Description
Since the mid-nineteenth century, agricultural development and fisheries management in northern Japan have been profoundly shaped by how people within and beyond Japan have compared Hokkaido's landscapes to those of other places, as part of efforts to make the new Japanese nation-state more legibly "modern." In doing so, they engaged in non-conforming modes of thinking that reached out to diverse places, including the American West and southern Chile. Today, the comparisons made by Hokkaido fishing industry professionals, scientists, and Ainu indigenous groups between the island's forests, fields, and waters and those of other places around the world continue to dramatically affect the region's approaches to environmental management and its physical landscapes. In this far-ranging ethnography, Heather Anne Swanson shows how this traffic in ideas shapes the course of Hokkaido's development, its fish, and the lives of people on and beyond the island while structuring trade dynamics, political economy, and multispecies relations in watersheds around the globe.
Author: Heather Anne Swanson
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 10/18/2022
Pages: 274
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.62d
ISBN13: 9780295750392
ISBN10: 0295750391
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- Nature | Ecosystems & Habitats | Oceans & Seas
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | Asian Studies
About the Author
Heather Swanson is associate professor of anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and director of the Aarhus University Centre for the Environmental Humanities. She is the coeditor of Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.