone debate, the article proposes a dialogue between the Latin American theorization on territory and the political ecology of urbanization. Based on an empirical analysis of urbanization in Bogotá, Colombia, the article also discusses implications for urban justice with respect to territory and sustainability. Finally, the article offers some remarks to further the research agenda on the political ecology of urbanization with a focus on territory.

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Possible moral ecologies, the function of everyday curation, and the experience of regions

Journal of Political Ecology ◽

10.2458/v23i1.20185 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 134

Author(s):

Kirsten Valentine Cadieux

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Land Use Planning ◽

Food Systems ◽

Moral Economy ◽

The Political ◽

Participatory Action ◽

Economic Relations ◽

Political Ecologies ◽

Modes Of Engagement ◽

Powerful Mechanism

Investigating the political ecologies of everyday engagements with environments—including material as well as policy and ideological interactions—requires consideration of the moral economy at play, as well as the political economy and social ecology. A.V. Chayanov (1966/1925), E.P. Thompson (1971, 1991), and Jim Scott (1976) have provided useful ways to think about moral economy. They framed moral economy as a way of enacting understandings of just commons, subsistence entitlements, and desirable economic relations based on social struggle. This framing can be particularly useful in combination with political ecology approaches to investigate 'moral ecologies.' These are society-environment assemblages that are often more aspirational than enacted, but toward which considerable effort is expended, and whose moral and ecological dynamics are functionally linked, perhaps as best illustrated in recent attention to agroecology as a powerful mechanism for ensuring rights to food (De Schutter 2011a, 2011b, 2012). Given political ecology's focus on power relations, moral ecologies that do not exercise considerable power are often overlooked by political ecologists. However, even if particular understandings may not be highly efficacious in exercising power, they may have considerable influence on relational conceptualizations. This mismatch between habitual inattention to moral ecologies and their potential importance contributes to tensions within contemporary society-environment scholarship between structuralist and poststructuralist modes of engagement. Given the value of both modes, particularly for understanding what Peet and Watts (1993) describe as liberation ecologies (and the regional discourse formations that shape them), I argue that political ecology provides useful frameworks for documenting and analyzing the socio-ecological experience of regions—in terms not only of the functions of society and environment, but also of the performance and curation of knowledge about those functions.Keywords: moral economy, food systems, curation, critical regional studies, land use planning, participatory action research, environmental justice, integrated natural resource management science

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Land grabs reexamined: Gulf Arab agro-commodity chains and spaces of extraction

Environment and Planning A Economy and Space ◽

10.1177/0308518x20956657 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 0308518X2095665

Author(s):

Christian Henderson

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Agricultural Land ◽

Commodity Chains ◽

Land Grabs ◽

Gulf States ◽

History Of ◽

The Relationship ◽

Labour Time ◽

Gulf Arab

Research on land grabs has identified the Gulf Arab states as major actors in the acquisition of agricultural land. However the role of these investments in the economies of the Gulf remains underexplored in the scholarly literature. In response, I propose that these projects are part of commodity chains that are articulated to the agribusiness industry in the Gulf states. I argue that they are extractive zones; enclaves created through articulation to the investor states, and disarticulation from their host society. With this considered, the commodity chains that link these projects with the Gulf economies transfer surplus value in the form of labour time, but also biophysical matter such as water, energy, and soil nutrients. This focus on the appropriation of nature allows a better understanding of these schemes and their role in the Gulf’s economic growth. As will be demonstrated, the cycle of exhaustion of water impells the location of these land grabs, and this context connects them with the history of domestic projects. This article uses a framework that integrates theory on the spatial contestations of commodity chains with work on political ecology, and by doing so it contributes to a growing body of work that examines the relationship between networks of commodity production and nature.

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