"This is an excellent collection of articles. . . . All are clearly written and any of them could be used in undergraduate teaching. Moreover, the range of case studies is impressively global. . . . The articles all exhibit a good capacity to provoke. . . . The result is an enjoyable book that is likely to be useful to teachers, students and practitioners of environmentalism." - Anthropological Forum Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate. David G. Anderson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Eeva Berglund was Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College from 1998 to 2002 and has written on the anthropology and history of environmental politics.

Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate.

Carrier and his group of international researchers tackle the complex factors affecting people's understandings of their environment-not just the natural environment, but landscapes shaped by humans, and their social contexts. The authors consider the impact of local events, such as tourism or environmental protection regimes, with detailed analyses of local cases. They also evaluate the large-scale political-economic forces that operate at regional and global levels, such as policies and bureaucratic requirements of international agencies and a country's position in global commodity markets. Their approach encourages policy makers and researchers to think about their natural and non-natural environment in novel ways. This book will be an excellent resource for all concerned with social, cultural and political-economic aspects of environmental use and conservation, and researchers in anthropology, geography, and political ecology.

The book aims to counter the normative functioning of creativity in contemporary capitalism with a plethora of alternatives to radical creative practices. In the first part, titled "Creative Capitalism", five authors analyze the forms of contemporary capitalism: on the one hand, there are new ways of working which include flexibility, mobility, and especially precarity; on the other, there are new forms of recovery and accumulation. In the second part, titled "Multitudinous Creativities: Radicalities and Alterities", the book reflects on more autonomous creative experiments in the world. The third part, titled "Creativity, New Technologies, and Networks", analyses the issues related to the work of creative capitalism and the possible resistance within the digital and collaborative platforms.