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Synopsis As environmental use and abuse becomes even more fiercely contested around the world, we need fresh perspectives to understand issues such as resource extraction and social conflict; community identities and environmental claims; and technology, risk, and environmental governance. Cultural politics offers a novel approach that expands and enriches political-economic analysis to explain the changing relations between states, markets and social groups and their bio-physical environment.In this volume, nine eminent scholars apply the theory and practice of a cultural politics of natural resources to spatial and temporal sites that range from petroleum fields in Nigeria to palm-oil plantations in Indonesia; from irrigation engineering in British India to contemporary environmental decision-making in the United Kingdom; from global climate change to water scarcity in Gujarat.The volume is organized around a set of keywords: waste, scarcity, security, territory, sovereignty, frontier, conflict, expertise and community. These are significant, indicative terms whose changing meanings trace shifts in a vocabulary of cultural practices and institutions. Taken together, these words map a distinctive world of meanings and chart out the terrain of the cultural politics of natural resources.The path-breaking essays in this volume stimulate and inform environmental debates in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, history and geography--as well as in the world at large.