Rust and Ferns: Work, Value, and the Politics of Everyday Security in Kudremukh, South India / Pooja Nayak.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Nayak, Pooja, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Anthropology, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cultural anthropology.

Environmental studies.

South Asian studies.

Anthropology--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Anthropology.

Local Subjects:

Cultural anthropology.

Environmental studies.

South Asian studies.

Anthropology--Penn dissertations.

Penn dissertations--Anthropology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (240 pages)

Distribution:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2022

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 84-03B.

Place of Publication:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania, 2022.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This dissertation is a historical and ethnographic study of the politics of everyday security in the Kudremukh region of southern India, where a state iron-ore mine was decommissioned after activists cited threats to the area's ecology. Building on security as the basic desire for ongoing economic and ecological stability, I examine how individuals and communities enact environmental projects and the search for livelihood in zones where mineral resources overlap with biodiversity. The dissertation analyzes-and yet qualifies-the ways in which material and discursive forms of work in such contexts come to be presented with ethical urgency. Drawing on twenty-one months of ethnographic fieldwork across the Kudremukh, Mangalore, Bengaluru regions in India, interviews with mining employees, residents, conservationists, environmentalists, and biologists, and a wide range of primary materials including speeches, protest letters, and historical newspapers, the project illustrates how efforts to secure stability take the form of theorizing work as making value in ways that are not exhausted by the logics of commodity or exchange. Such enactments of value, I argue, rely on reconceptions of landscape, extraction, eco-tourism, multispecies relations, conservation, and biodiversity. The project makes two interventions at this crossing of discourses: 1) It offers an analysis of environmental security derived from the ethical work of diverse actors and their dynamic relations with non-human life in such post-extraction sites 2) Attending to the dynamics of class, caste, and gender, the project shows how the quest for secure futures, even as it reinforces older forms of hierarchy and exclusion, brings into being new ecologies and new social mobilities.

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-03, Section: B.

Advisors: Mitchell, Lisa; Committee members: Anand, Nikhil; Benson, Etienne; Morrison, Kathleen.

Department: Anthropology.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2022.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798351434445

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.